Professor Julia Davidson

Julia is one of the UK's foremost experts on advocacy, policy and practice in child safeguarding, online harms/safety and youth cybercrime . She is Chair of the UK Council for Internet Safety Evidence Group and provides expert advice to international and national organisations such as the Technology Coalition, UNICEF , the US Sentencing Commission, and the UN ITU, the Home Office and the DCMS. She is a member of the Europol EC3 Expert Academic Advisory Committee and acted as Chair of the Research Ethics Committee to the Independent Inquiry into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse, having acted as an Academic Advisor to the Inquiry since it began . She has been awarded funding in excess of £10million and has directed a considerable amount of national and international research spanning 35 years, she has recently led part of an H2020 project focusing on the technical and human drivers of cybercrime (CCDriver) conducting the largest EU survey of youth cybercrime in 8 countries and developing a new taxonomy of cybercrime.

She has recently worked with OFCOM to develop a child online risk taxonomy for VSPs in the context of the implementation of the Online Safety Act 2023 and is an Advisor to the Technology Coalition working with industry partners. She has also acted as an advisor on child online protection and Internet safety to governments and practitioners in the MENA region and has recently worked with the Rwandan Government to develop a child online protection policy ( with Baroness Kidron, implemented 6/2019) which has been developed into a Global Safety Toolkit endorsed by the Duke of Sussex. She is currently co-leading the African Youth Safeguarding Network initiative with partners in South Africa, Rwanda, Kenya, Zambia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone focusing on child online protection and victimisation.

She has been awarded a substantial amount of research and consultancy funding over the last ten years from funders including the ESRC, the EC (Safer Internet, EC ISEC and recently H2020), Home Office, DCMS, Charities, NGOs and industry. She was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2020 for services to Child Internet Safety. Professor Davidson has worked with the media since 2003 working on live and recorded interviews for the BBC News, BBC World News, ITV, C4, BBC R4 News , BBC R4 Woman’s Hour. She has also worked on documentaries and has published widely in the child abuse and Internet safety area; she has written five books and many academic articles. She has a PhD in Social Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and was made Honorary Research Fellow at Royal Holloway University of London in May 2010, Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology in 2014 and she is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.