As featured with & trusted by
Available for interview, comment and expert analysis on children and technology, the phone ban, the under-16 social media ban, AI companions, sextortion and online harms.
As featured with & trusted by
Winner, Cyber Awareness Award
Named in the Top 20
Cyber Impact Award
UK celebration of remarkable women in tech
Media and podcast appearances include the BBC (CBeebies Parenting), BBC Radio 5 Live, LBC, HuffPost, Dubai Eye 103.8, HPE's Technology Now, Malicious Life, The Locked Up Living Podcast and many more. High-resolution headshots, cover images and a full biography are available on request.
"Catherine is the real deal when it comes to understanding human behaviour online."
I am a registered psychotherapist. What follows is a condition of that registration and of the ethical framework I practise under, not a position I have adopted for marketing purposes.
There are none, and there will not be any. People who come to me clinically are never asked to review the experience, and I would decline if one were offered. Someone inside a therapeutic relationship cannot give genuinely free consent to endorse their therapist, which is precisely why the request should never be made.
Where you see endorsements on this site, they are from professional colleagues speaking about my professional work. They are not clients.
Not on the record, not on background, not anonymised, and not "in general terms, about a case like this". This holds whether the work concluded last month or twenty years ago, and it holds regardless of how widely a story has already been reported elsewhere.
If you have reached this page hoping for access to a family, a child, or the details of something I have worked on, I will not be able to help you. I would rather say that here than waste your deadline.
What I can do is explain how a harm works. How grooming is actually structured. What sextortion does to a fourteen-year-old's nervous system. Why "just take the phone away" fails. What the research says, including my own. That is usually the more useful interview anyway, and it is the one I can give you properly.
When I speak at a conference, write a book, post on social media or answer a question on a podcast, the examples I use are vignettes: composite, de-identified, with details and circumstances altered so that no individual is identifiable, including to themselves.
They exist to illustrate a mechanism. How the harm reaches a child, what it does to a developing brain and body, and what the adults around that child can do differently. They are teaching tools. They are not case notes, and they are not anyone in particular.
This is not a technicality. Professionals learn from the specific, so the work of teaching this subject is the work of building examples that carry the clinical truth without carrying the person.
Where a child is at risk of significant harm, I have safeguarding obligations that override confidentiality. I will always say so before I act on them, and I would rather you knew that at the start than discovered it later.
You are welcome to contact me for comment, background, data or expert explanation. Please do not ask me to introduce you to a family, confirm or deny whether I have worked on a particular case, or comment on an individual. The answer will be no, and it will be no every time.