Law enforcement and other governmental agencies from different countries regularly meet and cooperate with other countries’ law enforcement to suggest what laws they can suggest in order to increase their effectiveness. US, UK, and Germany are pretty influential in this regard. And international organizations facilitate the spread of powerful countries’ doctrines (good and bad) to others. There’s nothing secretive about this, its just globalism at work. The EU in particular can spread such policy like wildfire by its very design.
For example, the UN Convention against Cybercrime “encourages” countries to set up internet surveillance systems and share its data with other nations for anything they consider a crime. Its planning on a global scale for mass surveillance, but not necessarily a hidden conspiracy.
“Ministers want the likes of Apple and Google to incorporate nudity-detection algorithms into their device operating systems to prevent users taking photos or sharing images of genitalia unless they are verified as adults.”
To give an honest assessment on how well this would work at its intended goal to crack down on sexting:
1.For preventing online-only sexting from “Category 1” (regressive) offenders;
This will indeed deter a decent number young adults from sexting. I remember growing up in an era where my school classmates bragged about their 20-something year old “boyfriends” on MySpace/kik/whatever. And the “boyfriends” would typically turn out to live hundreds of miles away, in their mothers’ basement, and only talk about video games 
, and maybe a few weeks after getting attention, the girl would get bored. To be honest, I’ve been there when I was a teen (and no, i am not “traumatized” by it);
These are what we call “opportunistic”, “regressive” offenders. The kind of people who do this aren’t generally very tech savvy or intelligent, but at the same time aren’t particularly harmful either. These sad individuals make up the supermajority of those prosecuted for sexting. Criminology papers will typically note that such offenders very rarely do anything in real life, typically have no criminal record, and only do so due to depression, loneliness in their own lives. I think you get the kind of picture of the kind of person I’m painting here; so I will refer to this kind of offender as “Category 1”;
Due to their overall lack of knowledge, intentionality, or drive, I honestly think that nudity-blocking systems on common operating systems will deter and detect a large amount of people like this. However, the existing dragnet surveillance in place on common platforms already gets most of such people caught nowadays in the first place.
2.For preventing online-only sexting from “Category 2” offenders;
There are people who actually intentionally manipulate and even threaten teens for nudes, in order to secretly distribute them on the darkweb, or just for masochistic pleasure. They make up a very small minority of child pornography cases (but probably are the majority represented in media). These are people who intentionally hurt teens, and either don’t care or enjoy it. Groups like 764 are an example of the less tech savvy ones.
Unfortunately, I don’t see these laws deterring these kind of guys. For starters, they would just recommend moving to a non-backdoored OS or other line of communication after building rapport. Its not difficult to get even a 14 year old to install Tails on a computer with a webcam.
3. For preventing prohibited sexual relations in-person (Category 3):
Competent people who want to have sex with young adults or children (in person) just refuse to use phones for doing so in the first place, and just have relationships with people they know in person through friends, family, work or community organizations.
My concern is that given a restrictive digital ecosystem, many 1st category of people (careless teen sexters) who would otherwise be caught, will realize that sexting is to risky or simply difficult, and either move to the 3rd category (competent, offline) or even worse, the 2nd category (intentionally malicious, tech savvy).
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This has been said 1,000,000 times before, but the most effective solution against child sex abuse is good parenting & awareness, friendships, and maintaining a positive social and romantic environment for teenagers.
The UK’s “Home Office is expected to encourage companies to introduce such controls as part of its strategy to tackle violence against women and girls” when it announces the initiative in the coming days, the FT said.
No, digital surveillance will not effectively tackle violence against women and girls. The UK does have the highest rape rate in Europe (by far), but backdooring phones isn’t the solution to that issue 