Further Reading
Here is more information, covering pornography, general insights, VR, digital addictions, adolescent brains, sex trafficking, gaming, relationships, the disinhibition effect and county lines. Happy reading.
2021 BBC News article, Father calls for pornography sites to require proof of age on the work of Ioannis Dekas and Ava Vakil. Ava Vakil had written an open letter about the culture of sexual violence in some schools, which went viral.
She told the BBC, "I think porn is everywhere, and growing up as a young woman I've seen the influence of that. I think young men are ingesting pornography online to an extent that people aren't aware of. I'm sure everyone, and particularly young women, can look back on so many conversations they've had with boyfriends and male friends and think 100% it was impacted by porn."’
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Scroll down to see a table of recommendations on how much and what type of screentime kids from 0-18 should be allowed.
Pornography
Mary Aiken in chapter 4 of The Cyber Effect says that in 2010 she was ‘researching online child abuse material... and came across interesting information in the studies. An inappropriate sexualised event in early childhood has been reported by some contact and online offenders.’
If this ‘inappropriate sexualised event’ includes children watching (often violent) porn, she rightly states that ‘the potential consequences could be tragic. As a society we need to stop and really think about this.’
If you go on to read this book, know that there is some good news about INTERPOL and predators that follows this dark warning.
Adolescent Risk Taking
Can we expect schools’ PHSE classes to overcome the reality of the adolescent brain plus what they are seeing on screens?
Here’s an interesting piece from Harvard Medical School’s Harvard Health Publishing, The adolescent brain: Beyond raging hormones
‘Adolescents' judgment can be overwhelmed by the urge for new experiences, thrill-seeking, and sexual and aggressive impulses. They sometimes seem driven to seek experiences that produce strong feelings and sensations.’
And: >>>
‘Another circuit still under construction in adolescence links the prefrontal cortex to the midbrain reward system, where addictive drugs and romantic love exert their powers. Most addictions get their start in adolescence, and there is evidence that adolescent and adult brains respond differently to drugs… Functional brain scans also suggest that teenagers and adults process reward stimuli differently; the adolescents are hypersensitive to the value of novel experiences.
Hormonal changes are at work, too… which in turn influence brain development. The production of testosterone increases 10 times in adolescent boys. Sex hormones act in the limbic system and in the raphe nucleus, source of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is important for the regulation of arousal and mood.’
So we’ve given them some excellent tools to get risky with.
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Very interesting article entitled, The Rise Of The Liberal Groomer, which opens with the question, ‘Does progress have to mean the sexual liberation of children?’ and explores 'the question of who is responsible for shaping children and to what ends.' The piece was sparked by news of the news of a theatre production, The Family Sex Show (‘for ages 5 and above’), coming to Bristol and since pulled.
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Watch this YouTube video, The Three Terrible Ideas Weakening Gen Z and Damaging Universities and Democracies by Jonathan Haidt.
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Times article (2021) by Baroness Beeban Kidron: Design of social media leaves teens flooded with porn
Social Media pushing knives to boys
The Times June 2022 Instagram and YouTube ‘push knives’ to boys as young as 13
“Instagram and YouTube have been accused of pushing content to teenagers that glorifies violence and invites them to buy knives.
An investigation by the BBC programme Panorama found that the companies’ algorithms were recommending harmful content to young people.
The inquiry followed the murder of Oliver Stephens, 13, who was known as Olly, in January last year. He was stabbed in a park in Reading after a row on social media.”
Mental Health & Sleep
Originally published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science
The abstract includes:
‘Cultural trends contributing to an increase in mood disorders and suicidal thoughts and behaviors since the mid-2000s, including the rise of electronic communication and digital media and declines in sleep duration, may have had a larger impact on younger people, creating a cohort effect.’
Addiction
As referred to in Glow Kids, there was research done in the late 70s by Dr Bruce Alexander into addictive behaviour. It involves experiments done with rats. His article Rat Park, (acknowledging the suffering of the rats) includes his belief that, “today’s flood of addiction is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, hypercompetitive, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel socially and culturally isolated… They find temporary relief in addiction to drugs or any of a thousand other habits because addiction allows them to escape from their feelings…”
And the more they escape the more isolated they become. This is one vicious circle you don’t want your child caught up in.
Disinhibition
The Online Disinhibition Effect, a study by John Suler 2004, includes the following:
“While online, some people self-disclose or act out more frequently or intensely than they would in person. This article explores six factors that interact with each other in creating this online disinhibition effect: dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination, and minimization of authority.”
General
Virtual Child: The terrifying truth about what technology is doing to children by Cris Rowan
Addiction
Watch this TED talk by Johann Hari, Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong, in which he talks about how it is disconnection (in our very ‘connected’ society) that drives addiction.
Comedian and activist Paula Poundstone gives a good general summing up on CBS Morning News 2015
Why Kids Shouldn’t Sext…
This article outlines the dark world of anonymous image boards, where men upload and share intimate photographs of a former sex partner without the subject’s consent. Also known as revenge porn. I had a look to see how easy this stuff is to find and again came across images of very young teenage girls, some not much more than children. Depraved and depressing beyond words.
Social media and sex trafficking
I’m not saying your children will be trafficked if they get a mobile phone, however, you should know about the kind of people that are prowling the likes of Snapchat.
This 2015 article in Reuters gives a good summary:
Tech-savvy sex traffickers stay ahead of authorities as lure teens online
Gaming
Study into the effect gaming on the brain (pay to read) – Brain connectivity and psychiatric comorbidity in adolescents with Internet gaming disorder
There is good and bad here – the good around increased connectivity of brain networks, the bad concerns distractibility and poor impulse control.
Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men By Leonard Sax
This touches on gaming amongst other factors.
Relationships
Mary Aiken talks about online dating – it’s about adults, but the same can apply for kids (cf. Tinder for Teens).
Criminal gangs using social media to recruit kids
UK Government guidance: Criminal exploitation of children and vulnerable adults: county lines
This warns of “the use of social media to make initial contact with children and young people.” Like much else on our site, this is a worst-case scenario, but one parents should know about. You can do your own research into the role of social media in sex trafficking.
Exploring the role of the Internet in radicalisation and offending of convicted extremists – Ministry of Justice Analytical Series 2021
White paper by HM Prison & Probation Service: Exploring the role of the Internet in radicalisation and offending of convicted extremists – Ministry of Justice Analytical Series 2021
Section 5. Implications/Conclusions
“From 2005 to 2017, the number of convicted extremists in the sample who were subject to online radicalisation had increased, whilst a reduction was observed in the number of those primarily subject to radicalising influences in offline settings over the same time period. This is seen to reflect general trends in society relating to the widespread use of the Internet. The findings from this study supported the notion that younger individuals and females in particular now have opportunities to engage with extremist groups and causes online in a way that was more difficult previously. This also mirrors general societal trends, with those in the 16–24 age group self-reporting the highest volume of weekly internet use and females reporting being more likely to have a social media profile/account than males (Ofcom, 2018).”
And later:
“New online counter-terrorism measures should aim to target younger users and appeal not just to males, but also to females, given the particularly marked increase in prominence of the Internet in radicalisation for these groups.”
General information and studies
https://www.childrenandscreens.com
”Our vision is to understand and address compelling questions regarding media’s impact on child development through interdisciplinary dialogue, public information, and rigorous, objective research bridging the medical, neuroscientific, social science, education and academic communities.”
Center for Integrative Brain Research:
Addiction – Overstimulation and ADHD and the work of Dr Dimitri Christakis
Research
Key stats from 2021 research by Ofcom below – read the full report here
All of the above seem to be of little to no use in preventing under 13s getting on social given that Ofcom also found that ‘three-quarters of children have a social media profile by age 12.’
Please note that this chart is accurate at the time of publishing but things can change quickly so let us know if you have discovered the age checks to be different.
Go to the 5 Rights Foundation, founded by Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE, which in their words “works to put children’s needs and rights at the very heart of digital design. It's our mission to ensure that the same freedoms, protections and privileges that young people are entitled to offline, also apply online.” If you’re interested, check their news page for updates on progress, here and in the US.
This 5 Rights Foundation 2021 publication, Pathways: How digital design puts children at risk states the outcome of a research project that “examined how design choices embedded in digital products impact the lives of children. It states:
‘The results are alarming and upsetting. The interviews with design professionals reveal the commercial objectives that put innovators under pressure to produce features that maximise time spent, maximise reach and maximise activity. These features shape children’s behaviour. They make it hard for children to put down their devices (‘I kept turning it off and then going back and still using it’ – Lara, 13). They push network growth to the extent that children find themselves introduced to inappropriate adults, often with provocative or sexual content (‘Old men and that sort of thing’ – James, 14). And they encourage children to post, share and enhance to such a degree that many children feel that their ‘real selves’ are inadequate (“All my photos have filters...they make you look prettier” – Carrie, 17).
The designers explain that ‘companies make their money from attention. Reducing attention will reduce revenue.’ As one of them ruefully offered: ‘There are no safety standards – there is no ethics board in the digital space.’”
This Guardian article summarises a report by Childwise (2020) that surveyed 2,167 UK 5- to 16-year-olds, stating that, “by age 11, 90% had their own device, and phone ownership was ‘almost universal’ once children were in secondary school.
Of those questioned, 39% said they could not live without their phone – up from 33% last year. Teenagers aged 15 and 16 were most concerned about being without their phone, the report found.”
“57% of all the children surveyed said they always slept with their phone by their bed, while the same proportion admitted they did not know what they would do if they lost their device.
And 44% said they would feel uncomfortable if they were somewhere without phone signal, while 42% admitted to being ‘constantly worried’ about running out of charge.”
And this is a useful digest to share with others
10 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Give A Child A Smartphone Or Tablet
What it takes to put your phone away
This 2019 New Yorker article quotes Jenny Odell, who says, “Nothing is harder to do than nothing,” in her new book: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.
She equates the crisis in our natural world with a crisis in our minds and sees “little difference between habitat restoration in the traditional sense and restoring habitats for human thought”; both are endangered by “the logic of capitalist productivity.”
This same New Yorker article states, wisely, “To make money from something—a forest, a sense of self—is often to destroy it.” Worth thinking about when it comes to our children’s minds and lives.
Safer Children in a Digital World
In the 2008 report “Safer children in a digital world”, Professor Tanya Byron made 38 recommendations for government on keeping children safe online. In 2018, the NSPCC reviewed the progress made in implementing Professor Byron’s recommendations - only 13 have been fully implemented. Read in more detail from the NSPCC here.
Worth knowing about is Elias Aboujaoude, on ‘the intersection of psychology and technology, focusing both on negative aspects (e.g., "addiction", post-privacy psychology, cyberbullying, online psychological shifts and their effects on democracy) and potential benefits (e.g., video therapy, virtual reality exposure therapy, global health).’ Also see his book, Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-personality
Stats
This 2021 Office of National Statistics report found that:
While the majority of children told us they only spoke to or exchanged messages with people online who they knew in person, around one in six children (17%) aged 10 to 15 years spoke with someone they had never met before (equivalent to 682,000 children) in the previous 12 months.
An estimated 1 in 50 children (2%) said that they spoke to or messaged someone online in the previous 12 months who they thought was their age but later found out were much older.
An estimated 5% of children aged 10 to 15 years met up in person with someone they had only spoken to online (equivalent to 212,000 children) in the previous 12 months.
Around 1 in 10 children (11%) aged 13 to 15 years reported receiving a sexual message, while 1 in 100 reported sending a sexual message, in the previous 12 months.
Furthermore: “prior to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic… more than three-quarters of children said they spent three or more hours per day online at the weekend, with 22% spending seven or more hours a day online at the weekend. Almost half of the children spent three or more hours online on an ordinary school day.”
Connected Kids Report
It has this graph on the rise of smartphone ownership at a glance by age and date:
Bostwick and Bucci, in their report out of the Mayo Clinic on treating Internet pornography addiction with naltrexone, wrote “…cellular adaptations in the (pornography) addict’s PFC result in increased salience of drug-associated stimuli, decreased salience of non-drug stimuli, and decreased interest in pursuing goal-directed activities central to survival.”
2021 Guardian article: Is society coming apart?
“According to the Reagan-Thatcher worldview, there is no such thing as society. There are only families, who look after one another, and individuals, who participate in markets. The idea that government is the solution to people’s problems rests on a mistaken belief in the existence of society. This mistaken belief leads to attempts to solve problems such as ill health with government programmes such as government-funded healthcare, as if these were problems of society, rather than problems of individuals. Government programmes like these will also interfere with the only place where real solutions are to be found, which is the free market.
Not many worldviews build worlds but, long before the pandemic, this one did. It not only contributed to the dismantling of social supports in the US and the UK, but also undergirds the architecture and ethos of the internet, which is ungoverned, deregulated, privatised and market-driven – a remote and barren wasteland where humans are reduced to ‘users,’ individuals, alone, just so many backlit avatars of IRL bone-marrow selves.”