Talk about awkward

Peaches, bananas, cucumbers, lemons? What do they all have in common, other than being fruit and vegetables, of course?

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) used fruit and vegetables as body part replacements, emoji-style, in their recent Think Before You Share campaign. We were incredibly proud to be part of this project, which we believe is the kind of critical action required to protect young people from the very real, increasing risk of exploitation and harm online.

We routinely work with partners on projects that aim to have impact, and this is one of the clearest examples of where academic research has informed and influenced real world impact.

What did the project want to achieve?

This collaborative project by the IWF and our team at IPPPRI aimed to improve awareness of the issue of non-consensual onward sharing of nudes amongst children and prevent these images ending up online.[1]

This content refers to sexually explicit images and videos taken by children themselves which are then shared online, often with boy/girlfriends but also with adults. Unfortunately, some of these images end up on the dark web, being shared by perpetrators with a sexual interest in children.

The key aims of the project were to encourage children and young people to think before they share their, or their peers’, explicit images (sexts/nudes) online.

It also aimed to get parents/carers and teachers to talk about this issue with their children, as we know from our pre-campaign research that the sharing of explicit images (aka sexting) online between children has become more normalised.

This blog will give a brief overview of the original research and the evaluation findings, which – spoiler alert – were very positive.

What did our initial research tell us?

Our initial research told us that children are living in a digitally connected world and are using the internet to make friends with people they don’t know in real life.

We also found that the internet is being used increasingly for sex education. This reflects the lack of good sex and relations education (SRE) within schools and the fact that children are therefore turning to the internet for sources of information.

Our participants described how receiving and being asked for nudes was becoming a ‘normal’ part of their lives, with some young girls telling us that they were receiving ‘dick pics’ regularly, with one describing it as happening “24/7” (Year 7 participant, secondary school).

They also described instances of some children collecting the sexual imagery, like some of us might have done with football cards in the past.

Very few of our participants had had direct experience of sharing nudes but many knew someone who this had happened to. Two examples are highlighted below.

Others highlighted that this had happened to them, with some very concerning examples given:

It became clear that this was an issue that was affecting children’s lives online and having a clear impact offline. This, combined with our research into the dark web CSAM chat forums, which found how easy the offenders find it to target and groom children online, illustrated how important this issue is to address.

The campaign 🍑🍋🍌🍆🍒

The campaign itself, developed by the behaviour change agency Consider Creative, ran for six weeks across social media and radio and digital channels during June-July 2024. View some of the campaign videos on YouTube and visit the campaign website. The campaign website also hosts the newly-developed resources designed for use by teachers and educators.

In total, the campaign achieved over 122 million social media impressions with 7.1 million completed views of the campaign assets.

Evaluation

Having initially led the research to inform the development of the campaign, our next role was to evaluate its impact. Once it had ended, we carried out a survey, with the campaign assets embedded for the participants to watch/listen to.

1347 participants took part and almost 30% of them had seen the campaign over the summer. The findings were very encouraging, with 87% of the participants liking the campaign.

Free text comments in response to what participants thought about the campaign were overwhelmingly positive, particularly from teenagers, with adjectives such as “perfect”, “great”, “supportive” and “funny” being used on multiple occasions.

Participants observed that they found the campaign clear, informative and creative. Adult participants were slightly more critical of the campaign, with more negative comments based around the use of the fruit imagery.

93% of the participants reported understanding the key messaging of the campaign, which was always a top objective. Awareness of the IWF and NSPCC’s ‘Report Remove’ service, which enables children to request to have their explicit images removed from the internet, was also raised, with a 44% increase in reports (n=1142) in 2024 compared to the same period in the year before (IWF, 2025). This is a key finding, as it is a service aimed at children and young people.

Another crucial finding was that 88% of the participants agreed that the campaign had helped them understand more about the risks of children sharing their images online, and 89% of the teenagers said that they agreed that it had made them think before sharing an image of themselves in the future.

We might not be able to see the full impact of this campaign immediately, but we already know it is the most effective campaign delivered in IWF’s history, and we hope it will continue to influence and affect behaviour change going forward.

We hope that teachers will continue to access the free resources to help them talk to their students about this important issue, and we can’t wait to see where else the campaign is shown as the IWF is working with organisations to licence the campaign for global use.

One thing is for sure, you might never look at a banana or a peach in the same way again!

Dr Sarah Colley, Postdoctoral Researcher, IPPPRI

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1 This is often referred to as ‘self-generated’ child sexual abuse material (SG-CSAM) but is contentious as the words ‘self-generated’ carry victim-blaming connotations.