Enough of online safetyism
Why the automation of safeguarding doesn't work
I’ve accumulated a list of bookmarks. These are links to websites and various online resources that are meant to make our kids safer online. I’ll admit, as a former Safeguarding Link School Governor, I’m not convinced they make our children any safer than they otherwise would be. Admittedly, I haven’t tested this hypothesis to exhaustion, but I’ve tried and failed to take various measures to restrict or protect my children when on some device. More often than not, it has to be abandoned because however straightforward it might seem to those for whom safety is the only consideration, the reality tends to be rather more complicated.
If you put an age - or any other automated - restriction on what your child can access, you soon learn that the kind of thing they were playing or watching previously, is now out of bounds. Whether they should have been or not may be a moot point. But it’s also something that we, as parents, make a judgement call on. Should your 12 year old be accessing content meant for a 16 year old. Maybe. Maybe not. It depends what it is. It also depends on your circumstances. If you’re working from home and don’t have much time for active parenting, you may well decide that it isn’t the end of the world if they hear a few words that you ideally wish they wouldn’t.
They probably hear much worse in the playground, you rationalise to yourself, or when their sweary aunt visits. Maybe they’ll come across other stuff you’d really rather they didn’t. If the primary school is telling them there are multiple genders during assembly, you rationalise it to yourself, how much more harm will a suggestive scene or an adult comment in an otherwise harmless show do? These filters aren’t very good at filtering anyay.
I’ve had to remove restrictions for this very reason. Better safe than sorry? You can’t protect kids all the time. We used to understand that, and we still do to some extent when it comes to the real world. We get it that at some point you have to let your child walk to or from school, or head to the corner shop on their own. That is how they learn, and get streetwise and learn to look out for themselves. We seem to forget this online. While of course we should do what we can to ensure they are not watching porn or getting into exchanges with malicious strangers, there is only so much we can do.
As I say, every solution I’ve come across turns out to be nothing of the sort. It’s that metaphorical sledgehammer cracking that tiny nut - and everything else in the vicinity. Of course, if we take all their devices off them, ban them from having a phone etc then, yes, they’re not going to be exposed to the potential dangers associated with those devices. But they won’t have learnt how to deal with them either. They will be too trusting of strangers in chat rooms in much the same way as kids unaccustomed to going out will lack the awareness they need to cross the road safely.
CEOP, which is part of the National Crime Agency, is typical of the online child protection industry’s idea of safeguarding. Their advice to parents includes ‘talk with your child about gaming’ and ‘learn together’ by watching an animation. This would not survive contact with my kids - of course, parents should talk to their kids about the games they’re playing but in my experience abuse animation gets mocked by bored, giggly kids. The other advice is to ‘set boundaries’ - well, that’s for parents - and ‘safety settings’ too. Changing settings is fraught with complications and - if my experience is anything to go by - you’ll soon feel the need to change them back.
‘How risky is in-game chat?’ A good question. One many a parent worries over. There are , let’s face it, perverts online who will use these platforms for their own dark ends. It would be nice to know how big a threat they are. But, and again this is typical, rather than answer it’s own question, CEOP raises the prospect of risks. There is no attempt to quantify or scale these risks, or put them in some sort of context. It’s just a list of things for parents to worry over even more than they already were - from sexual language and images, to blackmail and grooming. As if scaring and guilt-tripping parents about their failure to follow the safeguarding script protects children.
It’s the same on Childnet. A mother with her arm around her daughter as they both gaze into her mobile phone. They both look delighted with themselves. ‘Have a conversation’ we are instructed. ‘Speak to your child about how to stay safe and happy online’. It’s just not real. No child is that happy having their mother looking over their shoulder at their phone screens. And no parent needs to be told how to ‘have a conversation’ with their child. Maybe I’m wrong and parents are totally incapable of relating to their own children and couldn’t possibly work this out for themselves?
The NSPCC sums up the wrong-think of the industry. ‘We won’t stop until every child is safe online’ it declares, impossibly. The UK Safer Internet Centre seems more interested in pushing a campaign than it is in providing useful information, while leaving parents to get on with the messy business of raising their kids. They list one of their Manifesto aims as: ‘Ensuring the Effective Implementation and Delivery of the Online Safety Act’. A piece of legislation that is intended to ‘make the UK the safest place in the world to be online’ with all the restrictions and regulations on our speech that would entail, is not going to be good for kids either. The internet needs to put the world at their fingertips, not cut it off from them.
These types of organisations, many of them charities, are far from being grassroots movements speaking up for children, parents and families. They are often wealthy, well connected and busily lobbying for legislative change. The UK Safer Internet Centre - an umbrella group of charities including Childnet - even describes itself, quite unashamedly, as the ‘bridge between Government, industry, law enforcement and society’ and says ‘we are the engine of the online protection landscape in the UK.’ A narrow outlook that can only, in my view, do more harm than good. These entities are a million miles away from the families doing their best to raise their kids.
Which is why, if I were to recommend just one useful source of information on how to safeguard your children’s activities online, I would recommend Internet Matters. While it too is guilty of mission creep into what is properly understood as parents’ business, its parental controls guidance is worth a look. If you’re concerned your child is watching things on Netflix that they really shouldn’t; if you’re worried about what their browsing on Google; or what they’re watching on YouTube then this is a handy guide. It’s not about scaring but informing you, with good advice on how to go about it.
Having said that, in the end, you may find that these restrictions are too restrictive. They may deny young people access to the content that may well enrich the quality of their informal learning and understanding. Or maybe you, as a parent, are less rigid about the rules that you set in your household. And you don’t want your child to be brought up or ‘controlled’ by some program on the internet. It also depends on the child.
It is parents, not IT experts, or safeguarding ‘experts’, who are best placed to make these judgement calls. Those of us with kids with autism, for instance, may find that they spend an awful lot of their time online. They are, potentially, more vulnerable than the average young person online. But, nevertheless, it is also their place of retreat and safety (as it is, to some extent, for all kids). For autistic kids it might become the site of the pursuit of their specialised interests, allow them to hide from the world, protect against building anxieties, or allow them to engage with other human beings in a way they feel comfortable with. I’m not minded to take this away from them.
At the risk of contradicting myself though, parents can also feel uniquely poorly placed to make these decisions. We often don’t feel in control or we lack the expertise. But it’s important to understand that safeguarding isn’t a technical exercise. It is about the building of relationships and the informal monitoring that can result. There have surely never before been so many influences on our children’s day-to-day lives before. They are constantly exposed to stuff that we simply don’t get. I don’t regard myself as a technophobe. But, compared to my nearly teenage son, I’m utterly clueless. While he recently built - assembling it part by part - his own PC, I can barely turn the television on (not least because he’s hooked it up to his devices).
But who else is there to hold the ring? To police the boundaries of their lives. We’re not perfect. We’ll make mistakes. But they have to learn. And the alternative is to make their lives a mollycoddled misery. If we really want to protect our kids - and I’m having a go at myself here more than anybody - we need to, somehow, be a bigger part of their lives. We need to get a better understanding of these new worlds they inhabit. We mustn’t cramp their style or venture too far into these worlds that they have created for themselves. We’re sure to get lost.
But we owe them. They are in that world of virtual encounters because of how restricted we have allowed their offline or ‘real’ lives to become. We mustn’t turn the online world into this restricted and suffocating place that campaigners seem so keen on. Our kids go out far less and ‘see’ so much less of each other than preceding generations. But by knowing them a little better, we can at least do a better job of not only protecting them, but helping them to grow and go out into the real world with a boldness that will hopefully make them capable of re-imagining it.
Image: Willowbl00
