Jon Honeyball has one message to everyone in charge of children’s safety: must try harder

This is a difficult subject with no easy answers. But we have to decisively solve the problem of safeguarding children when they’re using the internet.

Hardly a week goes by without a news report telling us how adults have been targeting children on chat rooms, video sites and all of the other places that have sprung up online. Forty-two years after the birth of the world wide web, it simply isn’t good enough.

It’s easy to say “where on earth were the parents? And why wasn’t the device locked down with some sort of parental control?” It’s easy because we’re techie users who know that parental controls exist and aren’t frightened by the tools required to implement them.

But that doesn’t describe the average parent, who may not have the technical knowledge of their digital-native offspring. I’m sure they’re aware of the potential for depraved awfulness that the internet offers, but you need easy-todeploy weapons to combat it. Whilst I fear there are some parents who just shrug their shoulders and say “someone else should do something about it”, I’d hope that most would take action if they knew how.

The OS vendors carry much of the blame. With the exception of Amazon’s Kindle Fire range, almost no OSes ask “is this for an adult or for a child?” at first and then make appropriate recommendations and lockdowns. Could this be due to fear of litigation, a worry that they’ll be held liable for any outcome? That can’t be the case because they all offer parental control and oversight in their products. It’s baked into iOS, Android and Windows. The inescapable reality is that this a nettle they really don’t want to grasp.

Then there are the other ongoing issues. iPads are wonderful things for children, but they’re resolutely limited to a single account per device. You can’t have a parent account and then set up a child’s account on the same iPad. The same is true of most Android hardware.

Of course, Apple would argue that you should buy and configure an iPad specifically for a child. That’s fine if you have the money, but it’s not an option for families where sharing an expensive device is a requirement not an option.

Maybe schools should be taking a stronger role. Many have been supplying laptops and tablets to children for schoolwork, but they’re being strongly locked down and monitored. This creates a problem when the child wants to play games, chat to friends and do things that aren’t school-focused - so they fall back to the home device, taking them outside of the protection offered on the school-supplied kit.

Education? Teaching children in the trusted environment of a school about the dangers of the internet is an excellent first step, but it must be contained within strictly defined boundaries – it would be disastrous to unwittingly encourage children to go exploring for things they didn’t know about, or to scare them so much that they shy away from the benefits that the internet has to offer.

Then there’s the problem of allow-lists versus block-lists for services and websites. It could be argued that pre-teens should be operating within a walled garden of allowed sites, while teenagers need the scope to explore, excluding only the more unacceptable parts of the internet. But who defines what is and isn’t acceptable? Clearly, there are sites that should be offlimits, but there are many resources that can be hugely valuable, even critically important – teenage pregnancy advice, for example. Let alone services such as Childline.

There are plenty of tools and advice sites available to parents. I don’t doubt that a huge amount of effort is being put into this problem, but there’s little sign, at least to me, that things are getting better. It’s like the parental controls in software – they can be applied if you know what to do. But if you know what to do, you’re already most of the way there to making the device safer.

I wish I had a magic wand that could make all of this better. Some claim separating the oil and water of the internet into authenticated and identifiable, versus unauthenticated and anonymous, is the solution, but that’s too simplistic. It doesn’t take into account that the internet is a global phenomenon and thus the predatory abusers could be anywhere on the planet.

The whole subject leaves me feeling drained and helpless. And everyone – from parents to schools, from youth clubs to software vendors, from ISPs to global platforms – has a role to play. That we are in this position in 2021 is a huge indictment of just about everyone involved. We must all try harder.

Everyone – from parents to schools, software vendors, ISPs and global platforms – has a role to play