Dannielle Kelly

When a child is exploited online, multiple systems activate at once: law enforcement, child protection services, government agencies, regulators, and non-profits. The problem is those systems were never really designed to work together. Making them work requires something that doesn't appear in any legislation or funding agreement: deliberate, sustained investment in trust across organisations with different mandates, cultures, and constraints.

This panel draws on direct experience working at the intersection of those systems, supporting police capability, building cross-sector partnerships, and advocating to government for stronger national responses to online child exploitation. It explores what collaboration looks like in practice: how shared language is built between agencies that often operate in silos, how frontline investigator experience is translated into policy and funding decisions, and what it takes to bring police voices into rooms where legislation is shaped. Speakers from law enforcement, the non-government sector, child protection, and online safety regulation will each offer a different vantage point of the same system, what has worked, what hasn't, and what the gaps still are.

The session will highlight the complexity of cross-sector collaboration, acknowledging that it is not achieved through goodwill alone. It depends on relationships built over years, on organisations willing to operate outside their typical remit, and on a shared commitment to putting the child at the centre of decisions that are often made far from the frontline. Attendees will leave with practical insight into how multi-agency partnerships can be built and sustained, and how connecting ground-level experience to policy outcomes can ultimately strengthen the national response to child exploitation.