Safer Internet Day 2023
Tomorrow (7 February) is Safer Internet Day: the annual event to promote the safe, responsible and positive use of digital tech among children and young people. This year’s title is ‘Want to talk about it? Making space for conversations about life online’
Those who have followed me for a while will know that one of the core things I try to educate on is good communication and building trust with the children you are trying to protect. This has always been the most important factor because of how technically adept this generation is, they can and will hide their online activities from you if they don’t feel able to confide in you.
I previously wrote a blog post on the very subject of “Communication: how to have the chat” please do have a look or if you would rather hear my dulcet tones I also recorded the following video for my YouTube channel.
In my opinion ‘Safer Internet Day’ is a great initiative but we should be thinking about this every day and not need an annual reminder. Talking is the key facet to every relationship and none more so than that between you and your child as you teach them how to grow and develop in the world that we call home.
Trigger Warning — Child abduction
There are many different variants of the above image and most people will instantly realise that it relates to ‘Stranger Danger’ because as we grew up everybody would tell us about the dangers of accepting sweeties from strangers, getting into a stranger's car or even just talking to strangers. This was a subject that was communicated to us from a very young age and all the way through our education.
I chose this image as one that sends a very strong message but also because it is one that many people may look at and not realise the relevance in the same way that the first image does. It is human nature that people will shy away from something that they don't fully understand, this is the case with the internet and most things of a technical nature. Children have grown up surrounded by technology and for that reason are far more technically literate than many adults who have a duty of care over them.
The image above should mean something to any of those adults, you never really know who you might be talking to on the other side of your screen, even if you video call somebody, technology has come so far that you can deep fake a video call and the voice to present yourself as another child. Stranger danger used to be a very high-risk process for the predator as they would need to snatch a child from a street or park and the probability of being caught was high. Now a predator can spend weeks or even months talking to a child online and grooming them, they build a level of trust with the child by pretending to share the same interests. Ultimately they can abuse that trust by making the child do things on camera but the main risk is that one day your child goes to meet their ‘Friend’ and in the same tragic ending as the original ‘stranger danger’ are never seen again.
I realise that the previous paragraph will shock many but this is the reality of the world we live in now and when I tell you that this is the highly watered-down version of it, that should really scare you. I have had to witness through my own eyes the results of when a predator succeeds in their grooming of a child and as I type this very sentence I am a grown man crying uncontrollably because the emotions are still as raw as the first day I sat in front of those computer screens in 2012. When you have looked into the eyes of a child being abused there is no return from that and what has been seen can never be unseen.
I spend much of my time working towards a future when no child has their life stolen from them in such a horrific manner, it is the fuel that keeps me going, gets me out of bed and gives me purpose. We must educate children about these dangers in just the same way that we were educated about stranger danger as children. We must use technology to our own advantage to protect those children from online predators but most importantly we must communicate with children and build trust so that they know they can talk about anything that does not feel safe online.
To try and enable this education I have started a campaign which involves a petition to the government to “Publish mandatory curriculum content on online safety for children” I urge, no I implore you to please sign this petition but also share it far & wide across all of your social media platforms and place yourself right on the front line of this battle against online sexual predators!
This is only half the battle though as we must also enable the adult generation to be better equipped to protect children online. Over the past 10 years I have blogged on the subject of online child safety providing information on how to understand different social media apps and the parental controls to secure them, I have also created videos on YouTube to try and explain things in a way that more people can understand. I will continue to do so for as long as my mental health will allow me to. This is not a one-man fight though and there are not enough people doing this type of education if you do not understand something then reach out and ask questions because ultimately we only succeed when people face up rather than ignore the issue.
Use this Safer Internet Day 2023 to improve your knowledge and become part of the solution.
https://cybersafetyguy.com/membership
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