She inspired a CSI show... now she’s a real-life hero

IT’S been a week when we’ve seen some truly amazing women take the public stage to speak their truths to politicians and a President, to lawmakers and to lobbyists. The circumstances were different and the issues varied too, but they all had this in common: none of them stood to gain personally from the stance they took and the singular effort it required.

Their only concern was to make the world a better place for other people and their families. And, by their courage and tenacity in their very different ways, that is what they have achieved.

Two of them you’ll know immediately – at this stage, we’re on first-name terms with Vicky and Emma, and the public and private battles they’re fighting have transfixed the nation. Thanks to them, it’ll be a long time before any health executive mandarin decides that patients should be the last to know when errors in their treatment are exposed. Thanks to them, adults will be treated like adults, not children, and will be given the information they need on the basis that they are capable of processing it maturely.

The other woman, as it happens, believes that children should be treated like children, not adults.

Her efforts may have passed slightly under the radar this week, but you’ll know her from these pages and from her frequent television and radio appearances. You might well know her alter-ego Avery Ryan, the FBI Special Agent played by Patricia Arquette in CSI: Cyber, the glossy crime drama she inspired.

Unlike Vicky and Emma, though, you know little about Dr Mary Aiken’s private life.

She makes a very clear that she is not even prepared to be photographed alongside family members at public events.

She doesn’t talk about her beautiful family home, even though it’s by all accounts the kind of place that would make for a 10-page spread in Hello! magazine.

What we do know about her, though, is that she’s probably the leading global expert on cyber-psychology and the head of the world’s first research centre into the parallel reality of cyber crime, based in the Royal College of Surgeons. Her choice of intense personal privacy is hardly coincidental – Dr Aiken is passionately concerned about the harvesting, storage and exploitation of our private data by online entities, commercial and malign, and particularly about protecting children from their clutches. This week, she, along with UCC’s Professor Barry O’Sullivan and this newspaper’s campaigning editorial team, scored a major victory for child safety online when a majority of TDs were persuaded to vote down Government plans to set at 13 the digital age of consent – the age at which children’s data can be accessed, retained and used to target them by all manner of vested interests.

Astonishingly, to win this battle for an age limit of 16, Dr Aiken and her allies had to face down a confederacy of children’s rights campaigners, seeking to set the age of digital consent far below that of legal or sexual responsibility.

ACCORDING to Children’s Ombudsman Niall Muldoon, setting the lower age would have been ‘in keeping with international children’s rights standards as it allows for the balancing of the different rights that children have’.

I’m not entirely sure what he means by that – the primary right children have is to expect protection and guidance from their parents and elders – but I do know that Dr Muldoon believes that 16-year-old boys are old enough to marry, even where there’s good reason to suspect that the decision might not have been freely made.

Following a fatal shooting during the Traveller wedding of a 16-year-old groom and a 17-year-old bride three years ago, the ceremony continued because, it was reported, the children’s mothers feared that a postponement might see them change their minds.

And yet, asked if he had any concerns about the youth of these newlyweds, Dr Muldoon blithely replied that he thought they were ‘of an age to make up their own minds’.

I’ve got a 16-year-old son. He doesn’t even know what T-shirt he’d like to wear tomorrow, much less whom he’d like to be married to for the rest of his life. But our Children’s Ombudsman thinks he can, indeed, make that binding choice. And he had no objection to children as young as 13 being exposed to the predatory attentions of the big tech companies, seeking to sell their data to marketers, and to heaven knows what else, too.

But Mary Aiken, who has slightly more experience of cyber villainy than Dr Muldoon, has no doubts that allowing children the ‘rights’ he advocates means that ‘they will never be more than two clicks away from extreme content’. If children of 13 are too young to marry, enter a contract or consent to a medical procedure, she says, ‘how could they possibly make a decision on something that impacts on their mental health?’

Like Vicky Phelan and Emma Mhic Mhathúna, Mary Aiken didn’t have to take up this battle. But, like them, she can speak from a position of experience, not moralising and not glib platitudes. And like them, she has ensured that other people’s families will be all the safer for her efforts.