Introduction INTRODUCTION

The project began in 2017. Researchers Dr Roxanne Ellen Bibizadeh and Professor Rob Procter conducted focus groups with over one hundred young people in England between the ages of eleven and twenty-one and interviews with teachers.

The findings highlighted that there is an abundance of online safety educational resources available but there are discrepancies in the delivery and messages conveyed to young people.

Our research revealed that children and young people have a paradoxical relationship with the Internet because they feel both free and unfree online. They reported the Internet offered “refuge” and a form of “escape”, and at the same time they were also concerned about how their data was being used and described feeling the need to self-censor and conceal their online activities.

Overwhelmingly young people felt they were spoken to and not heard, and they found it difficult to have conversations with adults about their online lives who they believed lacked understanding (Bibizadeh et al.)

The next phase of the research project began in December 2019 and sought to address why these conversations between educational professionals/parents/carers and children and young people are intimidating and how this might be remedied.

The project aimed to achieve this by interviewing experts working within the field of online safety including academics, government officials, NGO’s, and social enterprises. We hoped to draw on their experiences to identify what provisions currently exist to support children and young people online and what are the potential collaborative solutions to existing risks and challenges online.

Children are growing up online and experiencing an array of digital dangers such as commercial exploitation, cyberbullying, exposure to pornographic content, hate or self-harm materials and the image sharing and live streaming of child sexual abuse (UNICEF 2017, 72-3).

Three months into the research project the UK was experiencing the first lockdown due to the global pandemic. The United Nations reported that the pandemic had created the largest disruption to education systems in history with nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries and all continents affected, impacting 94% of the world’s student population (UN 2020, 2). One of the many impacts of school closures is that children and young people are spending large amounts of time online.

Within the first month of lockdown the specialist cybersecurity company Web-IQ revealed there was an increase of over 200% in posts on known child sex abuse forums that link to downloadable images and videos. Additionally the Internet Watch Foundation recorded an 89% reduction in child abuse materials being removed from the Internet in the first four weeks of lockdown, as investigators struggled with their workload during the pandemic (Donovan and Redfern 2020). eSafeGlobal reported during lockdown there has been three times more sexting and grooming incidents than normal, including grooming minors as young as ten, and twenty-five times more incidents of children and young people talking to strangers (NPCC 2021, 4). The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children registered a 106% increase in reports of suspected child sexual exploitation – rising from 983,734 reports in March 2019 to 2,027,520 in the very same month in 2020 (Brewster 2020).

The COVID-19 crisis has moved our lives online, and this has increased children and young people’s vulnerabilities to online harms.

Our findings suggest that historically online safety educational resources tend to place the onus on young people preventing an online harm through a form of responsibilisation to, for example: “not post” or “think before you post”. The impact of such messaging is that it creates a culture of victim blaming. The responsibility is placed on the young person who sent the original message rather than the person who has shared it without consent. Such messaging creates an unhealthy culture that reduces the opportunity for communication and support.

Our research indicates if we address the pertinent issue of a lack of open communication between adults, children and young people, we may be able to prevent both lower and higher level online harms, because children and young people will feel more comfortable talking to adults about their online lives.

This report will be useful for educators, policy makers, law enforcement agencies and parents and carers who are working to support and enable children and young people’s digital well-being. Our hope is that this research will be used to inform the development of new educational approaches, assist in a review of law enforcement agencies handling of victims of abuse, encourage a rethinking of the language used in online safety education, and updates to existing materials.

It should be acknowledged that the findings within this report are not conclusive, but we hope that these discussions will provide a crucial insight from the leading experts in the field.

We invite others to draw on the findings from Digitally Empowering Young People to develop interventions and strategies in this space.