Training, Practice and Service Provision for Selective Mutism: Findings From a UK-Wide Survey of Therapists.

Nonconsensual intimate image (NCII) removal platforms are an essential recourse for victims of NCII abuse. Yet despite real advances in content hashing and proactive detection [], most removal workflows were built around takedown logistics rather than the psychological realities of trauma, leaving help-seeking more burdensome and distressing than it needs to be [,]. Because users must navigate these interfaces while in acute distress, the burden falls on the very people the system aims to protect, thereby contravening Safety by Design’s principle that safety should never rest solely on the user []. These concerns can deter victim-survivors from seeking help altogether []. The problem is therefore not merely technical or regulatory but clinical: it requires understanding how trauma reshapes the cognitive and emotional capacities that digital interaction demands. Empirical accounts of how victim-survivors experience reporting and removal systems reinforce this concern. Studies of technology-facilitated abuse document that survivors frequently encounter fragmented, effortful, and opaque help-seeking pathways, and that maintaining safety online imposes a substantial and sustained burden []. Research on image-based sexual abuse describes the compounding distress victim-survivors face when navigating institutional and platform responses that are difficult to access, slow, or inadequately explained []. Controlled comparison of NCII reporting interfaces across 45 platforms shows that the interaction style of the report itself produces measurable trade-offs in clarity, efficiency, and elicited distress []. Survivor-centered work developing digital tools for gender-based violence has further shown that survivor-facing systems often fail not because the underlying technology is inadequate but because they are not designed around victim-survivors’ psychological and contextual realities []. Taken together, this evidence indicates that the limitations of current NCII removal platforms are experienced by users at the point of help-seeking and justify a design approach grounded explicitly in trauma psychology. Safety by Design [], trauma-informed care (TIC) [], and usability heuristics [] each address part of what NCII removal platforms require, but none integrates the others into interaction-level guidance, a gap this work addresses. Recent NCII-specific scholarship has mapped how harms arise across sociotechnical layers and where interventions might sit [], yet no existing work integrates clinical trauma theory, usability evaluation, and platform-level safety engineering into an actionable implementation framework for NCII removal platforms.