Our children are digital natives – keep them safe

The internet offers a wealth of information and fun at children’s fingertips. Here, head of NSPCC Cymru/Wales explains why it’s so important to keep our young ones safe online

Children and young people today are the first generation that can be characterised as “digital natives” – a generation which has been brought up with access to mobile technology and the internet from an early age.

For this generation, being online is an entirely natural part of everyday life.

The internet and social media have, with incredible speed, become an ubiquitous presence in the home, social and even school lives of today’s children and teenagers.

But for all the opportunities and benefits brought by the explosion in internet-enabled technology, they have been accompanied by a similar rise in issues around children’s safety and wellbeing while online.

It is becoming clear that the internet is currently far from a safe place for children and that a great deal of work is needed to reduce the dangers the online world can hold for young people who have tablets, smart phones, games consoles and other internetenabled devices at their fingertips.

These dangers range from sharing personal information with people they’ve met online, being subjected to bullying, viewing inappropriate content and posting or sending material they may later regret.

This includes so-called “sexting”, where a young person sends a sexual text, image or video which they subsequently lose control of.

The NSPCC is at the front line in finding out about these growing issues in society and we are often the first to offer help to those experiencing them through the direct services we provide.

Worryingly, our Childline service is seeing a rise in reports from children of online sexual abuse, which can include grooming, child sexual exploitation, being made to perform sex acts on webcam and viewing distressing sexually explicit content.

In 2016-17 there were 4,258 Childline counselling sessions held with children about online sexual abuse, a 15% increase from 2015-16, when there were 3,716 counselling sessions.

As well as providing that immediate and direct help to thousands of children in distress, we have an array of resources available to build knowledge and awareness of the issues and provide some solutions.

Share Aware warns young people about the dangers of talking to strangers online and sharing personal information, while Net Aware is a parent’s guide for the latest games, sites and apps that young people are using so they can keep up with developments in social media.

Childline recently released a new anti-sexting app that uses humour to help teenagers deal with unwanted requests for sexual images of themselves.

The free “Zipit” app offers young people a gallery of images and animations they can send in response to requests for sexual pictures.

It comes after Childline counsellors heard that some teenagers felt pressured by peers into sending nude selfies and with the knowledge that sexting was the most viewed topic on the Childline website last year, with 221,840 page views.

But while it is vital that parents and children receive the best possible information on keeping safe online, the NSPCC strongly believes that government and internet companies also have a huge responsibility to play their part.

The NSPCC believes that universal minimum standards for websites signing up children are a way of forcing social networks to put their young users’ safety first and ensuring children are given extra protection from the second they go online.

The NSPCC has called on the UK government to create universal minimum standards enshrined in law and enforced by an independent regulator for all social media companies.

We believe that government must ensure young people are safe no matter which social network they’re using and that companies should face financial penalties when they fail to meet these safety standards.

Minimum standards include safer accounts for under-18s, with the highest privacy settings as default, grooming and bullying alerts where social media companies must track patterns of grooming or abusive language by users and take swift action against those individuals and every social media company hiring dedicated child safety moderators to help protect their young users.

These minimum standards can ensure that when children and young people are using the latest technology and social media they can do so knowing steps have been taken to protect them from harm.

In mid-December the UK government has the chance to adopt an amendment to the Data Protection Bill, which is currently before Parliament, which would make minimum standards a reality by requiring all social networks to build child protections into their sites.

Social networks and the internet are used by millions of children every day but their safety while online is far from assured.

Solutions to this major 21st-century child protection challenge are not simple but must come from a combination of education, technology and legislation.