I reported concerning sexual material and online activity found on an old phone that had been given to a child. I followed safeguarding advice and handed the device to police.

Since then, the matter has been repeatedly minimised and NFA. The phone was eventually examined, but the relevant cloud/account activity was not, and the recordings I made of what was visible at the time were not professionally assessed for a long period.

I have now provided those recordings to police, but I am still concerned that they may not be properly examined.

What I do not understand is why it has been so difficult to get a suitably trained officer simply to look at the material. Is it because some of it is historical? Because nothing was recovered from the handset at the later examination? Because there is no previous offending history? Or because the original report came from an ex-partner and was later escalated through senior officers?

I do not want to speculate about motives. I just want the evidence assessed on its own merits by a professional trained in that area. This PC said he'd just have a look at it! Surely there are professionally trained officers, and a whole process around this?

Some of the recorded material appears to me to depict very young people, potentially under 18. I am not qualified to determine age or whether any particular image is illegal, which is precisely why I reported it. To me, who has children of the same age, they look to me to be 12-13, 14 at a push. They continued to say there are adults who look like 16 in the p industry, that there are safeguards in place on mainstream search engines meaning that it is "unlikely" what I saw was IIOC...its the dark web where this material usually is and I had not demonstrated he had accessed that...

None of this seems right to me, but have no idea where to go to challenge it. At the end of the day there are a huge amount of images of IIOC somewhere on the internet and for the sakes of those girls I want someone to take them down. Doesn't seem to be a facility to submit recordings Ive made to IWF. I will try and call LFF later but my children are in the flat and I don't want them to hear the conversation.

My question is simply: how do you get police to properly assess historic digital material when the later device examination does not recover it, but contemporaneous recordings still exist showing what was visible at the time?[/b]

I am also struggling with having had to revisit and document disturbing material myself bythe family court, when this seems like something that should have been handled by trained professionals. I feel like I'm still being closed down because the escalation to senior officers has resulted in the original OICs marking their own homework. Nothing feels official because they haven't interviewed so VRR was rejected. I am so confused about how the police work, none of it feels very professional.