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I'd like to talk to you for a little while about the work of the evidence group, which
is part of UKCCIS and was established following Professor Tanya Byron's recommendation that
all of UKCCIS's work should be evidence-based in a variety of ways. And the evidence group
has been working over the last few years - there are several of them here in this room
- to work on a research strategy for UKCCIS and advice on its priorities, and especially
to establish the evidence base. In this we've been working with the other UKCCIS champions,
the other working groups and really trying to keep a watching brief on the array of research
that is going on, um, some of it in this country, some of it in other countries, to try and identify
what are the kind of key insights, the key evidence and the key messages that can inform
the work of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety and all of the stakeholders that it
works with and represents.
So one of the ways that we've been working - um, I don't necessarily expect you to
read all those words in the detail, but they are in the packs that you've all received.
One of the things that we've been doing is trying to identify where is the research,
who is doing what kinds of research and we've been trying to identify the key messages within
that research that is relevant to UKCCIS so, as I'm sure you're all aware, research reports
tend to be very long and very detailed and they're not always full of information which
is not directly relevant to the question of internet safety. We've been trying to kind
of identify what are the key parts of it that UKCCIS needs to know about and that this wider
stakeholder group needs to know about. And so we've been looking at the array of publicly-available,
high-quality research starting in this country, and so so far over the past year, we've identified
15 pieces of work. You can see the kinds of bodies on the right-hand side who are producing
this research, and on the left-hand side the kinds of issues that have been tackled. So
the work that Chris Wollard talked about from Ofcom is in there. The work that I've been
doing for EU Kids Online, whose reports are upstairs if you want them, is also in there.
And a whole range of other kinds of research studies that are going on.
What I thought I'd do in the few minutes that I have with you today is just to bring
out from those summary accounts, from those highlights, some of the key messages that
the evidence group thinks this group might find interesting and useful in developing
its further work and policy initiatives. So I've got three slides; they've all got a
lot of words on them because I'm a researcher but there are only three of them, I promise,
and they try and draw out what those key messages can be.
So first I think there has been - oh, now I want to go backwards - can I go backwards?
Yes. Ah, I've only got one green button. I'm not being dense, this is a very simple
affordance.
This is the context of rapid change. I think this has been said several times today already
and it will carry on being very important, and a very challenging thing for those of
us trying to work to make the internet safer for children. And as many would like to emphasise,
and the evidence group too would like to emphasise, the primary story about the internet is about
benefits, it's about opportunities, but within that wider array of beneficial change we must
also focus on questions of risk and safety. I also don't expect you to read the little
highlights but as a researcher I like references. And I just want to say that behind each of
these summary points, there are the research highlights which are numbered and behind those
there are very detailed research reports so this is a kind of a terrible synthesis without
qualifications and elaboration.
Children are using the internet in very diverse places: in private rooms, on personal media
so some of the advice we've been giving over the past few years - for example that parental
oversight is vital - is in many ways no longer practical. You cannot ask a parent anymore
to look over the shoulder of a child. A direct engagement between the parent and the child
is increasingly important and that's something I know many stakeholders are now thinking
about.
The internet is being used by ever-younger children, and the evidence shows that parents
and primary schools are often unprepared. Much of the efforts in the last few years
have been on secondary schools rather than primary schools with parents of teenagers
rather than parents of young children, so parents of primary schools are often unprepared.
Er, I'm glad that was you, Bill. It wasn't you. Oh, you just looked pink so...
And some of the ways in which we've designed the affordances, for example on social networking
sites, to be specific for particular age groups are not working so the recommendation from
the research would be to develop new age appropriate approaches to safety as Deirdre also said
in terms of advising children on *** use.
Children's practises are evidently changing. One fifth of teenagers communicate with 'unknown
others' online. They want privacy. They often feel more themselves online. We need to understand
better what that culture is of youth and how it evolves as the platforms evolve.
Familiar risks persist. There's a fair bit or evidence now about the rates at which children
report being cyber-bullied or seeing harmful content or being exposed to ***, and
at the same time there's evidence of new risks arising. So the rise of pro-anorexia
sites for example I think and the use of those is something that's received very little
attention so far. There is increasing attention to personal data misuse and it's not surprising
then that research shows that a substantial number of parents are worried.
At the same time, we can also see that that stark situation of digital natives and completely
ignorant parents is changing. And even though parents may be often behind children, they
are catching up, they are using the internet and the more they use the internet, the more
their skills mean that they are empowered to er, um, to manage their children's internet
use better. So we can see that more skilled parents results in better and more targeted
parental mediation of their children, and it also strengths children's confidence that
they can talk to their parents about what it is that might be worrying them. Parents
are I think less likely now to simply feel that they have to turn off the computer and
take it away. They feel that they might have some other tools so that, in that sense, parental
use of the internet and its positive benefits for parental mediation should be encouraged.
One of the things that hasn't been talked about very much today so far is the question
of vulnerability and what makes some children resilient and other children not so resilient
to some of the risks that the internet affords. So although teenagers we can see are encountering
more risks, often they are resilient and research suggests it's the younger children who are
upset, suggesting that parents, teachers and others should now be having some quite difficult
conversations with younger children that previously they just had for teenagers.
There's evidence about the way in which younger children especially lack the digital and safety
skills that they need for using the technologies they are now engaging with. Um, pinpointing
exactly where that vulnerability is is quite difficult. I think there's been a lot of
anxiety about games and internet addiction and, um, not belying what Deirdre has just
said, the evidence so far finds very low rates of addiction, though of course for those children
there is an interesting question about who might be supporting them.
Some of the research is with offenders, um, which is showing that grooming behaviour is
often very carefully planned, tailoring messages over time to target a specific child, but
at other times quickly and opportunistically working through friends list to quickly identify
a vulnerable child among the very many who are wisely saying no, you know, I'm not engaging
with you. Still, there's no typical groomer and, erm, advice that sort of characterises
the typical groomer again needs to be rethought. But maybe we're getting to a point where
we can kind of map types of offender and which children might be particularly vulnerable
to different kinds of approaches.
There's evidence that webcams and mobile phones are often used in the grooming process
with nearly half of the reported cases of abuse occurring via webcam. We haven't talked
very much about webcams and I think perhaps we should be talking more about webcams as
well as smartphones as we think about what technologies are linked to particular kinds
of risky online behaviour.
At the same time, there is lots of evidence which is rather encouraging. I think the considerable
efforts that many here and more widely in this country have been putting in over the
last few years are paying off. Most children now say they do know what to do in a threatening
online situation. There's beginning to be evidence that safety training is making children
more careful. But still a very familiar problem of what children know and what they do in
practice persists so some tend to forget the safety rules when they're online and engage
in risky behaviour. And working to move beyond what children say they know, what they've
learned and when they put that into practice when faced with particular challenging situations
is something that I think awareness-raisers have yet to fully engage with.
Again a positive story - the research shows that UK parents lead across Europe in the
use of filtering, end-user filtering technology. But still that means that half of parents
are not using filtering technology. We can see that filters are becoming more effective
but still there are gaps, the technology is again often ahead of the safety tools, so
the filters are less effective for peer-to-peer communication, for user-generated content
and for mobile use, so clearly those efforts to develop better parental tools and guidance
are still very much needed.
Again there's evidence of better reporting systems and how that improves policy-makers'
and the public's knowledge of the incidents of online risks, and some evidence that children
find those reporting tools effective. So I think that making those more widely available
is a priority. In the use of filters and other forms of end-user protection, so for example,
British children are the most likely to set their social networking site to private, all
suggest that safe-guarding efforts have been effective. Of course they need to be maintained,
they need to be updated, and I think one of the interesting findings is that, in schools,
setting up those safety policies is often more effective and sustainable than keeping
them going and evaluating them.
So still, that question of balancing opportunities and risks is very difficult. Half of UK children
say that parental efforts to keep them safe restricts what they can do online; there's
a difficult balance between their opportunities and their risks. We can see some evidence
that the gap in what children and parents say about internet use and safety use is reducing.
In other words, children and parents are beginning to understand each other better in relation
to internet use, but still there are lots of differences. And some of those words 'what
is safety?' 'what is strangers?' 'what is sexting?' we can still see a divergence
of views and understanding between children and parents and other adults.
So, of course, more research is needed. Um, I think it is especially needed for younger
children and the parents and teachers of younger children to understand what particular risks
they face and how they are equipped or can be better equipped to deal with them. Research
has to keep up to date to address the latest technology. Um, we need still to be much better
at understanding the particular conditions of the vulnerable children whose parents are
not necessarily doing all the right things or with the attention and the skills and the
ability to resource them and support them as we might wish. And there is some work going
on on vulnerable children and the evidence group hopes to have a seminar or a day disseminating
that work in the autumn.
A sense that some of the familiar risks are now being relatively well-researched, but the
emerging risks, for example, of user-generated content or privacy and identity issues, again
there's an area where research needs to keep up. And similarly, there is much more to be
understood about the nature of the media literacy and digital skills that children and parents
need, and also how those very needs are changing as children and parents have to cope with
ever-changing risk environments.
In the, in our work, the evidence group is very keen to embed the insights from evidence
in the design of awareness campaigns, in the design of parental controls and other end-user
tools, and, erm, in the design and development of industry and government approaches to self-
and co-regulation. We, of course, will continue to update the evidence base and anyone who
knows of any research we haven't yet discussed or disseminated, please do get in touch and
we've made everything available on the UKCCIS website.
Thank you.