Can reducing loneliness increase online resilience for care-experienced young people?
In 2020 the NSPCC published a landmark report evidencing lonely children in the UK are twice as likely to be groomed online. Later in the year, a Coram Voice Bright Spots Survey of 169 care-experienced young people in Plymouth evidenced that 30% of care experienced young people (between the ages of 16–25) reported feeling lonely ‘often or always’ — three times that recorded by 16–24 year olds (10%) in the general population. (ONS, 2018).
The Pandemic has of course impacted everyone’s relationships and ability to connect over the past 18 months, although this research led us in Project Acorn to consider whether care-experienced young people’s disproportionately higher experience of loneliness is also impacting their safety online.
To read up on what we did and broader recommendations from the first cycle of Project Acorn, please check out the posts below.
Post 01: Care Journeys Project Acorn: co-producing People I Tolerate, a care-experienced youth group
Post 02: What we learned about co-production and reducing loneliness
Post 03: What’s next and recommendations for reducing loneliness at scale
We teamed up with Nominet’s Reach programme to explore two questions with Care-experienced young people over the next two years in Project Acorn.
- In what ways does loneliness impact on care experienced young people’s opportunities and ability to recover from negative experiences online?
- Do care-experienced young people know who to go to for support if they feel worried or unsafe online or offline, and what can we do to make it more likely for young people to seek appropriate support in a safe way?
We’re using the UK Council for Internet Safety’s Digital Resilience framework as a basis for how we think about this research. They define Digital Resilience as; a dynamic personality asset that grows from digital activation i.e. through engaging with appropriate opportunities and challenges online, rather than through avoidance and safety behaviours.
Scratching the surface: exploring online harms and resilience in the first 6 months
During Acorn cycle 01 we started exploring these questions with the care-experienced co-production team and the People I Tolerate youth group. We spoke to about 10 young people in total and their ages ranged from 16–25 years old.
We started by asking our Acorn co-production team to define ‘online harms’
We talked about the impact of being care-experienced has on digital resilience
The theme of loneliness surfaced here through young people reflecting on how connections online were a lifeline when they were socially isolated in care. We also heard that young people may not feel comfortable telling professionals in their lives about negative experiences online.
Receiving sexually explicit content was the most consistent form of online harm spoken about
“young people think it’s normal to send [an explicit] pic if you like someone” — care-experienced young person
“It’s [sending indecent, unsolicited photos] like the normalisation of guys wolf whistling at women or not showing emotion” — care-experienced young person
“I would ignore a dick-pic” — care-experienced young person
Receiving sexually explicit photos or videos through direct message on social media platforms is commonplace, in fact all of the care-experienced young people we spoke to have been sent or come across indecent images online. The ways they cope include ignoring, blocking accounts or simply normalising sexually explicit pictures or videos. It’s worth saying that this is not always a negative experience for young people.
Online safety lessons from school are cutting through
“My mate almost met up with a paedophile they met online…at school I did online safety lessons so I could tell that the person wasn’t who they thought they were. I convinced my friend to not meet this person. Now my friend is like me, he doesn’t really talk to people online.” — care-experienced young person
“Here’s one thing I remembered from school, report button on website.” — care-experienced young person
Lessons on online safety are helping some young people know how to spot danger online and in some cases how to report it although is knowing how to recover from online harm may be a gap in education?
Online gaming or community platforms can make it easier to report…and self organise
“There was a server on discord for Minecraft and the owner had a hidden channel with indecent pictures. We left and someone reported it to discord and they shut the server down.” — care-experienced young person
“I have friends who put a ‘brick’ on your wifi or your x-box and they do that to people who post indecent images. He only uses it for a ‘good’ cause. He does it because he wants his server to be safe.”— care-experienced young person
“I’m in a group called *****: and there’s about a hundred of them and you can get them to DDos them.” [multiple online connected devices that overwhelm a computer with information] — care-experienced young person
Many care-experienced young people, like all young people today, are part of extensive online communities that have processes in places to report harmful activity. Some of the young people we spoke to reflected on times when online community’s they are part of would take matters into their own hands instead of reporting incidents of online harm.
Knowing how to screen out ‘creeps’ and bots is part of the online experience
“I wouldn’t report, just block.” — care-experienced young person
“I’ve had more friend requests from bots that are trying to send me nudes than actual accounts (snapchat)… I can tell they’re bots because their snaps are always zero.” — care-experienced young person
“If I have a mutual server, I would message them and ask who they are.” — care-experienced young person
“… since that time, like, I don’t accept like any random thing through social media. Unless I’m sure, like hundred percent what it’s about.” — care-experienced young person
“If it’s someone asking for money, a real person, I’d tell my carer. If there’s a bot I’d just shut it down.” — care-experienced young person
We heard about a lot of mitigating actions young people take to avoid online harms; from being able to screen out bots to directly confronting people to telling a trusted adult.
“I give people my real postcode.” — care-experienced young person
The comment above was shared by a young person with additional learning needs. Their awareness of specific areas of online safety, such as not giving out personal information, was significantly lower than other young people in the group.
What did we learn about the connection between reducing loneliness and increasing online resilience?
Non-native English speakers may be more susceptible to being blackmailed by bots, especially if they are lonely
This example gives some insight into the intersectional nature of online harms. A young person for whom English isn’t their first language sent private photos to a bot and was subsequently blackmailed. They eventually asked their friend for help who was almost immediately able to discern this was a bot. The ability native english speakers have to screen out bots based on patterns in their language may not be there for asylum seekers or care-experienced young people in the UK who aren’t native English speakers.
“Well, he got added from a fake account on Facebook and he accepted…he told me that person wants to see me and stuff. I thought to myself, this is fake because, like, I told him like to ask the account a few questions but they kept keep saying same thing. It was like an automatic message. So after he didn’t understand…he did something and they had a picture of him on all of that stuff. So after that, I just suggested to ring the police.” — care-experienced young person
Additionally, this example of online harm shows how there are instances where young people may feel embarrassed to speak to a professional about this and will intuitively want to speak to friends first. Training up young people to support each-other to speak about and de-shame online harms is probably as important as training up professionals.
Having judgement free spaces to talk about online harms with peers and professionals can be a relief for young people
One of the most striking parts of these conversations was how open care-experienced young people were to talking about online harms with peers and professionals. Everyone had stories to tell and an evolving toolkit of coping strategies but everyone was equally interested to hear about each other’s experiences…maybe because normalising talking about this is one of the keys to digital resilience?
I think it kind of helps to know that it’s not just me. It’s kind of, it’s other people that have had similar experiences. So it’s kind of is a bit relieving to know that you kind of, it’s bad to know that it’s not a one off thing, which is a bit worrying, but also it’s good to know that there’s other people that go through the same thing. So it kind of, I’m able to talk to someone about it. — Care experienced young person
What’s next?
With our first social action programme in Plymouth kicking off in January 2022 we’ll be putting learning and recommendations from our first 6 month cycle into practice.
We’ll be digging deeper into how reducing loneliness has the potential to prevent and mitigate online harms with our learning partners from the Nominet’s Reach programme.
If you’re doing connected research or would like to get in touch please reach out to us at plymouthcarejourneys@barnardos.org.uk
