Therapeutic Safeguarding: A New Era of Digital Protection for Young People

The internet is a wild place. For most of us, a weird pop-up or a sketchy DM is just a minor annoyance. But for children in care and vulnerable adults, those same digital corners can be genuinely dangerous.

At Voop, we realised that the "standard" way of protecting people online, patchwork apps and easily bypassed settings, just isn’t cutting it. We’ve worked directly with the foster and residential care sector, police, local authorities and government to close this critical safety gap and build digital resilience in our young people. 

Voop’s solution stands to make a major difference to social care and safeguarding of children and other vulnerable people. We’ve found we can stop children going missing and tackle the worst harms like grooming, criminal exploitation, sexual exploitation and human trafficking, while improving overall mental health and digital resilience. This stands to result in a significant improvement in care outcomes for young people, and wide-ranging systemwide efficiency benefits for local authorities, the care sector, police and other key partners in the system. 

Why "Good Enough" Isn't Enough

"We’re building a foundation of safety that lets vulnerable people enjoy the digital world with the freedom they deserve"

Most parental control tools are like a screen door: they look okay, but they’re easy to kick through. Kids are tech-savvy; they find the workarounds. For a child in foster care or a person with additional needs, a "workaround" can lead straight to grooming, bullying, or exploitation.

We don’t just build apps. We are a global mobile network that embeds safety into the actual connection. By combining enterprise-grade device management with a SIM that filters threats at the network level, we create a "digital bubble" that stays intact, no matter which app is opened.

"We didn’t set out to build another parental control app that kids can bypass in five minutes," says James Paul, Co-founder and CEO of Voop. "We’re building a foundation of safety that lets vulnerable people enjoy the digital world with the freedom they deserve, minus the constant threat of harm hanging over them."

Tech Built for Humans

"Traditional tech treats safeguarding as an optional setting"

Our platform isn't about "bricking" a phone or stripping away independence. It’s about therapeutic safeguarding. We provide real-time alerts for things like bullying or "risky" content, allowing carers and parents to have informed conversations rather than just playing digital police.

Nick Pasha-Gubbins, Co-founder and CTO of Voop, explains the technical shift: "Traditional tech treats safeguarding as an optional setting. At Voop, we’ve integrated it into the full stack, from the SIM to the OS. If the protection isn’t at the core of the network itself, it’s not real protection."

Making an Impact

We’re already protecting children across the UK care system. Our mission is simple: to make the internet a place where the most vulnerable among us can thrive, learn, and connect without the fear of what’s lurking in the next tab.

No hype, just results.