Public Safety Canada Webinar Series 2025
Combatting Online Child Sexual Exploitation
Hosted by Public Safety Canada, 2025
On this page
- Webinar Series 2024-25: Protecting Children in Online Games
- Webinar 1: Online Games - Key Insights to Protect Children
- Webinar 2: Designing Safer Online Games and Communities
- Webinar 3: Understanding and Guiding Youth in Online Gaming
- Resources
Webinar Series 2024–25: Protecting Children in Online Games
In 2025, Public Safety Canada, in collaboration with GamerSafer, hosted a three-part webinar series. This summary provides key insights from all three sessions, providing an overview of online gaming dynamics, their significance in children's lives, and highlights prevention and intervention strategies to address online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA) in online gaming environments.
Webinar 1: Online Games – Key Insights to Protect Children
Why Gaming Matters to Children
Online games offer far more than just entertainment. Research highlights its positive impact on social, cognitive, and emotional development. Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC), for example, found that games can foster children's autonomy, competence, creativity, identity, and emotional regulation while also helping them build relationships.
According to the report Bringing Canadians Together through Gaming: Essential Facts 2022 (PDF), 70% of children aged 6-17 play video games with others. This report highlights how video games foster social connections, enabling players to collaborate and build friendships.
Understanding why children are drawn to games helps us recognize how bad actors exploit these same mechanisms, whether by building trust over time, offering in-game rewards, or bonding over shared experiences.
Online Games as Social Platforms
Unlike friendships formed through traditional social media, which may be casual, short-lived, and spread across large networks, research suggests that friendships formed through gaming tend to be close, tight-knit, and long-lasting as they are built and centered around shared objectives, real-time collaboration and teamwork.
Social features are critical in online environments. Many games would not be as engaging without integrated chat, voice communication, and online communities, as these elements help players share experiences, bond, build social skills and create meaningful relationships. These features, however, also introduce risks. Any system that allows direct messaging, voice chat, or anonymous friend requests carries potential risks of exploitation if not properly monitored.
Sharing gaming experiences can also create a sense of community and belonging, especially for people who may not have access to similar communities in their real-life social circles. However, what starts as a casual friendship in a game can sometimes be deceptive. Predators leverage the trust built through online friendships to gain access to young players. Many cases of child exploitation begin in games but are often moved to private, often encrypted, messaging platforms, where predators can operate with less or no oversight.
Grooming Tactics and Warning Signs in Multiplayer Gaming Environments
Predators in online gaming spaces use various manipulation tactics to groom and exploit children. Some key warning signs may include:
- Asking inappropriate personal questions.
Example: "Do you play while your parents are at work?" - Disguising questions as compliments.
Example: Commenting on an avatar's appearance to shift the conversation toward real-life looks. - Excessive flattery or recognition.
Example: "You're the best player I've ever teamed up with!" - Offering in-game rewards or gifts.
Example: Using rare skins, in-game currency, or items to build trust and dependency. - Encouraging isolation.
Example: Convincing players to leave public chats or avoid teammates for "exclusive training sessions." - Creating a false sense of maturity.
Example: "You're so much smarter than other kids your age."
These tactics are often used to normalize inappropriate conversations and move interactions to private platforms. Predators often create multiple accounts to monitor victims or re-establish contact if they have been blocked.
Safety Tools
Online games are diverse, and approaches to safety vary across platforms. Some of the key tools used to enhance player safety include, but are not limited to:
- Chat filters
- Detect and block harmful language while maintaining positive communication.
- Reporting systems
- Enable players to flag inappropriate behavior for review.
- Human and artificial Intelligence assisted moderation
- Actively monitor interactions and detect potential threats.
- Blocking and friend request controls
- Help players prevent unwanted interactions.
- Parental controls
- Allow guardians to manage communication settings and gameplay restrictions.
- Player and staff verification
- Reduce anonymity risks and enhance trust within the gaming community.
Expand Public Awareness
Educating children directly on safe gaming practices, recognizing risks, and knowing how to seek help empowers them to make informed decisions in digital spaces. Expanding access to safety tools and resources further strengthens this effort.
Encouraging Reporting
Many victims hesitate to report abuse due to fear, shame, or uncertainty about what qualifies as a crime. Families often need guidance to:
- Understand when, how, and where to report
- Know what to expect after they report
- Feel support throughout the process
Cybertip.ca offers public reporting tools and safety guidance to empower families and communities in safeguarding children online.
Webinar 2: Designing Safer Online Games and Communities
As part of ongoing efforts to raise awareness and strengthen collective action against OCSEA in gaming environments, the second webinar from the series brought together professionals from across the gaming industry.
This session focused on the important role that game developers, designers, and studios play in shaping player experiences for younger audiences. With thoughtful strategy and a diverse range of safety tools, game makers have the power to amplify positive social interactions, reduce risky behaviors, and proactively address potential harms within their platforms.
Led by the co-founders of GamerSafer, experts in the field of safety and security in games, the webinar highlighted emerging challenges and presented concrete strategies — ranging from age-appropriate design and moderation frameworks to cross-sector collaboration. These approaches aim to ensure that children across a wide range of ages can engage with online games safely, meaningfully, and with greater resilience.
Webinar 3: Understanding and Guiding Youth in Online Gaming
The Online Gaming World: Building Bridges, not Walls
The Positive Side of Gaming
For many youth, gaming is a core part of their identity, social life, and peer culture.
Rather than approaching gaming with concern and fear, parents and caregivers were encouraged to use it as a bridge to open, honest conversation and opportunities for learning.
Gaming Platforms, Genres, and Ratings
Each platform brings a unique set of features and risks, and understanding them helps parents decide when and what type of supervision or conversation is most needed.
Cross-Platform Play
Many games today allow players to connect across devices. For example, a child playing on a console may be in the same team as someone on mobile or personal computer. This expands opportunities for social play but also requires awareness that safety settings may vary by platform.
Understanding Game Ratings
Game rating systems are crucial as they help guide players and parents in making informed choices by highlighting the content and age-appropriateness of games.
Game rating systems offered by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) and Pan European Game Information (Europe) evaluate and classify content based on:
- Violence
- Language
- Sexual or suggestive content
- Gambling mechanics
- Drug/alcohol references
These systems support and guide age-appropriate access. Beyond age ratings, based on your children's maturity and needs, parents and caregivers should consider if a game includes player-to-player interactions, the content displayed – among other factors, to make decisions.
The Online Gaming World: Key Insights
- Online-only friendships are normal — and meaningful.
According to Thorn's the Online Grooming Report (PDF), 1 in 3 minors say their closest friends are people they met online, and 70% regularly talk about shared interests with these friends — with gaming being one of the most common areas of connection - The "stranger danger" narrative is outdated.
Grooming often begins with someone a child meets through a game or social platform — a teammate, an older player, or a contact who has earned their trust or offers some kind of benefit. Evidence shows that many children do not perceive these individuals as strangers, and often do not recognize the interaction as risky or inappropriate
- Grooming in online multiplayer games can happen quickly.
Predators can engage a child in a high-risk conversation within just 19 seconds of connection, with the average time being just 45 minutes. (WeProtect Global Alliance Threat Assessment (PDF), 2023) - Watch out for peer-to-peer harm in online spaces.
Children are not only susceptible to being victims but can also display harmful behaviours. Social manipulation, sexual pressure, and bullying among peers can escalate without being recognized as abuse
The most effective way to protect kids is through conversation, supervision, and education, not fear.
Facilitating Safer Gaming Experiences: Tools & Strategies
Recommended strategies included:
- "Living Room Strategy": Keep gameplay visible when possible. Avoid defaulting to headphones and isolated play. Light, natural observation is more effective than surveillance
- Protect personal information: Children need to understand what information should remain private, why it matters, and how to respond to potential red flags. Emphasize the importance of this: even usernames or gamertags can reveal details like age, location, or identity. A name like "Luca2012" or "Emma_Toronto" may seem harmless to them, but it can unintentionally share personal information with online contacts
- Talk about cross-platform exploration: Many predators do not operate solely inside games. They will try to move conversations to private, encrypted apps. Parents need to consider their child's broader digital footprint and talk about how and why this happens
- Establish shared rules with other families: Align with other parents on games and chat permissions whenever possible. Shared norms across your child's peer group, especially during sleepovers or playdates, can ease tension and reinforce expectations
- Stay curious, not combative: If children feel like their favorite game is "the enemy" in your eyes, they may stop sharing with you. Instead, ask about their favorite features, characters, or wins. Let them teach you something. This builds trust — and keeps communication open
- Recognize changes in behaviour: A child becoming withdrawn, irritable, or secretive may be coping with online pressure or harm. Encourage openness, and be ready to support, not punish
- Use parental controls as part of a bigger picture: Parental controls are valuable, but they are just one piece of the puzzle. They work best when combined with regular dialogue, role modeling, shared learning, and other available tools that support trust and safety. Keep in mind: some controls may restrict features that young players enjoy—like adding friends, chatting, exploring, or customizing avatars, which can cause frustration
- Play together when you can: Use gaming as a lens to understand what children care about, what frustrates them, what makes them proud
OCSEA: Reporting and Getting Support
Many children and youth do not immediately disclose harmful experiences online because they feel ashamed, scared, or unsure of what will happen next.
Your response as a parent, caregiver, educator, or trusted adult can shape whether a child feels safe enough to speak up. Listening without judgment, believing what they share, and guiding them through next steps are powerful acts of protection.
Participants were encouraged to:
- Report in-game abuse or suspicious behavior using built-in tools available on gaming platforms
- Document interactions (screenshots, usernames, timestamps)
- Escalate concerns to national or platform authorities
Resources
- Child Sexual Exploitation on the Internet
- Cybertip.ca
- Bringing Canadians Together through Gaming: Essential Facts 2022 (ESA Canada) (PDF)
- Games as Social Platforms (Steinkeuler, 2024)
- Video games can have a positive impact on children – if they are designed right, says new study (UNICEF)
- Gaming and the Metaverse (Bracket Foundation)
- Combating Online Child Exploitation and Abuse in Gaming (Tech Coalition, Digital Thriving, 2025)
- Sexual Exploitation in Online Gaming (UNICEF)
- Video games and friendship (Psychgeist)
- Hate is No Game: Hate and Harassment in Online Games 2023 (ADL,2023)
- Webinar: Understanding Gaming Nuances to Protect Youth Audiences Online (INHOPE)
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