Child safety online
p2pnet.net News Opinion:- Freelance writer and broadcaster Bill Thompson is also involved with policy formulation around the internet and the digital society.
He’s the father of two children as well.
“My 13 year old daughter is a member of the Childnet International children’s panel,” he says. “My 11 year old son is an avid Xbox Live player and less interested in the policy framework.”
Thompson recently gave a talk to the ippr Digital Manifesto seminar on child protection and the Internet in the Moses Room of the House of Lords.
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A dangerous place?
There is a vast amount of research to indicate that children engage in what we call ‘dangerous’ behaviour online. They chat to strangers, divulge email and postal addresses, send photos to people they don’t know very well, expose personal information and even arrange to meet online friends in the real world.
We need to help these children avoid facing the worst consequences of their actions. Every time a child is abused it is a tragedy, and we cannot fail to take steps to reduce the chance of this happening. But we must not let the big incidents, the ones that make the newspapers, create an atmosphere of fear where every adult who talks to a child in a chat room is automatically suspected of thought crime.
I think we have a problem when it comes to discussing child safely online, because the debate is largely being driven by a particular group, the children’s charities, who have a very specific and understandable focus on protecting children, and far less concern with protecting the Internet. As a result our discussions are skewed, and those of us who advocate restraint in regulation are placed on the defensive.
A manifesto for change
Today the Children’s Charities Coalition for Internet Safety – represented here by their omnipresent spokesperson, John Carr – launched their digital manifesto, and generated some publicity by criticising the government for not spending enough to police the net. They have called for extra funds, new services and a law that will criminalise discussion of how to abuse children. They were supported by ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers, somewhat to the surprise of the Minister, Paul Goggins, who earlier told the BBC that ‘everyone seemed content with the progress we are making’ at last week’s Child Internet Protection Task Force meeting, and seems to have been very restrained in his comments to us just now.
The publication of the manifesto provides an opportunity for us to present another point of view, from those of us who do not accept the CHIS analysis or its prescriptions, and who look for a liberal and progressive alternative to this ‘war on paedophiles’. We have just heard BT’s Mike Galvin describe Cleanfeed as a ‘weapon in the armoury’, but I do not think such terminology is helpful.
As always, I run the risk of being pilloried for being ‘soft’ on child abuse, on not wanting to do enough to prevent it. Child abuse, in all its forms, is abhorrent and we must act to stop it happening, and prevent those who carry it out from doing so in future. But we must not overstate the Internet’s role in child abuse and we must not take wrong or ineffective action just because we are bounced into it by campaigners who refuse to see both sides of the argument.
Understanding risk
As a parent I fear for my children, but I also accept that they take risks in all areas of their lives. Tomorrow my son plays his first rugby match for school and he may break a limb. Tonight my daughter will be researching homework online and may encounter a potential abuser. I do not want Max to stop playing rugby, and I don’t want the Net to be controlled, restricted and sanitised to be safe for thirteen-year olds.
So we must preserve the Internet as a space in which adults act as adults, and resist attempts to remove content from online because it is inappropriate for young people.
The proposal from the CHIS manifesto that there should be a ‘cyber equivalent of the Indecent Displays Act’ is just the sort of illiberal, poorly thought through idea that permeates discussions about child protection. Because it is a short line from that to saying that any uncategorised content is, by definition, unsafe and unacceptable, and then we find schools, libraries, colleges and far too many homes limiting net access to the ‘walled garden’ of UK labelled sites.
And the suggestion that drawings or cartoons which represent children involved in sexual acts should be as illegal as if they were photographs steps beyond the area of child protection into that of absurdity. Perhaps we should also make it a criminal offence for a man to suggest to his sexual partner that she shaves her pubic hair and makes herself look more ‘childlike’.
Keeping children safe on the internet is not the same as persecuting those with paedophile tendencies and criminalising every aspect of their lives or limiting the freedom of those who may wish to explore areas of sexuality within an adult relationship.
We need a wider debate
Yet we have allowed this debate to be hijacked by those who believe it is, and they have managed to shape the agenda to the point where it is almost impossible to separate the consideration of paedophilia, pederasty and child sexual abuse from that of child safety online.
There is a fear of adult material in the current debate – an abhorrence of pornography, eroticism and even mentions of sex and sexuality – which I find more distasteful than the thought that my daughter might see a picture of an erect penis.
We cannot continue down this path, and must instead take a different approach.
We can start by resisting the temptation to patronise our children, to assume that we know best in all things, and we must protect basic rights for all online, even for children. The real issue is not about monitoring your six year old, it’s about respecting your twelve-year old, because while it is clear that a six-year old should be supervised and kept away from material which might distress or upset them, the boundaries are far less clear for older children as they move into adolescence and adulthood.
No easy solutions
Technology cannot provide a complete solution to this problem. Firewalls and filters are imperfect tools; safe lists and stop lists come with so many cultural and political values embedded in them, values that parents may not share, as to be useless in practice; and children will find ways around limits put on their online activity by their parents. Asking for filters to be preinstalled, as the CHIS manifesto does, is both technologically naïve and doomed to be ineffective.
Single sign on with an authenticated identity, one which is federated across many sites and which allows sites and services to know the age of their users, sounds great. A Liberty Alliance solution, based on a physical token like a mobile phone, could allow child-only zones and also make it possible to have age-restricted areas without multiple logins, passwords, credit card verification and so on.
But research done by the BBC has shown that the kids don’t want it and wouldn’t use it. And the slow uptake of federated identity services among sites where its utility is obvious, like online publications and banking sites, shows that adults don’t seem to want it either. The UK government couldn’t persuade us to get digital certificates and dropped the plan (although Eire has had more success) and the nature of online identity and the link to real-world identity is still tenuous.
Many of the initiatives supposed to make us safer do nothing of the sort. BT has, by basing Cleanfeed on an unofficial list of blocked sites drawn up by a self-appointed group of net censors, shown itself to be an online vigilante which does not respect its customers’ freedom. Even with it in place. images of child abuse are still made, distributed and hosted on private networks, many built on top of the security features which we have, in other forums, clamoured for. And until they change the policy and show blocked sites for what they are instead of hiding behind a fake ‘not found’ page, they will never gain acceptance for what they are doing from the wider net community.
Nor can laws and regulation be completely effective, because the line between freedom to use the net and limiting children’s exposure to danger cannot be drawn in a way which will satisfy all users. As a result there will always be some who believe the law is too lax and others who campaign for it to be more repressive. This means that there will always be those seeking to undermine the law from one side – the anti-censorware providers – or another – the IWF and Cleanfeed.
Awareness is key
What, then, can we do? I believe the answer lies in raising awareness of the issues among children and the adults in their lives, whether parents, carers, school teachers, librarians or the person behind the counter in a cybercafé.
We are all old, and we remember a time before the net and the Web. Our children do not. They do not fear the network as we seem to, and they will not thank us for limiting its uses and their access because we are in the grip of a moral panic.
I asked my daughter what she would recommend, and she was quite clear about it. Putting up websites won’t help because the kids at risk won’t visit them; blocking access won’t work because new tools and techniques will get around them; and issuing leaflets for kids to take home from school is pointless as they never make it outside the school gate.
She believes that net safety should be a central part of the ICT teaching she gets at school, from reception onwards, and that teachers are the ones to show children what is safe and what isn’t. That way it is unavoidable, it doesn’t rely on parents who may not bother, know or be able to explain, and it just becomes part of the general awareness of life that you pick up in school.
This is not such a bad idea. What’s more, it equips children to become net-using adults instead of trying the make the net a child-safe space.
It’s not the only thing we should be doing, but it might make more of a difference than spending money on child awareness websites or frightening people with tales of online abduction, or passing laws that damage the net and help nobody.
I am, as anyone who has read my work will be aware, in favour of a regulated Internet and the rule of law online. However I do not believe that the children’s charities should be the only group to determine the shape of that regulation.
Bill Thompson – andfinally.com
