Improving youth safeguarding in the entertainment industries across the UK and Japan

Lecturer in Creative Industries, Dr Dorothy Finan, is co-leading a project with Professor Kaori Suetomi (Nihon University, Japan) on safeguarding young people in the entertainment industries in the UK and Japan. Finan and Suetomi hope to eventually develop an urgently-needed set of internationally applicable policy proposals to improve child safeguarding in the entertainment industries, as well as to establish a permanent network for exchange of best practice and ideas.

During their trip to Tokyo in 2024, the policymakers and survivors they spoke to expressed a strong interest in comparing and sharing initiatives for preventing the abuse of children and young people in the entertainment industries. 

Dr. Dorothy Finan (right) and Professor Kaori Suetomi (middle) meeting with Japanese politician and campaigner Ayaka Shiomura (left) in Japan’s House of Councillors

Finan and Suetomi subsequently conducted a round of interviews with industry professionals with knowledge of and/or interest in child performer licensing in London, Leeds, and Sheffield in June 2025. Finan has now submitted evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport committee inquiry into children’s TV and video content based on these interviews. Finan and Suetomi have also received interest from CIISA, the new standards body for the UK creative industries, in using their research to inform international exchange in child performer safeguarding policy. 

The UK interviews were funded by a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Small Grant worth £2000, and the Tokyo interviews were funded by an International Academic Mobility Funding grant from the University of Leeds Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures.