| Abstract | This report, produced by the Institute for Connected Communities (UEL) in collaboration with the Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies (MDX), presents key findings and recommendations from roundtable discussions on child safety risks in virtual reality environments. Study Background
This report relates to a previous project, titled VIRRAC (Virtual Reality Risks Against Children). By placing children at the heart of our research and data collection methods, VIRRAC aimed to raise awareness of child safety in the metaverse (UNICEF, 2025). Our primary focus was to understand the risks and harms that children and young people encounter in these immersive virtual environments, ensuring their voices and experiences shaped our approach. By doing so, we sought to explore practical, child‐centred solutions that can enhance safety and well‐being in the metaverse. VIRRAC came to an end in March 2024, and additional funding was awarded by the REPHRAIN centre to carry out two online roundtables with professionals working in the education, and industry and other sectors. Context and Aim
The research team proposed two interactive virtual workshop sessions with education and industryspecialists. The format of these sessions was explorative and participatory (Bastian, 2016), whereby key findings and recommendations from the VIRRAC project were shared with attendees to inform facilitated discussions centred on applying and prioritising the VIRRAC recommendations. The virtual roundtable sessions provided a meaningful platform for engaging with key strategic stakeholders to critically examine the implications of the core VIRRAC findings and outputs. Methods
Ethical approval was principally sought from the University of East London ethics committee and then from the REPHRAIN centre. The convenience and the snowball sampling method were used, whereby participants were recruited initially through existing networks, and were encouraged to share roundtable information with relevant colleagues and wider networks (Parker et al., 2019).
In order to curate a comprehensive set of questions, the two roundtable guides were developed by the team based directly on learning derived from the original VIRRAC research whilst also taking the project’s findings and recommendations into account.
The VIRRAC Report Executive Summary was shared with participants before the roundtable sessions, and the team presented key findings and recommendations at the start of each event before commencing. Roundtables took place online in a secure channel, via Microsoft Teams. Transcripts were fully anonymised before being uploaded to ATLAS software for deductive thematic analysis. |
|---|