Let’s do this together YOUR COMMUNITY CORNER

The battle for control of the tech continues. So far the score is Mum… 1, The Dark Lord… 2 – but I’m about to even the score since I just discovered she has completely wiped her laptop in order to uninstall my parent control software.

I had been too quick to glory in my new-found power that the app Famisafe gave me over The Dark Lord’s online presence and screen time.

So she decided to lose a few skirmishes (and all her photos), in order to wipe the device and then win the battle.

Meanwhile the big war still wages on, but it’s soul-destroying that I should have to fight my own daughter to protect her, especially in light of the hard-hitting report out today by the Internet Watch Foundation that reveals girls aged 11-13 are under constant attack from sexual predators.

Never before have our teenage girls been so vulnerable to being coerced than now, often in their own bedrooms while mum and dad watch TV in the sitting room, and then the images and videos of this abuse are shared widely online.

IWF experts – whose job it is to find and remove child sexual abuse material from the internet – warn the self-generated images from this abuse now, for the first time, makes up almost half of the vile content online.

I know just how hard it’s been to try to control my daughter’s tech, but I also know how good parenting controls are when the little minx doesn’t try to sabotage them.

My app alerts me when Jesse is sent or views inappropriate content, so we have the technology – there just needs to be some motivation on the part of internet giants to use it to safeguard kids instead of feeding them to the lions.

I’ll be talking more to my daughter about this later in the week, and also showing her the new campaign, Home Truths (talk.iwf.org.uk) that aims to get parents and kids slamming those open doors to child sex abusers.

In the meantime, Satan’s Minion is making a point of joke-swearing in messages to her mates so that my phone is buzzing with all the profanity notifications. “Swearing is not big and it’s not clever, so bloody stop it,” I texted her back.

Email me at siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.