Vester Allé 24, 3.sal 8000 Aarhus C +45 86 370 400 info@cfdp.dk www.cfdp.dk
Aarhus November 20th, 2010
This document focuses on the need for redefining the way we communicate and work with child safety on the mobile phone platform - with a focus on youths at risk. Providing information and educational material is traditionally based on a one-sided learning philosophy, where we provide the information and the children/parents are responsible for adapting and utilising this information. However, a growing number of children do not benefit from, or respond to, this learning philosophy. We need to considers this in order to successfully reach all children and ensure better awareness and integration of safer mobile use. It is our belief and experience that especially children and young people should be met with dialogue and interaction. This presents us with wide-ranging challenges, as we need to get closer to the young people and find new ways of engaging with them. In Denmark we have a well established tradition of involving young people and fostering productive dialogue - also when it comes to raising awareness about proper mobile phone behaviour and web ethics. The Danish tradition has had a positive effect, and the majority of our young population use mobile phones and online services as positive extensions and a way to broaden their social, learning, and cultural possibilities. They show a high awareness in their use of mobile phones, and are generally able to deal with minor problems or otherwise seek advice. This target group is characterised by having social skills and supportive parents, whose moral and safety guidelines extend to their use of mobile phones and computers. Accepting and Identifying A Growing Number of Youth at Risk As a platform for online counselling, we are especially aware of the growing number of youth at risk with poor social skills, and without the necessary means and close adult relations to benefit from existing information campaigns or educational material. Characteristics of this target group: • They find ways around technical filters and limitations that the industry applies, and/or have access to alternative phones or computers. • Their parents lack the time or ability to fully help, guide or support them - they are left alone, also online. • They show the same, sometimes decidedly risk-seeking, behaviour online, as they do offline. • They are often part of subcultures that create their own rules/guidelines, and eschews even positive adult influence. • They are involved in a disproportional part of the negative and unsafe behaviour we are seeking to prevent. CfDP - Centre for Digital Youth Care is a socioeconomic company, which aims to ensure digital safety and well-being for children and young people.
Vester Allé 24, 3.sal 8000 Aarhus C +45 86 370 400 info@cfdp.dk www.cfdp.dk
Aarhus November 20th, 2010
Identifying and accepting this target group is essential to create a successful strategy for mobile safety for young people. It is vital that we acknowledge and focus on both target groups. Only then can we ensure a successful implementation of mobile awareness in our schools, successful campaigns aimed directly at the target group, and develop educational material for parents, teachers and other primary adults around the young people. How to Proceed Bearing this in mind we, as an organisation, find it important to focus on different aspects and, in the following, we divide it into three sections: The large majority of resourceful families, the marginalised children and young people, and finally ideas on how we handle the challenge in the future. 1. The Large Majority of Resourceful Children and Their Families At the workshop “Child Safety and Mobile Phones” held on 16th November 2010 in Brussels, there were a lot of ideas and thoughts that would benefit this target group. The essence of these ideas stem from the assumption that the child can interact and learn from the material provided by the parents, teachers, and the mobile industry, when buying a phone themselves: • Implement technical solutions that support the parents, such as: • Restricting access to numbers and Internet. • Limiting the amount of credit. • Blocking numbers, through white- or black-listing. • Information and educational targeting parents: • A common online resource and helpline for parents. • Informational material when buying a phone for a child, focusing on the new ethical aspects and parenting challenges. • Information and educational material targeting teachers: • Educate teachers in young people’s digital behaviour. • Suggestions on using phones as a positive resource, showing young people that adults understand and expect positive usage. • How to implement mobile phones and web ethics awareness in the social work in the classroom. • Pro-active dialogue with the national departments of education, to secure a successful implementation of mobile and online awareness.
CfDP - Centre for Digital Youth Care is a socioeconomic company, which aims to ensure digital safety and well-being for children and young people.
Vester Allé 24, 3.sal 8000 Aarhus C +45 86 370 400 info@cfdp.dk www.cfdp.dk
Aarhus November 20th, 2010
2. The Marginalised Children and Young People This target group is characterised by having a great need of dialogue, support, and practice in developing awareness of safe mobile behavior. Typically, alleviating this deficiency is obviously connected to education and social work aimed at improving the target group and the individuals general social behaviour and functioning. We propose • Educate teachers in how to include this specific target group in the awareness raising activities relating to safe mobile use. • Implementation of relevant educational material in primary school, preferably as early as the third school year. This target group needs early intervention, and are rarely getting it from their home and limited network. • A high element of interaction, this group will tire of traditional informational and cautionary campaigns even faster than their peers. • Create awareness, in the target group, of the national Insafe helplines, and keep the subject matter of these and similar outreach centres broad and accessible. • Target youth clubs, full care institutions, after school activities and other venues were these kids have a chance of finding positive adult feedback. • Focus on interesting activities that exemplify positive use, and leave warnings and regulations as talking points for the conversations that arise.
3. Ideas and Proposals To successfully reach children and young people in general, and the subgroup who are marginalised or at-risk, it is essential that the mobile industry, the online companies and the experts in children's online behaviour work more closely together. This is especially true regarding marginalised children; there is no research on their specific online behaviour, only the experiences from the social workers around them, and the few who do meet them online. The Insafe helplines, and especially those who work online, are invaluable in this regard, as are any organisation that does social work in the ‘new media’ and have insights on how youth at risk use and misuse their mobile phones and the net.
CfDP - Centre for Digital Youth Care is a socioeconomic company, which aims to ensure digital safety and well-being for children and young people.
Vester Allé 24, 3.sal 8000 Aarhus C +45 86 370 400 info@cfdp.dk www.cfdp.dk
Aarhus November 20th, 2010
In Cyberhus, we have a wide and varied expertise in the field, and offer the following examples and suggestions:
• Cyberhus’ project `Mobile Phones Against Bullying` have school classes create their own campaign videos against cyber-bullying. The educational material becomes relevant as it is required as part of the interesting assignment of shooting and editing a video spot, while the task itself requires reflection over the subject matter. The videos are shared at school and in the children’s own network, to create a feeling of having taken a stand on the matter, but also to raise awareness among their peers. Finally, the workshop helps the teacher understand the positive and educational possibilities of the digital media, hopefully inspiring an integration of the children’s online world with the adult expectations of proper social functioning. Watch the Danish introductory video and examples of video spots here: http://lommefilm.dk/kanaler/aktuelle-kanaler/mobiler-mod-mobning • Motivate and help teachers integrate mobile phones and computers in their daily work. The online world is as real and important as the offline world, at least to young people and their social life. We need to show them we take it seriously, and that the adults around them, with their expectations and rules, are part of that world too. Using the digital media creates opportunities to bring up subjects on what to share or not to share, proper technical and procedural safety measures, cyber-bullying, and other related topics. Safe and positive computer usage should not be just another chore for teachers, but instead an integrated part of the curriculum, along with a ‘new media literacy’ and source criticism for the digital age. • Cyberhus’ school service, Cyberskolen (the Cyber school) visits schools and classrooms in Denmark and is an example of the mobile industry working closely with already established national initiatives to raise awareness of mobile ethics. The Cyberskole have met and discussed mobile issues with pupils on a daily basis since 2006, and would like to continue to expand and share our experiences with teachers, social workers, parents, and policy makers, in all of Denmark and the EU.
CfDP - Centre for Digital Youth Care is a socioeconomic company, which aims to ensure digital safety and well-being for children and young people.
Vester Allé 24, 3.sal 8000 Aarhus C +45 86 370 400 info@cfdp.dk www.cfdp.dk
Aarhus November 20th, 2010
• A reduced focus on filters and technological barriers. Online-capable devices have become so ubiquitous as to render such controls nigh-irrelevant. The lesson from all fields of computer security continues to be that the weakest link is the user; no child (or adult) is safe unless their own actions make them so. The challenge of guiding children and young people through new ethical dilemmas and problems is not solved by keeping them away from the technology. We recommend aiming such solutions only at the youngest children, and that they allow fine-grained control over what functions are blocked. It should be easy to lift technical barriers gradually as the child ages and is ready for additional challenges - just like one does in other aspects of child-rearing and social education. In short, we recommend pairing user profiles on mobiles and certain social services in a parent/child setup, where one has control over the other’s privacy settings - but caution that such solutions should always aim at the day where they are made obsolete by the child’s ‘internal filters’. • Staunch opposition to a three-strikes law or any similar attempt to limit access to, either as preventive or punitive measure. Banning people from the Internet is problematic for several reasons, not least of which is, that it is very likely to punish exactly those we should be helping the most; marginalised people of all ages. It is entirely unreasonable to penalise youths who have never had the opportunity to properly learn good netiquette and basic online skills, for not knowing the difference between streaming and downloading. Free speech becomes a hollow phrase if you are not allowed to use the most prevalent communication tool, and curtailing it in this manner will further marginalise our target group.
In Closing We believe that EU and the mobile industry should collaborate in furthering these goals, but always with an eye to the fact that the final implementations will have to be sensitive to regional and national differences. Cyberhus will be happy to get involved in the development of material, campaigns and projects in collaboration with the mobile industry. We hope to share our experience and knowledge of the marginalised and particularly at-risk target group and how they can be reached online.
Kind regards, Erroll Marshall & Kristian Lund, Cyberhus
CfDP - Centre for Digital Youth Care is a socioeconomic company, which aims to ensure digital safety and well-being for children and young people.