Deputy Principal's Update

AI Safety

Dear Friends,

Educating our community to ensure student safety is the highest priority of all staff at The Friends’ School. While we are fortunate that the impact of AI and technology has not affected our community to the same extent as some other schools, it remains essential that we stay aware of emerging trends and their potential risks so we can be well prepared.

This letter aims to inform and engage you on a critical and rapidly growing issue impacting young people and communities across Australia: image-based abuse and the rise of deepfake content.

Image-based abuse refers to the non-consensual taking, sharing, or threatening to share intimate images or videos. This also includes altered images known as deepfakes—highly realistic, AI-generated content that can superimpose someone’s face onto another person’s body, often in explicit or harmful contexts. Such acts are not only a serious breach of trust, dignity, and privacy—they are also illegal.

According to the eSafety Commissioner, cases of image-based abuse in Australia continue to rise, with significant increases among teenagers and young adults. Victims often experience long-lasting emotional harm, including anxiety, fear, shame, and reputational damage, particularly when the content is widely shared online.

At The Friends’ School, we take this issue very seriously. We are committed to keeping our students safe both offline and online. To that end, we are strengthening our partnerships with families, law enforcement, and the eSafety Commissioner’s Office to provide proactive education and rapid responses to incidents. To be most effective, however, we need our entire community to work together with these agencies to protect our most vulnerable.

If you or your child become aware of, or are impacted by, image-based abuse or deepfake content, we urge you to:

• Collect evidence (screenshots, URLs, usernames, etc.)
• Report the content to the platform (e.g., Instagram, TikTok)
• Report the incident via the eSafety Commissioner’s portal: esafety.gov.au/report/image-based-abuse
• Contact the School for support—we are here to help you navigate these steps.

We believe that awareness and education are our strongest tools in preventing this kind of harm. Together, we must continue to educate our children—and ourselves—about the moral and legal consequences of creating or sharing such content. We ask for your support in discussing these issues at home, reinforcing respectful online behaviours, and helping build a culture that says clearly: this is not acceptable.

If you have any concerns or would like further information, please don’t hesitate to contact the School or visit the eSafety Commissioner’s website. The eSafety Education – Guide for Image-Based Abuse is also an excellent resource.

Thank you for your ongoing partnership in safeguarding our young people.

Yours faithfully,

Shaun O'Rourke - Deputy Principal