Alex Cooney: What we must do to ensure our children are safe and happy online
The Cyber Safe Kids annual report released today reveals that four fifths of children they surveyed play online games and have their own social media profiles. While the internet brings many positives, there are dangers too, which we must address through regulation and education.
Covid-19 has brought children’s online use into sharper focus — for both positive and negative reasons.
On the positive side, it has highlighted how versatile the internet can be in terms of meeting their needs.
When children were largely restricted from their normal daily activities and physically distanced from their friends, it proved itself a lifeline. It allowed them to work, play, and socialise from home.
It is not an exaggeration to say it is hard to imagine surviving lockdown without access to the internet. It has undoubtedly, however, been a period where we’ve all spent so much more time online than ever before, children included.
For all the many positives, there has been a darker side to this increased time that children have spent online, as evidenced by the recent Hotline.ie annual report, as well as other data from the Internet Watch Foundation, Interpol, and the NSPCC. These reports all highlight stark increases in child sexual abuse material online over the past 18 months.
While it is perfectly normal for children to want to seek out ways to socially interact with others, we need to be really careful about who they’re engaging with online and what they’re sharing.
For some children, meeting people they don’t know online can perhaps seem safer than offline encounters but there will always be an element of risk to this and the increases highlighted above certainly underline this.
Our latest annual report, published today, highlights just how many pre-teen children are active online.
We surveyed almost 4,000 children over the last academic year and found that 93% own their own smart device and 84% have their own account on social media and/or instant messaging apps (despite minimum age restrictions of at least 13 on all of the popular sites).
Youtube, Tiktok, Whatsapp, and Snapchat are all incredibly popular with the 8-12 age group.
Online gaming is also hugely popular with children, with about 80% of the children we surveyed saying that they played at least one online game. And yes, some of those kids are talking to people online that they don’t know offline.
Over a third of the children (36%) reported playing with people they didn’t know in an online game and over a quarter (28%) of children with social media/instant messaging accounts had friends or followers they didn’t know offline.
We know online predators will use a variety of channels to try and contact children, and are particularly drawn to social media and gaming platforms that are popular with kids.
61% of children told us that a stranger had tried to contact them in an online game either ‘a few times’ or ‘lots of times’.
According to our survey findings, boys were more likely to say this than girls, but this is perhaps because more boys are gaming regularly.
It’s quite challenging to persuade children to never talk to people they don’t know offline in an online game because, for many, it’s a normal part of a multiplayer game.
The key message to these children then needs to be that if they do find themselves playing with someone they don’t know, to not take that connection further — by adding them as a friend, engaging in private messaging, or sharing any personal information with them (name, age, school etc).
Similarly for those on social media with friends and followers they don’t know, we urge them to be really careful what they share about themselves.
Social media is, by its very design, encouraging users to share and to connect with others so beyond educating children, we actually need to be lobbying the companies themselves to take a much more child-centred approach in the design of their apps.
This will only come with tighter regulation — as we’ve seen with the introduction of the Age Appropriate Design Code in the UK, which is forcing many companies to apply significant (and much-needed) changes to the accounts of those children on their platforms between the ages of 13 and 16 (the under-13s are more problematic as they’re not supposed to be on their platforms at all — but clearly are, in some numbers).
A message we need to consistently relay to children is that if they ever come across something or someone online that makes them feel scared or uncomfortable, to tell a trusted adult. It could be a parent, an aunt or even a teacher.
Many children are doing this: 54% of the children who told us that they had seen or experienced something online that bothered them, did tell a trusted adult about it, which is really positive.
Worryingly, however, almost a third of those children (30%) told us that they’d kept it to themselves.
We clearly need to do more work with both children and their parents around ensuring that those channels of communication are kept open.
We still have some way to go to ensure all children will have a safe and positive experience online. The responsibility lies in a number of places. Parents and educators have a central role to play in educating, supporting, and empowering children online — but it needs to go further.
If we use the analogy of road safety, then we can see how a combination of factors over the decades has helped to bring about positive societal change in relation to road safety.
We have legislation — for example around speed limits, driving under the influence, and the use of seatbelts.
We have industry buy-in and compliance — for example, airbags, speed controls, seat belt warning alarms, as well as a healthy competitiveness between them, driving them to offer better safeguards and features than their competitors.
We also have huge investment in public awareness campaigns around the safe use of the roads and an appointed State agency whose sole responsibility it is to make roads safer.
This has brought significant and lasting changes — most people do wear seat belts, respect speed limits and will not drive under the influence, to name a few.
We need that same combination of collaboration, regulation, investment, and education to make much-needed societal shifts in relation to online safety too.
• Alex Cooney is co-founder and CEO of Cyber Safe Kids (CyberSafeKids.ie) an online safety charity providing education sessions to children, parents, teachers, and others working in a child-focused environment.
