At least some good came from our daughter’s ordeal

WE HAD no idea why major search engines didn’t automatically filter the kind of disgusting child pornography Mark Bridger had accessed.

We wanted it to be made illegal for search engines to link to content depicting child sex abuse, with substantial fines for companies that didn’t comply.

In July 2013 we met the Prime Minister. ‘This is an incredibly difficult thing to get right,’ he said, meeting my gaze. ‘Nothing is ruled out, including passing laws. But the problem is there are some words you might put in with an innocent explanation that can lead to horrible images.’

‘If a website is reported, its IP address should be blocked,’ I replied. ‘If we could get a law for Europe, that would be a good start.’

A few days later, David Cameron gave search engines three months to introduce stricter measures. Experts from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre would get more powers to examine secretive file-sharing networks, and a database of banned images would help police track paedophiles.

In November 2013, Google announced steps to prevent child abuse images being returned from more than 100,000 unique search terms, to be rolled out in 159 languages over six months.

Microsoft had banned all child abuse images, videos and pathways from keywords suggested by the National Crime Agency.

Both would show messages to people using any of these terms, warning them of the consequences.

Since Google and Microsoft accounted for around 95 per cent of searches, our hard work had paid off.