Recorded live at The Grange Manor in Grangemouth, this powerful panel discussion explored how exploitation is evolving in today’s digital world. Whether you work with young people, are raising children through uncertain times, or simply want to deepen your understanding, this conversation offered vital insight.

Exploitation in 2025 isn’t always visible. It can occur through a screen, behind closed doors, or in plain sight. From exposure to pornography and online grooming, to coercion via social media and peer pressure, young people are facing risks previous generations could hardly imagine.

Hosted by public health expert Dr Linda de Caestecker, the panel featured:

• Professor Alexis Jay, renowned child protection expert and former Chair of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse
• Lyndsay McDade, Fearless Lead at Crimestoppers, who has spearheaded national campaigns including work on sextortion awareness

Together, they unpacked the current landscape of online exploitation, how it manifests, and what practical steps we can take to better support and protect the young people in our lives.

What we covered:

• How online platforms can be used for grooming, coercion, and exploitation
• The risks young people face around what they learn online about sex and relationships
• The importance of early intervention, open dialogue, and spotting warning signs
• How parents, carers, educators, and professionals can respond with clarity and compassion

This episode is part of Care Visions’ commitment to raising awareness and empowering communities to take action.

In this insightful episode of Family Talk, Independent Chartered Psychologist Edwina Grant sat down with Dr Linda de Caestecker, Public Health Doctor, and David King, Supervising Social Worker and PACE trainer, to explore how the PACE model—Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity, and Empathy—can transform relationships with children who have experienced stress or trauma.

Designed for parents and caregivers, this online event offered a compassionate, trauma-informed approach to nurturing emotional regulation, trust, and healing.

Children who face emotional challenges often carry feelings of shame and mistrust, which can shape their behaviours and relationships. PACE provides a brain-based, relational framework that supports safe and secure connections while fostering understanding and resilience.

In this session, listeners learned how to:

• Use the four elements of PACE to strengthen bonds with their child
• Support emotional co-regulation and reflective behaviour
• Recognise and address the impact of shame and emotional overwhelm
• Create a nurturing environment where healing and growth are possible

By focusing on the child’s internal experience rather than just outward behaviours, PACE helps to reduce conflict, build trust, and promote lasting connection.

About our guest:

Edwina Grant is an Independent Chartered Psychologist with over 30 years of experience working with children and families across residential, therapeutic, and local authority settings. She currently provides assessments, training, consultancy, and therapeutic support through both statutory and voluntary organisations. Edwina is also a Trustee of Scottish Attachment in Action (www.scottishattachmentinaction.org), a charity dedicated to promoting secure attachment across Scotland and influencing positive change in social policy, education, and mental health.

Iain McGilchrist, a leading psychiatrist and global thinker, brought a vast body of work and deep insight into how we think, why we think, who we are, and how we understand our place in the world. In his latest book The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, Iain posed urgent and unsettling questions. What was the world? How could we understand concepts such as consciousness, matter, space and time? Was the cosmos without purpose or value? And could we really afford to neglect the sacred and the divine?

Iain’s perspective challenged conventional thinking. He explored how different sides of the brain worked together to shape our emotions, our character and our sense of self. He was committed to the idea that the mind and brain could only be truly understood in the broadest context: not only our physical and spiritual existence, but also the wider human culture that shaped, and was shaped by, our brains and minds.

About Iain McGilchrist
A former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Iain was also an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He served as Consultant Emeritus at the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital in London and held a research fellowship in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Baltimore. He also became a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch.
Iain lived on the Isle of Skye, off the coast of north-west Scotland, where he continued to write and lecture worldwide. His work had appeared in most major media outlets, and he had taken part in numerous radio and television programmes and documentaries, including the BBC’s The Moral Maze, Start the Week and Today.

About Humphrey Hawksley
Humphrey Hawksley, an award-winning author and journalist, hosted the weekly Goldster Magazine Show, where he interviewed prominent figures from the worlds of health, culture, travel and adventure. A long-serving BBC foreign correspondent, Humphrey reported on global crises with a particular focus on Asia, where he opened the BBC’s first television bureau in Beijing.
He also hosted the monthly Democracy Forum Debates, created the Rake Ozenna political thriller series, and authored Asian Waters: The Struggle over the Indo-Pacific and the Challenge to American Power. He lectured at institutions such as the RAND Corporation, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, and MENSA Cambridge.

Questions that drove the conversation included:

• Was the world essentially inert and mechanical, just a collection of things to be used?
• Were we ourselves simply the playthings of chance, caught in a struggle of all against all?
• Why were we engaged in destroying everything of value to us?

This live online event offered a rare opportunity to hear Iain McGilchrist and Humphrey Hawksley delve into these fundamental questions in a rich and thought-provoking dialogue.