On: Rising number of UK children report seeing explicit deepfakes of themselves

August 9, 2026

The report today is of children seeing their own faces stolen and grafted onto vile images. They speak of a ‘surge’. My heart aches for them, but the ache is a familiar one. We have seen this before, not with machines, but with the theft of innocence through other means. The new tool is different, but the old failure is the same: we have neglected the formation of character in those who would use it.

We speak of ‘safety watchdogs’ and ‘flagging services’. This is the infrastructure of crisis, not of prevention. It is the hospital built at the bottom of the cliff. The true infrastructure - the moral education that forms a boy to see a girl as a person, not as an image to be defaced - is crumbling. What habits are we building in our young men? If their daily formation is a stream of content that reduces others to objects for consumption, can we be shocked when a new technology makes the final, horrific manipulation effortless? The problem is not the AI. It is the vacancy where a conscience ought to be.

We must audit the character of our age. What formation produced a child who would do this to another? It is a formation of anonymity, of impunity, of a digital world where consequence is abstract. It is a formation devoid of the daily, practical lessons in empathy and respect that once were woven into community life. We have provided the technical means and neglected the human foundation.

My work was in tracts and schools - slow, patient building. This calls for the same. We must build an infrastructure of character that operates long before the ‘flagging service’ is needed. We must teach children to steward their own power, to see the face of another as inviolable. Otherwise, we are merely building better locks for a door we have failed to teach anyone not to break down.