Leo says we haven’t failed kids, as social media alarm grows
LEO Varadkar has refused to accept that our children are being failed online – despite mounting evidence, even in recent days, of the horrific harm they are being exposed to.
And astonishingly, the Taoiseach said yesterday that he is unable to say when a Digital Safety Commissioner will be appointed, citing the Government lack of a Dáil majority, despite the fact that all the major opposition parties – Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and Labour – are in favour of appointing a digital czar.
Mr Varadkar’s latest stance comes in a week in which a series of reports highlighted the extreme content many children look at and share online. They included: ÷ The National Youth Council’s warning that young people are using pornography for sex education; ÷ The fact that the number of children referred to a young offenders programme for having child abuse images has trebled since last year; ÷ The internet safety firm Zeeko’s warning that a third of eight-year-old boys are playing adult games online.
Despite this growing deluge of evidence of the damage being caused to children by allowing them unfettered access to the internet and social media, the Taoiseach rejected the suggestion that we are failing our children by not keeping them safe online.
He told the Irish Daily Mail: ‘I am always reluctant to kind of use the word “failing”, because… when you say you have failed or you are failing, you are kind of giving up.
‘The development of technology is happening at a very rapid pace and hasn’t stopped yet. So, what we are going to have to do is to adapt our laws and educate our people and protect our children.
‘But we are always going to have to either catch up or stay ahead of technological developments. And to say that we are failing kind of fails to understand the extent to which things change and how dynamic they are.’
The National Youth Council announced this week that it will make tackling the effects of pornography a priority after a major study of its members found young men are becoming more aggressive after viewing pornography online. They are also more likely to practise unsafe sex. The Youth Council is an umbrella group for 380,000 young people in 51 youth organisations.
And research by Zeeko found that one-third of second class boys have played a game which is for adults or over-18s. And by the time these children were in sixth class, when they are generally 13 years old, up to two-thirds were playing these games. Mr Varadkar had appeared to make a seismic shift in his own policy, when he told the Dáil on Tuesday that the era of ‘self-regulation’ for online firms had come to an end.
Prior to doing this, he had indicated he was in favour of self-regulation. He said in July that ‘a Digital Safety Commissioner in Ireland would not be able to regulate the internet, it is the World Wide Web’.
But despite now accepting self-regulation has ‘not worked for the internet and for the tech sector, and we need to more’, he was yesterday unable to say when a Digital Safety Commissioner would be appointed.
Sinn Féin TD Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire’s Digital Safety Commissioner Bill recently underwent pre-legislative scrutiny in the Oireachtas Communications Committee.
Meanwhile, a report by the UK’s Gambling Commission this week found that the number of problem gamblers aged 11 to 16 there now stands at 55,000, while a further 70,000 youngsters are at risk.
It found a worrying 450,000 children – one in seven of those in the 11-16 age group – bet regularly, staking an average of £16 (€18) a week each.
The money goes on fruit machines, on bingo, in betting shops or online, which are all illegal for under-18s.
The UK commission’s report also said: Children are being inundated with gambling advertising, with two in three saying they’ve seen it on TV; close to a million youngsters have been exposed to gambling through ‘loot boxes’ in computer games or on smartphone apps; more children say they have placed bets in the past week than drunk alcohol, smoked or taken drugs.
Mr Varadkar said: ‘When it comes to the Digital Safety Commissioner, that’s something we need to do some work on.’
‘We want to make sure anything we do is going to be effective. We brought in regulation and commissioners in the past who haven’t been effective,’ he added.
Comment – Page 14 emmajane.hade@dailymail.ie
OVER the past few days, we have seen a series of horrifying headlines relating to children. First up was a report by the Garda Youth Diversion and Crime Prevention Bureau that revealed the number of children referred to it for child pornography offences rose from 21 in 2016 to 59 last year. Of these, 18 involved the illegal possession or distribution of abusive or exploitative images of children.
In other words, children are watching and sharing child pornography.
Separately, the National Youth Council has warned that young people are using pornography for sex education, and it is making boys more aggressive and more likely to practise unsafe sex.
One-third of boys aged eight are playing adult video games that feature extreme violence and adult themes, while twothirds of 12-year-olds regularly do so.
In the UK, the Gambling Commission reported that the number of problem gamblers aged 11 to 16 had quadrupled in just two years to a staggering 50,000, despite gambling being illegal for under-18s.
What all of these problems have in common is that they have been facilitated by the internet – and by smartphone access in particular.
Yesterday, we asked the Taoiseach if these very stark statistics represented a failure to protect our children and he kicked to touch, saying that while he would like to see the appointment of a digital safety commissioner, he felt it would be difficult to pass the legislation in a minority government. That clearly is nonsense when other parties are fully committed to supporting him on that issue.
It illustrates once again the failure at the highest level of government to recognise what is right before all our eyes: namely, that children now enjoy unsupervised access to the adult world in a way previously unthinkable. We never will be able to protect our children unless we acknowledge they need protecting. That we know they are hooked on pornography, violence and gambling is de facto proof that they have been failed, and failed utterly. If Mr Varadkar cannot see that, what exactly would it take to make him understand?
How much longer before he and his Government are galvanised into taking responsibility for one of the biggest societal problems we face and turn words into actions?