The Duchess of Edinburgh has made an emotional plea as she kicked off her two-day foreign trip as Patron of the NSPCC and Plan International UK.
Sophie arrived in Brussels, in Belgium on Wednesday to take part in a series of engagements focused on tackling child sexual exploitation and abuse.
In the afternoon, the wife of Prince Edward attended an event co-hosted by the European Parliament Intergroup on Children's Rights.
During the event, Sophie delivered key speech, where she made an emotional appeal for urgent action to protect children from online abuse and exploitation.
“As I speak, AI is being used to generate hyper-realistic child sexual abuse imagery at scale,” the duchess, who has been Patron of the NSPCC since 2016, said.
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She went on to say, “Seventy-nine per cent of teenagers are already using generative-AI for learning, which obviously can be beneficial, but they are also receiving misleading or dangerous information from chatbots on topics including mental health, suicide and grooming.
“This underlines the corrosive impact of online abuse and scale of the challenge we face in tackling it. It is a challenge we need to tackle urgently, particularly given the emergence of generative AI,” Sophie added.
The duchess was joined by Jess Phillips, UK Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls.
Sophie later attended a reception with panellists, including survivors and representatives from EU institutions, the UN and NGOs advocating for change.
This is not the first time the duchess has engaged with the European Parliament Intergroup on Children's Rights, as she previously visited in December 2021.
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