I’ve questioned age limits on phones but now I see it is the only realistic way of protecting children PHILIP NOLAN

ONCE a week or so, I head into Gorey in Co. Wexford to wander around the shops and cafés on the main street and to visit the shopping centre, supermarkets and retail park to the south of the town, and the German discounters to the north.

It tends to be in mid to late afternoon when the streets are full of children leaving the community school. The largest in Ireland, it has 1,600 pupils and over 150 teachers so there is a swarm on the street once the bell goes.

Some walk in groups and do the things we all did at that age. You’ll see lads joshing and play-acting, and girls laughing, and sometimes, though surprisingly infrequently, mixed groups of older teens who already are dating.

What you also see, though, is dozens of children wandering zombie-like up Esmonde Street, glued to their smartphone screens and lost in little worlds of their own as they catch up on Snapchats and Instagrams sent by the pals they said goodbye to just five minutes beforehand.

For them, it is an engrossing pursuit and they often are oblivious to everything around them. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to ask them to mind where they’re going, because they walk into you. When chastised, they mumble what I’m never exactly sure is an apology or defiance, and continue aimlessly zig-zagging their way through the real world while deftly navigating the virtual one.

It is, quite clearly, much more than a compulsion – it is an addiction.

I’ve become more aware of it since this newspaper started its campaign to put an age limit on smartphone ownership. When this paper’s editor first told me about his plan, I admit I was sceptical.

My initial reaction was that it suggested a refusal to acknowledge the inexorable march of technology.

It also sounded impossible. That horse, I thought, has bolted and it’s never going back in the stable.

Then I started reading the daily stories about the effects of excessive smartphone usage and my position shifted, dramatically. You’ve probably read them too, tales from teachers about children sleepy in class because they were up late using phones in their bedrooms; warnings from experts that physical and mental health, and emotional security, are impaired by the joint threats of bullying and the need for almost constant validation by their peers; stories from parents about how lively, loving, engaged children suddenly become withdrawn and detached, preferring to spend their spare time on their phones than talking at the dinner table.

And you surely have heard about the sordid, evil side of smartphone use. The conviction last month of 26-year-old Dubliner Matthew Horan for grooming and sexually exploiting girls as young as nine was a wake-up call. He convinced them to send naked photographs of themselves to him, and distributed the images to other paedophiles who lurk in what is known as the dark web, an area of the internet that demands added tiers of software and authorisation to access it.

We all know paedophiles are present in the real world, but the idea they can target and abuse children who are in their own bedrooms, while their parents are downstairs, genuinely is terrifying.

Degraded

That is not the full extent of the problem, though. It is an entirely natural process for teens, and even pre-teens, to become aware of their sexuality and curious to explore it, but there used to be natural limits to how far they could take it. We all played Doctors and Nurses and Kiss Chase and Spin the Bottle; in retrospect, those games seem incredibly innocent, even though they also gave our parents the vapours back in the day.

I remember word spreading like wildfire in Ballybrack that a boy in our neighbouring estate somehow had got his hands on a copy of Playboy and there was a queue outside his door within minutes. That’s entirely natural, and the women in that magazine were presented in a way that was sensual, not practically gynaecological.

Nowadays, everything has changed. Boys and girls, very young boys and girls, only have to type the word ‘sex’ into a search engine to find images that are very far indeed from the innocuous pout of a naked Playmate. Instead, they see hardcore images of women being degraded, being shared by multiple men, being humiliated.

Developing a healthy sexuality, one that respects the other partner in the equation, is a hugely important part of growing up, but how can teenagers learn about the importance of consent when the movies they watch on their phones perpetuate the illusion that ‘no’ really means ‘yes’?

The most tragic impact of the smartphone, though, has been seen in teen suicides. Bullying used to end when children got home. On apps like Snapchat and Kik, bullies now can taunt a victim 24 hours a day. Some will be strong enough to report the abuse to a parent or teacher, but others withdraw.

Problems that adults handle in their stride can seem massive to children and some cave under the pressure and take their own lives. It is heartbreaking.

Some of you probably are saying that children are exposed to all that on a laptop computer, but they key difference is that the computer is in the home and a parent can supervise the use of it. That’s why we actually should not refer to smart ‘phones’ at all, because they’re not just phones – they are powerful computers that can be carried in a pocket.

In an ideal world, they would allow children access only all the good things the world has to offer – educational resources, information on a scale unknown even two decades ago, entertainment, and the sort of friendly exchanges most of us of a certain age conducted on the landline, where parents could hear what we were talking about and admonish us if they thought we were being inappropriate. The relationship between a child and a smartphone is more solitary and complex.

On TV3’s Pat Kenny Show on Wednesday night this newspaper’s editor put the arguments for age limits: however Alex Cooney, the chief executive of CyberSafe Ireland, said she believed an information campaign about the dangers would do the trick. To back this up, she claimed road safety campaigns led to the fall in fatalities: but that clearly is a nonsense.

They were an element of it, but the real results came because roads were upgraded, motorways built, autonomous safety aids added to cars – and, most importantly, because we brought in laws: laws which, more than any education campaign, stop people speeding, drinkdriving, driving unsafe vehicles, driving without seatbelts and the like.

We took decisive action, as we have done in other areas of life, and as a society we used the law to do so. We already set ages at which children can drive, drink, gamble, smoke, even vote.

They can’t consent to sex until they are 17 but, on their phones, they can watch others having sex.

What therefore is so unusual about introducing an age limit for smartphone ownership when we know the dangers they present to young minds that never should have to deal with the images of pornography and violence that litter the internet, or fend off the sick advances of perverted predators?

Our society already shields children from multiple potential causes of harm. I took persuading but now I firmly believe the time has come to add another to the list.