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Aarhus March 30th, 2011 Cyberhus / CfDP's input for the online child safety workshop on the 16 of March, 2011. Cyberhus / Centre for Digital Youth Care, and I personally, very much enjoyed participating in the discussion on child safety; and I would like to take this opportunity to extend on that conversation. In the following, I will summarise and elaborate on the some of the topics raised by us or others at the workshop, which we believe are most important, or most neglected. Please do not hesitate to respond or get in touch, if you have questions, comments or another perspective entirely.
A targetted approach. Cyberhus' online counselling helps some of the most at-risk children and youths in Denmark, and we can confirm the pattern reported elsewhere; the youths with real life challenges and issues face, suffer or create, a disproportionately large amount of the problems and harm online. This is neither surprising or new, but calls for a much more targetted approach to online safety, than we have seen so far. The same campaign or tool will not help all youths, all over Europe, and we need to focus our efforts - not on the largest demographic, but on the target group where we can prevent most harm. Educating and helping youth at risk is never easy, also because their immediate family will often not have the ressources or abilities to guide and help, and hence be part of our efforts to do the same. Hence, our primary suggestion is, that ICT skills and safe and positive online usage is integrated as goals into all points of contact with the target group; this includes schools, youth clubs, full care homes and more. This is primarily a political goal, but the industry can do much to help achieve it. Donations of hardware or software to institutions and social workers in contact with at-risk youths can make a difference in integrating ICT as a natural part of children and young people's lives, in the environments where learning opportunities arise naturally. Development of specialised software solutions for, and educating and awareness raising efforts aimed at, these professionals are just as important - Cyberhus tries to do both, but we, and the institutions we help, are severely underfunded. We hope that a solution for online child safety in Europe will include special considerations for helping those most likely to meet and be susceptible to harm online.
A positive approach. We raised another point in the various workshop groups, on the general methods used in ensuring online child safety; that we need to focus on positive net use, instead of negative. We are in no way denying the need for clear rules, safety tools or regulations to deal with illegal or harmful content and conduct, but we are at the same time insistent that this is only half of the picture. There is a clear need to stop and prevent negative use, but our contact with children and young people convinces us that the need for a positive approach is even clearer. Especially younger children and youth at risk do not always respond well to admonitions, and are in much more need of positive affirmation and understanding of what positive, constructive net use is. We have used such methodologies for years in Cyberhus, when helping schools with web ethics, and doing workshops on online bullying, and we believe they are the most succesful in reaching youths and changing attitudes and behaviour.
CfDP - Centre for Digital Youth Care is a socioeconomic company, which aims to ensure digital safety and well-being for children and young people.