The clinical framework behind the training, the audit and the assessment, and the argument for why safeguarding needs it.
Online harm is the issue. Cybertrauma is the impact.
I named it, defined it, and built the clinical framework for recognising it. The definition is published in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cyberpsychology, read the entry →
This one slipped under the net. A child tells you what they watched online, and what you say in the next sixty seconds decides two things: whether that child ever tells you anything again, and whether your organisation can show it acted.
If you have already met this and felt out of your depth, you are in the majority. Nobody was taught it.
Built by a clinical researcher, grounded in peer-reviewed research and in frontline clinical practice. These five pillars are what the assessment scores you against, what the audit measures, and what the training programme teaches.
We already track trauma exposure in first responders. Children watching the same violence online deserve the same clinical lens, the mind doesn't distinguish scene from screen.
Trauma-informed language, documentation standards and escalation pathways, so the response is immediate and grounded rather than frozen.
Cybertrauma integrated into the safeguarding categories and workflows you already run, using evidence-based triage criteria.
Training, policy and audit-ready evidence in place before an inspection or serious case review exposes the gap.
Grounded in doctoral research and two decades of clinical practice, so you can defend the approach to leadership and inspectors.
Most people who read this page can't authorise the budget themselves. This is the one-page version, the gap, the method, and what it costs to keep waiting, written to be forwarded to a board, a head, or a commissioner.
Download the one-page summaryTwo free assessments, both under five minutes, one for you, one for your organisation.
See the assessmentsTwo assessments, built on the five pillars above. Both are genuinely free, both give you your result on screen straight away, and neither will tell you off.
For practitioners
Twenty questions, under five minutes. You get a score across five areas and a plain read on where the gaps are. Most people score lower than they expect on recording and escalation, and that is the point. It was never taught.
Take the Recognition Readiness ScorecardFor organisations
Ten questions, under five minutes. You get a named profile, from Reactive Response through to Evidence-Ready, showing how your setting would handle a disclosure today, and what an inspector would find if they asked tomorrow.
Take the Organisation assessmentDoctoral research with children aged 7–10 who had viewed violence and gore online, using trauma-informed drawing-based methods, because direct questions about what a child saw can re-traumatise and still miss the truth.
The children in that study had already concluded that adults were not safe to tell. Not because the adults didn't care, because they didn't know what to do with it, and children can tell the difference. That finding is why this framework exists, and why it starts with what an adult says in the first thirty seconds.
Cybertrauma™ is any trauma that is a result of self or, other-directed interaction with, mediated through, or from any electronic internet/cyberspace ready device or machine learning or artificial intelligence algorithm, that results in impact now or future.
This event/interaction can be multi-modal, multi-platform and multi-interval, delayed or immediate, legal or not, singular or plural, and may include images, sound, and or text and may or may not be vitriolic in nature.
Events may include covert and overt typology and may be virtual and corporeal and/or at the same time.
(Knibbs, 2016–2021)
Dense on purpose. It was written to be precise enough to hold up in research and in policy, and everything above is built on it. The peer-reviewed version sits in the field's own reference work, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cyberpsychology (Palgrave Macmillan).