Will anyone stand up for our children?

A MAN who groomed a young girl and coerced her into performing sexual acts was jailed yesterday for six and a half years. As has become all-too-familiar, he contacted her on Facebook and Skype (which is owned by Microsoft) and gradually won her trust.

She was 13 at the time of the offences, which took place in 2011 and 2012.

Now 19, she told the court how her trust in others had been shattered and how it took her a long time to understand that she did not ask for this attention, and that she was the victim of a predator, and not complicit in her own abuse.

Her testimony was a reminder that all such crimes do not begin and end in the moment – there are years of repercussions, years of misplaced guilt, years of trying to forge a path back to normal life.

Online abuse is a scourge of the modern era.

It allows perverts contact children in the place where they should feel safest of all – the home.

The exchanges in this particular case took place on laptop computers, but in the years since, abuse increasingly has migrated to the computer in most teenagers’ pockets – the smartphone.

The Irish Daily Mail believes there should be a ban on the sale of these phones to children, and in a specially-commissioned opinion poll for this paper, over two-thirds of parents agreed.

The Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Denis Naughten, is on the record as saying he can not not accept that the digital world would go uncensored, and today hosts the Open Policy Debate, with key stakeholders invited to debate where we go from here. Among the participants are Facebook and Google, which both have shown reluctance to police their platforms at all (Google also own YouTube, the video sharing site on which children’s favourite, Logan Paul, recently uploaded footage of a Japanese man who had committed suicide, to a chorus of horror from parents and educators across the world). No one on the panel opposes the sale of smartphones to children of any age.

Also, there are representatives of Web Wise, which advises on protection from cyber-bullying and on the responsible use of social media, and the National Parents’ Council.

Both bodies are, at least, part-funded by the Government, so they are unlikely to rock the boat.

One person who is not there, and who should be, is internet expert Dr Mary Aiken.

She has boycotted the conference in protest at the decision by the Government to press ahead with the Data Protection Bill 2018 and include in it the establishment of the digital age of consent at 13.

That is not consent in a sexual sense, but it, effectively, will allow these massive companies, with more political clout than many sovereign states, mine the data provided by children, following their likes and dislikes and targeting them with advertising and content that may or may not be age appropriate.

If the Government appears deaf to concerns, President Higgins most certainly is not. Speaking in a pre-recorded interview on this morning’s Ryan Tubridy Show on RTÉ Radio 1, he did not pull his punches.

‘We have had suicides that have come from this and the notion therefore that, somehow or another, those who are providing the capacity for this are somehow neutral, or somehow don’t have responsibility, is nonsense,’ he unequivocally stated.

If the President gets it, why can’t Mr Naughten do so also? In preferring to listen to one-sided arguments from corporate behemoths, he is the Minister who won’t listen to parents.