I said, ‘I’m sure there are things we can do to sort it out.’

‘No.’

‘There must be something we can do to get it taken down, removed from whatever site it’s on.’

She stood up and swiped angrily at her tears.

‘I’ve told you. You can’t help! No one can!’

She walked off towards the house without another word.

I gave her a minute, then followed her in. This was something that should be shared with Sean, so we could discuss it, work out what to do – on any normal day that’s what I would have done. But normal was now a distant memory.

I could hardly look at him after today, let alone speak to him.

Daniel’s iPad lay discarded on the low coffee table in the lounge. I took it into the dining room and shut the door behind me, propping the iPad on its stand at the end of the long table. There was a rolling, sick feeling in my stomach.

My little girl is somewhere out there on the internet. Naked. Vulnerable. Naive.

I sat down and unlocked the tablet before realising that I had no real idea where to start. This video of my child – or whatever it was of – was out there somewhere other people could see it. Somewhere that other people could find it. Knowing that made me feel more helpless than ever.

It was one of those teenage things; I knew it went on, but I was pretty hazy on the details. Did they get posted on YouTube? Did they allow that kind of thing? It didn’t seem likely. Weren’t there moderators to remove nudity and sex?

I went back to Google and searched ‘sexting’. The top item was an article from Cosmopolitan magazine advising readers how to send sexy texts and messages, followed by a Wikipedia entry and another page suggesting different messages you could send to your partner. Not that helpful.

Snapchat seemed to be the main choice for kids doing this, but everything posted there apparently disappeared within ten seconds. So presumably anything she’d posted there would have been deleted. I didn’t have a Snapchat account, and even if I did it was highly unlikely that Lucy would accept a friend request from me.

I called up the browser and Googled ‘Where are sex tapes posted?’ A string of results came up, mostly about celebrities who had filmed themselves having sex and then found those films uploaded to the internet to be viewed by millions of strangers. Jennifer Lopez. Pamela Anderson. Kim Kardashian. Colin Farrell. The Wikipedia page had an alphabetised list that went on and on.

But this was getting me nowhere.