Who best to report to?

[Len342]

A child, aged 6, disclosed to me that his father showed him an inappropriate video during his contact time (I'm a relative on the mother's side). The child was very descriptive about the content of the video.

The child is in no immediate danger, but do I report this to the police or social services, or both?

Either or, I would probably go police. Reporting to either agency should lead to collaborative cp investigation depending on the content of the video (and sadly probably thresholds within the specific area)

Yes contact police and they will send someone qualified to deal with this and will involve social services

Report to cops - they will refer to a team called MASH that is a multi-agency team, ie cops/soc services/e/tc/etc - they will decide etc

therefore, report to cops, none emergency number to get ball rolling

'Inappropriate' covers a huge spectrum though. I suspect that people will read 'Inappropriate' and think worst case scenario/sexual content - but IF that was the case then I'd imagine the child absolutely would be at risk, which doesn't align with what the op said.

Hard core porn? You tube video of someone drowning kittens? Old graphic news report of people being killed in a war? All could be seen as inappropriate and I'd deal with all very differently.

That's a fair point. I wasn't sure how detailed I should make the op.

I wouldn't say porn but maybe. It involved an adult urinating on another adult. The child mentioned this to me in a very casual way and thought it was funny, so I'm not sure what context it was shown in or if these videos are shared with the child often

Ah that's a tricky one...it could be anything from porn to some stupid You Tube prank channel. If it was the former I'd report to police, the latter I probably wouldn't 'report' anywhere if a sole incident but would speak to the parent(s) as a first point.

Are you able to ask any other casual questions to try to gain context? Along the lines of 'Oh really? What else did they do? Who was it?' etc. If the follow up was along the lines of 'Yes, then they were riding motorbikes and jumping off' then that would be very telling.

Either way it's awful (I'm not trying to minimise) but certainly very different possible levels of awful.

Thanks for your message. I entirely agree. It's difficult because there's so much content online and children seem to have exposure to everything, everywhere now.

The child said that the other person was drinking it when they were asked what else happened and confirmed that they did see genitals. If it was one of those prank channels, I can't understand the thought process behind showing a child something like that.