Abuse case shows few rules protect kids in online videos
A TRIP to the grocery store. A little league baseball game. A cute baby swinging from a tree. Millions of people have watched strangers do these everyday activities online.
Family video blogs are a multimillion-dollar industry that has allowed some parents to quit their jobs and be with their children full time as they document their daily lives and post the footage for anyone to see. But the popularity of the videos, which draw corporate sponsors, has come with a price for some children.
An Arizona woman was indicted yesterday on charges of abusing her kids who had starred in a popular series of YouTube videos, including using pepper spray to punish them if they performed poorly during filming.
While the case is extreme, it has raised concerns about the legal protections and ethical quandaries surrounding children who appear in moneymaking videos. DUAL ROLE
“From a developmental perspective, you have a dual role as a parent — you are their boss as well as their parent — and that’s very confusing for a child, especially for younger children who want to please their parents,” said Yalda T. Uhls, founder and executive director of University of California, Los Angeles’ Center for Scholars and Storytellers, which offers insights from research to guide children’s entertainment.
“Even though it may appear on camera they are playing, they are working,” Uhls said.
Labour rules that protect children on movie and TV sets are not enforced online.
State laws guide how long child actors hired by studios can work, how much schooling they must get, and where their money is kept. In video blogging, parents are the only regulators.
No other agency, including social media platforms like YouTube, plays more than a minimal role in labour protections for children appearing in online videos, which can earn families hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The videos carry ads, and companies also offer marketing contracts for popular channels to feature their products. EARNING A LIVING
For some families, it’s a dream to earn a living from broadcasting their lives, whether it’s going to soccer practice or showing off scripted skits.
Samuel Rader and his family have a YouTube channel with 2.6 million subscribers. It started five years ago when he and his wife, Nia, posted a video singing along in the car to a song from the Disney animated movie Frozen.
The video got 23 million views.
Within about a year, the family’s videos had got so popular that Samuel Rader quit his job as an emergency room nurse to focus on video blogging full time.
“The impact was my wife and I were gonna be able to stay home and be with our kids, basically, every waking moment for them — and that was huge,” Rader said. “That was an easy no-brainer for me because I grew up with a very absent father, and that would have been a dream come true for me.”
The Rader family, including eight-year-old Symphony, fiveyear-old Abram and two-year-old Juliet, gets monthly paycheques generated from ads. Rader said that the kids’ cheques go into funds for when they’re adults and that he and his wife can’t touch the money. He said he’s heard plenty of criticism about exposing his children to the public but isn’t concerned.
THE CONSUMER Affairs Commission (CAC) is advising parents and guardians to pay careful attention to their children’s online activities.
Speaking at a JIS Think Tank, CAC Information Technology Manager Andrew Evelyn said that child exploitation online is a trend that the CAC is watching closely.
He said that parents should pay close attention to the online games that their children play.
“When a child uses an online game platform, it usually has an in-game chat, which allows your child to communicate with other users online that can lead to child exploitation.
“Nefarious persons use different techniques to coerce your child into talking to them online, and once they have gained the child’s trust, then they will ask them to do things such as share photos on another platform,” he explained. PLAY GAMES WITH CHILDREN
“Ask your child to demonstrate the games to you so you can assess the threats and risks that are out there for your child.
“Check the game chat features and who they communicate with and warn them against communicating with strangers,” he advised.
Evelyn pointed out that children are technologically savvy, “and sometimes they will use the phones in ways you’re not aware of. They could record a video of themselves or your home and post it on YouTube or another platform, and it’s quite easy to do”.