The Cyber Effect (22 page)

Research demonstrates that resilience is not a trait that people either have or do not have. While there is a biological argument that some individuals are born more resilient than others, the trait is tied to behaviors, thoughts, and actions that can be learned and developed. Studies of children show a gender divide, and an age divide, for resilience.
Boys are especially vulnerable, or less resilient, at nine to ten years. Girls are more vulnerable, or less resilient, when they are a little older—eleven to sixteen years.

How do people learn resilience? There are guides for teachers and parents about how to “teach” resilience—and instill and strengthen the trait. The American Psychological Association has created a list of ten ways to foster more resilience, some of which are just good common sense. The APA advises individuals to make connections and form a community of friends and family who can offer support. It suggests the building of confidence and self-reliance by creating realistic goals and regularly doing things that move you closer to them, taking decisive actions and addressing difficulties that can be improved.

Other suggestions: Avoid seeing setbacks and crises as “insurmountable problems,” accept change as a part of life, look for ways to grow and learn from hardships, nurture a more positive view of yourself, keep things in perspective and do not exaggerate problems, remain hopeful and optimistic, take care of yourself by exercising regularly, and do things that are relaxing.

The debate about how best to protect children online has been caught up in, intertwined with, and influenced by the current “teach resilience” philosophy. In 2009, the London School of Economics published a paper by two media and communications professors, Elisabeth Staksrud and Sonia Livingstone, who studied the protection and potential “overprotection” of children online—and how it could result in children who lacked resilience. The authors described “
a growing unease that the goal of risk prevention tends to support an overprotective, risk-averse culture that restricts the freedom of online exploration that society encourages for children in other spheres. It is central to adolescence that teenagers learn to anticipate and cope with risk—in short, to become resilient.”

The study found that, particularly in Northern European countries with high Internet access, “parental perception of likelihood of online risk to their child is negatively associated with their perceived ability to cope. A comparison of representative surveys conducted among children in three relatively ‘high risk' countries (Norway, Ireland and the
United Kingdom) found that although the frequency of exposure to perceived online risks, especially content risks, is fairly high, most children adopt positive (e.g. seek help from friends) or, more commonly, neutral (e.g. ignoring the experience) strategies to cope, although a minority exacerbate the risks (e.g. passing risky content on to friends). Most strategies tend to exclude adult involvement. Significant differences in both risk and coping are found by gender and age across these countries, pointing to different styles of youthful risk management.”

Translation: Parents may fret and wring their hands, but the kids are fine—and may even benefit from dealing with content risks online.

I strongly disagree with this approach. Is this how we want to “teach” resilience, by exposing children to extreme content online—to Twitter trolls, hate speech, cyberbullying, and hardcore pornography? This argument suggests that the strides made to protect the innocence of childhood and defend the rights of children in the brutal aftermath of the Industrial Revolution were actually the beginning of a trend toward coddling and hypervigilance. Rather than sending small children into the narrow tunnels of a coal mine or tiny passageways of a tall chimney, we are now sending them into dark, uncharted territory to mine the Web, almost like a character-building exercise.

In the developed world, we historically boycotted goods made by children in Third World sweatshops in the belief that these children were being deprived of the right to childhood. Exposure to extreme disturbing content online also deprives a child of innocence and a childhood. You don't need a rocket scientist or cyberpsychologist to figure that out.

This is the law of the cyber-jungle. This is throw-your-children-into-the-deep-end-of-the-swimming-pool to teach them to swim. If we accept this argument, then it means exposure to pornography is a positive thing—and learning how to fend off adult predators is a skill that should be instilled by experience online. I simply don't agree. Teaching resilience in the cyber context is a white flag of surrender.

The Internet is clearly, unmistakably, and emphatically an adult environment. It simply wasn't designed for children.
So why are they there?
Many experts argue that the positives of the Internet outweigh
the damage. If we accept that children are online, will be staying online for greater and greater amounts of their lives, and are by and large having useful and positive experiences there—like learning to read, learning to make friends, and improving fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination—then can we accept responsibility for the damaging things, the disturbing content that could have lasting ill effects on an entire generation?

I would argue that this particular gamble is too great. We cannot gamble with the future development of children who will someday be adults who weren't cared for and raised in the best way. A generation of what I describe as “cyber-feral children.” I return to John Suler's analogy: To allow young children online without proper monitoring and supervision is like taking them to New York City to run around, all alone.

And I have to wonder about the children who are falling through the cracks, those who have seen such disturbing things and content that their childhood has been effectively stolen from them. I am thinking of thousands of children in the Philippines who are forced to undress and engage with strange men from all over the world via their webcams. Who is doing more harm to them—the strangers or their own parents, who are selling their innocence online?

Or the children in Africa and other emerging nations who are just now discovering the Internet café. If we think kids in the developing world are vulnerable, what about children elsewhere? Children in Europe and the United States and the rest of the developed world have informed parents, teachers, and other support. What will happen in parts of the world where there is suddenly an increasing availability of devices and services but very little support for these children?

The mean-spiritedness of cyberspace is “fine for an adult,” said Andrew Keen, former University of California professor and author of
The Internet Is Not the Answer
, in an RTÉ Radio 1 interview in 2015. “We can deal with it. We have thick skins. But not twelve-year-old girls.”

As for childhood? I stand with philosophers Locke and Rousseau in their belief that children have a right to innocence, and a right to a childhood. I think all human beings deserve to have one.

Of course, a cellphone in itself is not necessarily dangerous. But now that a greater number of children have access to mobile devices that connect with the Internet, an almost entirely adult environment where we know that one-third of the sites contain pornography, we have to discuss the implications of the impact.

A mobile device offers exposure to inappropriate content—which may lead to the development of addictive or compulsive behaviors. It can expose a child to cyberbullying, or turn a child into a cyberbully. The worst-case scenario involves exposure to forensic risk.

In an age of ubiquitous technology—mobile phones, tablets, and public Wi-Fi—surely monitoring youth behavior online is almost impossible for parents, grandparents, teachers, or caretakers. The point at which technology companies design an app that allows children to take risky images that are transmitted and viewed and then disappear, is the point at which a child's covert behavior is arguably being enabled by technology.

Burdening parents with all the responsibility of cyber-regulations is asking them to raise their families in a lawless environment, a cyber frontier where they must become their own 24/7 sheriff or marshal. Age-inappropriate content is everywhere online, and any tech-savvy child knows how to access it. Have we adequately discussed this as a society?
I raised this in an editorial called “Parents Alone Cannot Police Our Youth in Cyberspace” and was drenched afterward with positive responses from thankful parents.

In the real world, we don't expect parents to throw themselves across the doors of all bars and pubs to prevent their children from buying alcohol, or expect them to guard cigarette vending machines to keep them from smoking tobacco. In the real world, kids are kept from buying tickets to movies with sexual and violent content. Printed pornography is kept in special areas of convenience stores.

So why is it so easy to find online?

I argue for more governance, more regulation, and much more protection. For a start, let's look at how the child-protection laws are written now.
Child abuse
is defined by the World Health Organization as
“all forms of physical and/or emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, neglect or negligent treatment or commercial or other exploitation, resulting in actual or potential harm to the child's health, survival, development or dignity in the context of a relationship of responsibility, trust or power.”

When the United Nations set out to describe the rights of children in the late 1980s, prior to the Internet, the result was a document of fifty-four articles and two optional protocols. The basic human rights of children were highlighted: to survival; to develop to the fullest; to protection from harmful influences, abuse, and exploitation; and to participate fully in family, cultural, and social life.

The four main principles of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child are: devotion to the best interests of the child; nondiscrimination; the right to life, survival, and development; and respect for the views of the child. I would argue that many of these articles are being broken by the presence of an unregulated Internet, and that the prevalence of age-inappropriate content online is an international children's-rights issue.

When a child is exposed to extreme content online—be it adult pornography or violence like decapitation, suicide, cutting, or bulimia—who is responsible? Whether it is the device manufacturer, the Internet provider, the host, or the generator of content, I believe all parties involved are collectively participating in the abuse of that child. This should be considered a direct breach of the U.N. Convention, and all those complicit should be held accountable, if not legally, then morally and ethically.

What are the solutions? Age verification and validation online would be a good start. With a little assist from our brilliant tech innovators, age restriction and age verification are possible.

Worldwide, several governments are beginning to try to tackle the current situation—and prepare for a future of more complications. In my opinion one of the world leaders is now Germany, where a long discussion led to the creation of new laws that protect children aged fourteen and under online. The Germans have a word for it,
Selbstgefährdung
, which translates to “self-endangerment” and describes the inevitability of encountering both dangerous content and potential
harm in cyber environments. Germany has been working on this since the early 2000s and could be a fine model for the United States and other developed countries that I believe are lagging behind—and have not yet dealt with the matter of the digital age of consent.

In France, the government is looking to tackle extremism on the Internet by legislating that networks that allow hate speech are accomplices in those crimes. In the U.K., there's been a serious debate and now a groundswell of support for more governance. I attended a closed-session hearing at which age-inappropriate content was discussed in the House of Lords, organized by Julia Davidson, a professor of criminology at the University of Middlesex, where I am a research fellow. Now the U.K. government is testing an initiative to require all Internet service providers to offer an effective way to stop adult content from coming into the home. Prime Minister David Cameron stated in 2015 that automatic porn filters, to protect children from the darkness of the Internet, will be made “law of the land.” The following year, one of the U.K.'s largest broadband providers, Sky, announced that it will turn on porn filters for all of its new broadband customers—not giving new customers a choice of whether parental controls are on “as standard.”

In 2013, I was appointed by the Minister of Communications to the Internet Governance Committee in Ireland and was a relentless royal pain concerning the rights of the child. Shortly after our report was published in 2014, an initiative was launched by Ireland's largest Internet service provider to introduce new opt-in child-safety filters on its home broadband connections as part of an industry initiative to take responsibility for protecting kids from adult and age-inappropriate content. It works on laptops, tablets, and smartphones accessing the Web through the company's service.

Enormously encouraged by this success, I took things one step further in what has become, to be honest, a personal crusade. On the seventieth anniversary of the foundation of the United Nations, I went to The Hague and delivered a keynote address about children's rights in cyberspace. Following that, on Universal Children's Day 2015,
I formally proposed that a new amendment be considered to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child that would enshrine children's rights in a cyber context. From my perspective, this is an emergency.

Technology is in a constant state of upgrading, updating, and evolving. Society needs to get much better at keeping up with it. Amending a U.N. Convention is a daunting task and traditionally takes a long time. But in the meanwhile, children are growing up, the content is there—and accessible. A colleague once called me a “disruptive agent of change.” But children deserve better. They are our most valuable resource and our hope for the future, as U.S. president John F. Kennedy said. We all need to get a little less complacent and a lot more disruptive.