Story by Eleanor Peake
Recently, Ofcom has opened a formal investigation into Elon Musk’s social media platform X after its Grok AI tool was widely used to manipulate images of women and children by removing their clothes.
Deepfake content has grown exponentially over the past six years, with Deloitte reporting that it rose by 550 per cent on social media platforms between 2019 and 2023. Deepfake porn is also on the rise, with new data finding it has been seen by 25 percent of school children.
Here, the iPaper speaks to a primary school teacher, “Megan,” based in London, who has experienced deepfake pornography abuse firsthand.
I have been a teacher for 20 years, and in my entire career, I have never been more disturbed than I was in 2021. And I have never heard of anything more disturbing or offensive happening since.
I had worked at a primary school in London for five years. There was a girl in my Year Four class who was quite a strange character. I had taught her in previous years, and so she knew me well. She seemed older than her age. Like she knew a lot more than the others.
One day on the playground, she said to me, “I’ve seen you online.” I asked what she meant, and she said she had Googled me and found a photo of me standing by a mountainside. I’m not sure what the picture was, but she had somehow managed to track me down.
A few weeks later, some parents complained to the headteacher that an inappropriate video had been sent to a WhatsApp group the children had made. WhatsApp groups were common in that age group; the children had set one up and even made one for the entire class.
The child who shared the video didn’t make it; they had been coerced into sending it by the video’s creator. That child told her parent, and we then discovered that the creator was the girl who told me she had searched for my photo.
She had taken photos of my face from the school website, along with images of two other teachers, and somehow created a deepfake porn video to make it look like we were involved in a threesome. I have no idea how she did it or what technology she used, especially as this was in 2021 and not many people were talking about deepfakes then.
That was when the complaints from parents arrived. The child who posted the video was mortified. Her mum repeatedly asked for a meeting with me and ensured her daughter apologized as well. But the girl who had made the video showed no remorse. She was just sniggering in the school meetings with her parents. It was all very strange. What was most disturbing was how incredibly young she was: eight or nine years old. To even know what a threesome is at that age is shocking enough, never mind creating a deepfake.
I never actually got to see the video; by the time it was reported, it had been deleted from the children’s phones. In the weeks that followed, the school did not support us at all. The assistant head, who was also featured in the video, didn’t want to involve the union. The other teacher, a male, also didn’t want to push it. It was really just me following it up.
Some schools are cautious when things like this happen. They don’t want drama or any bad press leaking out. This meant the girl wasn’t removed (not even just for the day), and she wasn’t encouraged to apologize. There were no real consequences for her at all. There was just a single meeting with her mum.
I wasn’t in these meetings, but from what I understood, it didn’t seem as if she was being protected at home from sexualized material. It later came out that the daughter had also made a video at home pretending to give oral sex to a sex toy. It then emerged that she had made another video of herself pretending to pole dance.
When I pushed for another meeting, the headteacher dismissed my concerns. “They’re just children,” they told me. I found that really upsetting; what they had done wrong.
With little fanfare, I was back in class, teaching all the children who had seen the video. It was very awkward and uncomfortable. I got advice from the union, which said that what had happened was illegal and that the school should have followed it up properly. I had another meeting with the school, but they didn’t want to pursue it any further. A year later, I left the school. I just felt very alone.
Looking back, I should not have continued teaching that class until the issue had been resolved in some way. I should have definitely had some time off work; I just didn’t want to let the other children down.
For a while, I felt very exposed and vulnerable. Someone had intruded into my personal life, depicting me doing something that never happened. It was deeply disturbing. It also really affected my professional confidence; knowing that half the children had seen it made me feel ridiculed.
At my new school, I tried to move on. I was frustrated that I never got to see the video, and I was anxious about whether it could end up online. I was worried that someone searching my name might come across it. I kept checking, but nothing ever appeared.
This happened five years ago, but it will only become more common. Schools need to pay attention, and more conversations need to happen. Deepfake porn is not covered very much in the syllabus, especially not in primary schools. There’s a fear of exposing children to things they shouldn’t know about, but the reality is that children already have access to porn online. They are already exposed.
Many parents are unaware of what their children are consuming. They turn a blind eye. But it’s time to be alert: children hide things, and most access this material at night, when they pretend to be asleep.
It’s time we banned children from smartphones and social media, and I think we should follow Australia in banning under-16s from the likes of Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. Children shouldn’t have WhatsApp groups in the first place. Phones are not designed for them; they are so, so harmful. I really hope laws catch up. It’s moving far too slowly.
You may also want to read these articles: Middle School Student Shares AI-generated Nude Photos of Classmates; Victim Faces Expulsion? Or Teacher Sexual Harassment: When Students Sexually Harass Teachers