Could you tell me about your early career?
I joined Childnet in 2000 as a research and policy officer but before that I was teaching adults and children in the UK and internationally. But we’re talking 21 years ago. So really, my focus has been online safety for children since the days when the internet made a noise and you couldn’t be on the phone at the same time.
How was your first experience at Childnet?
Day one was the breaking case of the first child in the UK who had been groomed online in a chat room. At that moment, I could see how important this issue was. The parent contacted the CEO of Childnet to say that their child had been groomed. They’d worked in the internet industry for the previous ten years and said if they didn’t know what was happening then no other parent would know. So they asked us to help tell that story. We worked with the family to raise awareness about that issue.
Covid-19 has seen a huge increase in children online. What impact has that had?
Over the last year we have seen the online space become so important for their educational lives, but also it becomes even more important for their social lives in lockdown. It has been a form of emotional support and I think that’s an important element for us to recognise. The internet does bring friends who are experiencing similar issues together and it can provide comfort to children during this time.
How should people approach raising safety issues on the internet?
It has to be relevant to children’s lives and engaging. An approach that we’ve taken, education-wise, has been very much a problem-solving issue. If we can get young people engaged in trying to solve problems in certain scenarios, then they can look to try and work out what advice they would give to somebody else in that situation. We want to try and encourage young people to own some of the situations which they might come into and practice strategies they can put in place in order to respond to them.
What trends do you see for the future of internet safety?
The internet has become much more personalised and it is accessible to incredibly young children, to the extent that some have access to their own devices. All the issues which I was talking about back 20 years ago are still things that we need to talk about, grooming and cyberbullying. The risks facing children are the four Cs. You have the contact risks, content risks, commercial risks and the risks of conduct. The question we need to ask ourselves is how well can we keep pace and support young people in this environment. But also, I’d like to see how we can mobilise young people and give them agency in this space. They can be an incredible asset as we try and promote online safety through school communities and homes.
A programme that we’ve run, called the digital leaders programme, sees us training young people in school, through an online platform, to become digital leaders in their community. We started this programme more than five years ago with secondary schools but primary schools said they wanted it as well. So we have young people who have trained online to be digital leaders and are then delivering sessions for peers, parents and staff. We have some who are in Year 2, seven-year-olds who are active digital leaders in their community, and I think that is a real asset to all of us as we try and keep everything current. If we mobilise young people their voice is enormously powerful in this space, parents will come and listen to young people talk about online safety.
We must not be frightening children and young people, or their parents and carers. It’s very easy to choose a case that shows the risks at the extreme ends in relation to the internet. So you have to put everything in context. The worst thing that can happen is that by raising people’s fears we deny children access to the technology they need. So we need to be responsible in our awareness raising and recognise that the benefits are extraordinary. But, in order to harness those, we need to be working to equip young people with the necessary facts.
Keeping children safe online is paramount. How does Safer Internet Day help?
This is a fast moving environment and it’s vital that we are working to keep pace with the experiences that young people have. Safer Internet Day happens every year on the second day of the second week of the second month. We choose a topic each year that we think is particularly relevant and pertinent at the time. Young people are very pioneering in the online space. It’s an area where they are pushing boundaries and using services which their parents or teachers may not be familiar with.
It’s important that we use this day to find out more about what young people’s experiences are. What do they think about it? How do they respond to it? What advice would they give to others? And what changes do they want to see? We try to make it as easy as possible for anybody to support Safer Internet Day and we give resources for primary schools with a range of different content for them to have this conversation with their children. They have assemblies with scripts, lesson plans and adaptation elements for remote learning content.
All that content is there, filmed content as well. Of the schools who supported the day last year 40 per cent responded that it led to disclosures of potential online safeguarding issues.
What has the impact of Safer Internet Day been?
It shows that schools can take the first step and talk about the internet and how to use it safely. This helps to encourage young people to come forward and talk about the things that are worrying them. And that’s the same for parents and carers. Then we are really building a bridge from both sides to stimulate that conversation and level of support between parents, carers and children. Last year, we reached 49 per cent of children and 26 per cent of parents. That’s amazing for a one-day campaign.
What was the focus of Safer Internet Day this year?
We focused on critical thinking and exploring the reliability of things online. We chose this theme because it’s an issue that affects the whole of the four Cs. Young people are having to make decisions about content and contact all the time, often several times a day. They have to assess the reliability of what they’re seeing or the friend request that they’ve received. This also encompasses clickbait images, images you see on social media and whether they are filtered or not. We want to hear what young people’s experiences are and what they’re doing about it.
