We have failed children in our rush to appear cool with the internet

Is childhood a thing of the past? Seems so, when the Children’s Rights Alliance is in favour of the Government’s decision to set the so-called digital age of consent at “the lowest age possible” which in this case is 13 years.

The “digital age of consent” is the age at which children can agree to have their data retained and used by online services without a parent’s permission.

The EU General Data Protection Regulation has set a default digital age of consent of 16 years with the possibility of national variation down as low as 13 years.

Our Government has gone as low as possible, with the support of the Children’s Rights Alliance, the Children’s Ombudsman, and the Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, which all favour pushing the age down to 13 years.

This is shocking. The organisations and executives we have put in place to guard our children’s welfare are cool with 13-year-old children entering into contracts with online providers.

This will give those providers the gift of the kids’ identities.

The providers will profile them and target them with online advertising. The kids will have access to online communities which may cause them serious harm:

11% of our nine to 16-year-olds have seen sites promoting anorexia and bulimia and 7% of boys and 6% of girls between 14 and 16 years have seen sites which suggest ways they might commit suicide.

To celebrate Internet Safety Day this week CyberSafeIreland published research showing 34% of children between the ages of eight and 13 had regular contact with a stranger online.

We heard the usual exhortations that parents should “do more” to monitor and control their children’s internet use. I don’t disagree.

The service providers should also be forced to police the age limits on their platforms,

according to the UCC professor of computer science, Barry O’Sullivan, who argues that they

should face heavy fines for infringement.

He says Artificial Intelligence can already profile internet users and could be developed to distinguish too-young users from their behaviour.

But sorry, is there such a thing as “too young” anymore? According to the Children’s Rights Alliance, the “digital age of consent” should be set “at the lowest age possible”?

I think their stance is a symptom of a massive cultural collapse which has left us unwilling to be parents and ambiguous about the very existence of childhood. Childhood is a relatively new concept, remember.

In the 19th century we gaily sent naked children as young as four up cleaning chimneys and only outlawed the practice in 1875.

Childhood is always being re-negotiated but in recent decades, with rising affluence and a higher premium on education, the age of maturity has been pushed upwards. This cultural trend has been totally disrupted by the internet.

Otherwise responsible adults are mesmerised by the new tool and their children’s ease with it. They seem to have forgotten that they are still adults and children are still children.

The Ombudsman for Children, Niall Muldoon told the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice and Equality that a digital age of consent of 13 years was “more realistic” than one of 16 years because of the “integral role that the online environment plays in their lives.” He added:

“There is no turning back the clock.” What if Lord Shaftesbury had taken the same attitude to child chimney sweeps? In fairness, he was probably helped in his mission to ban the practice by the fact that automatic sweepers were being developed. By contrast, the power of commerce is with the limitless expansion of internet services to a limitless audience and responsible adults are unwilling to stand against it.

No, it’s all about “empowering” children. We don’t want to create what the Special Rapporteur for Child Protection, Geoffrey Shannon calls “a nanny state”.

The Children’s Rights Alliance says that kids have a right to participate and have their views heard, as set out in the EU’s Fundamental Rights Charter, and don’t worry “Just 12%” of kids had their personal data misused online.

That’s not counting the commercial exploitation of data which they didn’t study at all.

The CRA adds that children make up a third of internet users globally while “Social networking is a near universal feature in the lives of Irish teenagers and an increasing part of the lives of younger children.” They’re at it already. Let them at it.

In this country some kids are drinking when they’re 13 and almost all at 15, so why do we forbid the sale of alcohol to under-18s?. Nearly a quarter of girls and 19% of boys aged 15 have had sex but the age of consent is 17 years.

You could say that the law doesn’t work but I would argue that the law provides a final court of appeal. When I’m running after my son on his dark bicycle with lights in my hands I scream, “You can’t go without a light, it’s against the law!”

Barry O’Sullivan, who with cyber-psychologist Mary Aiken is campaigning to make the Government reconsider its ruling on the digital age of consent before the May 25 deadline, makes the point that parents must give their consent to medical treatment until a child is 16, and asks why we have dumped the concept of parental consent when it comes to internet use?

By contrast, the Children’s Rights Alliance cites approvingly Article 5 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which says that children “acquire competencies at different ages and that will vary according to circumstances”.

That’s true. But the CRA would certainly not approve of a judge who adduced the defence of more than usual maturity in the victim of an alleged rapist. Hard and fast age limits are a hugely important tool against the exploitation of those girls and boys who are definitely not mature enough to know what they are doing, even if it also defends the few who do.

We are obsessed with sex abuse as a society to the point that it is illegal for me to drive my daughter’s friend to a camogie match if I am not explicitly Garda-vetted by the GAA club.

Yet we are cool with legally allowing kids of 13 and even younger sign up to online platforms even though we know that 12% of them leave their profiles public, a third communicate online with strangers and 4% have met an online stranger offline, a statistic which rises to 10% for older teens?

It is poignant that two thirds of kids say their parents know more about the internet than they do and half say they’ve tried and failed to spend less time online.

We are the adults and it is our job to protect our kids. How many suicides, anorexics and cases of sexual exploitation will it take to make us look up from the blue glare of our screens and remember that?