Posts Tagged ‘online safety’

I’ve attended a couple of online safety presentations over the years, the first being back in October 2007 delivered by Ollie Bray at Musselburgh High School, and more recently at my local school delivered by my esteemed OH himself, Neil Winton. Both these guys are CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) trained and Ollie’s presentation was the first to use CEOP’s, at the time new, parent training materials.

What struck me is that despite the two year gap between these presentations how similar were the questions raised by parents. There is clearly a need for continually delivering this type of thing, in waves perhaps, as I think many parents don’t really think about teaching their children how to take responsibility for their own safety online until they are already hacking the cyber-sitting software and resisting constant parental supervision.

I’ve always considered myself a fairly well informed parent when it comes to the intertube highway, I have a 20 year career in IT behind me and introduced all my children to computers and the online word at around 18 months. Even the clunky version back when my fast approaching 15 year old was but a baby (ouchie!). My initial reaction to the CEOP material was to dismiss it as over dramatic sensationalism. It focusses quite narrowly on child sexual exploitation online and I would argue that the figures for this particular and specific crime don’t support the privileged position it holds. As we know, most sexual exploitation of children is perpetrated in the home by “trusted” adults.  But until there are no children falling victim to online predators, CEOP’s work teaching parents and children how to stay safe will remain sadly essential.

For an insight into some of the issues faced by both parents and children regarding online safety, a quick browse through the ConnectSafely forums is quite an eye-opener.

The last couple of days have revealed to me that even adult online communites can experience a bit of a hiccup when it comes to balancing privacy and safety. Without going into any details, since they are not really the important thing here, a debate began about the wisdom of sharing personal details with online contacts for use in emergency situations. The motivation for raising the issue was undoubtedly sincere and well intentioned but I seem to be alone in questioning raising the idea in a public space.

Kidsmart UK have a 5 point Smart Plan that encourages children to stay safe online but I think it’s something we should all bear in mind, whatever age we are.

Top of the list is not to share your personal details with people you “meet” online. If this is a rule we think suitable for children we adults should at least give this advice some consideration. Of course, we would hope to be better placed and have more  experience and skills to judge people than children, but the bottom line is that  we can never be sure that the people we form friendships with online are actually who they say they are. Apart from the people who know me in meat space, nobody reading this knows for a fact that I even exist! That these are my children…

…or that I live in the village I say I live in with the man I say I live with. I could be a complete virtual construct who has trawled cyber space for details of a family to front my fake persona. I might not even be female.

Why would I put so much effort into a charade like that? Many people would jump to the conclusion that a fake online person must be a monster, a predator, a deviant… but I could just as easily be a marketing front for a company who wishes to target any one of the online communities I participate in.

I’m not!

But I could be.

And that alone reveals a multitude of forseeable and avoidable scenarios facing an unsecure online community that openly discusses the sharing of personal details. When talk takes place in a community, it’s easy to feel there’s a degree of security, that the community is a contained unit, but all it takes is one monster, one predator, one deviant to inveigle their way into that community, to pose as a valid, valuable member and take advantage of that community’s openness… with just a little bit of imagination…

An open community that publicly voices its willingness to share the same information we encourage our children to protect opens itself up to any number of cyber attacks, identity theft, manipulation and exploitation. As adults there is even more information about us online than our children. We are on the electoral role, details of our property, maps and purchase history are just a couple of clicks away. Even the best of friends can fall-out and once the information is shared it cannot be un-shared.

Most crime is directed at adults, not children, and we do our children no favours if we insist that they protect their privacy without at least thinking about how much we want to protect it ourselves.

In an endeavour to be as transparent as possible, and ensure that my validity as an actual human being bearing a close resemblance to the one I project online isn’t questionable, I myself break many of the rules we would normally apply to children. I use our real names, I post photographs and I link my social spaces to each other to create that “bigger picture”. MrW blogs in his capacity as a professional educator so our rough location is no secret. In fact our exact location wouldn’t take anyone with a bit of Googling skill longer than 5 minutes to find out. I chose for it to be that way after considering all of the above so  I’m sure as Sherlock not advising anyone, anywhere, to chose differently! I heartily endorse online transparency but I can only endorse it for me. I would never suggest it for anyone else without also pointing out the possible downside. And I do my best not to tinker with anyone else’s privacy comfort zone.

You didn’t think I really knew people called Jemima and Tallulah did you?

I’m real enough.

I think it’s you guys that are all madey-uppy!

Apart from the obvious safety advice there is only one piece of guidance I have given my children regarding their online behaviour. Don’t textualise anything about anyone you would not be willing to say to their face.

It could be suggested that this is one of those lessons you need to learn through experience but I’m not convinced. As a generation, mine is far more actively engaged in avoiding the physical and emotional bumps and thumps on behalf of our children than my parents’ generation ever were, with mixed results I suspect. I’ll admit that the motivation for encouraging my progeny to play nice online is not so much that it’s the right thing to do as to protect them from the almost guaranteed backlash that any careless, thoughtless words they share would engender. The unintended positive result seems to be that rather than lashing out at some perceived hurt via Bebo, they talk to me, and once we all calm down we can usually, between us, come up with a few different “takes” on the situation.

Furthermore, I extend this warning to include paper and pen. It always amazes me that anyone calling for the restriction of children’s access to technology can seriously cite bullying as the reason. Sharon McLellan, headteacher of Hoddom Primary in Dumfries and Galloway is certainly not alone in deriding social networking as the cause of bullying, when it is merely a method. One of many. In her Comment article in TESS from August 14th she laments the passing of the days of pen and paper class disruption as an

“attempt to spice up the boredom of the lesson with offers of illicit meetings behind the bike shed, arrangements scribbled hastily on crumpled pieces of paper promising delights at 7pm”

She goes on to denounce Bebo as

“a platform to ridicule and offend, the modern day equivalent of the stocks”

I do wonder if she’d sigh nostalgically on catching her pupils  texting to Bebo in class, arranging to meet behind the bike sheds promising delights at 7pm. Somehow, given the way she proceeds to claim how anti-social social networking is and how fleeting any goodness found there must be as it can be deleted with one click… I think not.

What an utterly arrogant and blinkered view!

• Good old days (i.e. my days) = note writing = good
• Kids nowadays = texting and social networking = bad

She does not even acknowledge the reality of vile, nasty, hand-written notes that were passed round the whole class before ending up on the desk of the “victim”.  That reality just does not fit with her rosy version of the good old days so it’s ignored. She even goes as far as to claim that

“For us, passing notes around was the way to network and being sociable was indeed our aim”

Sorry but I doubt her teachers considered it so. Mine certainly didn’t. I remember well the fear of being caught with a note, throwing them away in a panic and growling silently at anyone who dared to try and pass me one.  I also remember the squirming  embarrassment of the author and sometimes also the victim should a teacher intercept a note and read it out for the whole class. Swiftly followed by an often painful and humiliating  punishment for anyone involved. It was awful, and it was behaviour on a par with the exact same class disruption caused by mobile phones nowadays.

To further suggest that the hand written networking was preferable to this instant delete button age because words on paper can be kept and re-read and dug out in twenty years to reminisce over makes a mockery of the pain and hurt the written word can inflict. Hurtful words on paper can also be kept and re-read and dug out in twenty years… to suffer all over again.

Condemning the tools that our children will use, indeed do use, and suggesting that they are the reason children are nasty to each other is just plain ludicrous. There always have been and there always will be children who don’t play nice and blaming the new tools they use to behave badly is as daft as blaming the old tools. And I don’t recall anyone in education reviling paper and pen.

Pointing the finger at  technology removes the responsiblity to tackle nasty, brutish, bullying behaviour where it should be tackled… with the person, not their mobile-phone.

It’s not easy to pin down a straightforward definition of “duty of care” at common law, unless you’re talking about the environment or dogs! My two personal favourites are from an Australian agriculture website and English tort Law which between them state four criteria that need to be met before a failure of duty of care has occurred.

1. Was it foreseeable that the action of a particular person or organisation would expose another party to harm or damage?
2. Is there a relationship of ‘proximity’ between the two parties?
3. Is the action or inaction of one party the cause of the other party’s damage or loss?
4. Is it “fair, just and reasonable” to impose liability?

California has another 20 or so but they can be reasonably ignored for my purposes. I looked all this up because, as a parent, I chucked “duty of care” at my son’s primary school on more than one occasion and needed a rudimentary understanding of what I was accusing them of. In those instances it was with regard to bullying and I long believed that they failed in their duty of care as the steps they took prevent the bullying once they had been made aware of it, were inadequate. However, according to the NUT..

“There is a proviso that if it can be shown that the professional acted in accordance with the views of a reputable body of opinion within their profession, the duty of care will have been discharged even though others may disagree with them.”

It doesn’t matter what a parent thinks of the bullying policy at a school, if they have an approved policy and then follow it they have not failed in their duty of care.

MrW asked me if my understanding of duty of care could be applied to internet usage in schools, in particular when it is used as a reason to deny teachers access to online resources. My initial “Nah no way” didn’t satisfy him much! Having given it a bit more thought I do believe that whilst internet abuse in schools could lead to a charge of failure to provide duty of care, it would have little to do with the internet itself and more to do with the level and quality of supervision.

Take 30 pupils in a gym. If the class are clearly told what rules are in place to maximise their safety (i.e. use of crash mats, maximum users on a piece of equipment) and they break those rules resulting in injury, has the teacher failed in their duty of care? What if the teacher leaves the children unsupervised in the gym and injury occurs? In the second scenario no one would claim that any failure to meet care standards is a result of the inherent danger of the gym equipment!

Take the same 30 pupils using computers. If the class are clearly told what rules are in place to maximise their safety (i.e. never share your password, no cyberbullying, no searching for inappropriate material) and they break those rules resulting in injury, has the teacher failed in their duty of care? Again, what if the teacher leaves the pupils unsupervised and injury occurs? How can it be suggested that any failure to meet care standards is down to the inherent danger of the internet anymore than my first example was the fault of the gym equipment?

I strongly suspect that my children are inadequately supervised during some of their internet use at school. They are often allowed to spend free time at the end of a lesson, online, doing whatever they please, their safety abdicated to the draconian filtering the school imposes on staff and pupils alike. This would be more unacceptable to me if I didn’t personally take responsibility for teaching them about online safety.

But I whinge again, the question was can duty of care ever be a reasonable excuse for not allowing a teacher access to any website, let’s say YouTube? Would education authorities deny a PE teacher access to trampolines citing “duty of care”? Would they deny a Chemistry teacher access to sulphuric acid citing “duty of care”? Would they deny a Modern Studies teacher access to (often) harrowing material on human rights abuses citing “duty of care”? Of course not, so why should these same professionals be deemed incapable of making a professional judgement  when it comes to accessing online resources?

All these resources are requested by teachers to be used in lessons on the understanding that they will be used appropriately and to the advantage of pupils. All except the internet. The only difference with the internet is that it isn’t an artefact, it can’t be picked up and taken from you and it can’t be locked in a cupboard. However, unlike sulphuric acid, most pupils already use it every day.

Filtering, teacher supervision and the repetition of online safety rules are absolutely necessary, but at that point I believe the duty of care has been met as reasonable steps have been taken to ensure pupil safety. Given that pupils usually sign some form of user agreement stating that they will not knowingly abuse their internet access or use it to threaten or bully other users and they are not similarly required to sign anything binding with regard to trampolines, jars of acid or jumping off the dinner hall roof for that matter, I think schools are more than adequately covered.  If a pupil  circumvents security and accesses inappropriate material online using the school network it should be treated exactly the same as it would had the pupil brought inappropriate printed material to school and used it in class, or broken any other rule in place to ensure their safety and well being.

If local authorities are happy to give teachers access to the chemical cupboard, why not the internet? Why does granting a teacher access to YouTube endanger a pupil? I could throw up scenario after scenario here but ultimately only a person can fail to provide duty of care and if a person cannot be trusted why are they employed in teaching? I give the last word on the subject to the ever sense making NUT…

“As long as teachers apply their professional judgement, training and experience to a situation in a reasonable manner, seeking to promote the best interests of the pupils in their care, their obligations will have been met”

http://schools.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=is&catcode=ss_to_es_tl_te_03&rid=9927

http://www.teachingexpertise.com/e-bulletins/safe-internet-usage-school-3663

http://carewatch.blogspot.com/2007/03/duty-of-care.html

http://www.regional.org.au/au/asa/2006/plenary/environment/4649_revellck.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_of_care#United_Kingdom

What’s the point of teaching our children online safety if allegedly responsible adults are going to break all the rules we encourage them to follow?

I gatecrashed East Lothian’s first Internet Safety training for Parents and Families evening held at Musselburgh Grammar School last month. I think I qualify as an “informed” parent having had a first career in IT and having conducted a fair bit of my professional life online. I’m an online survivor as it were! Notwithstanding a bit of CEOP sensationalism, I felt the evening was pitched pretty well, managing to avoid patronising parents with lessons in egg-sucking and give us a few “areas for development” to take home with us.

Kidsmart are the UK face of Childnet International a non-profit organisation working with others to:

“help make the Internet a great and safe place for children”

and they have formulated for parents 5 Key Points to online safety, the first of which stresses not to post any personal information that might lead to you being identified offline, so no addresses, phone numbers, school names and definitely no answering of A/S/L? Obvious, basic, and common sense.

I can’t claim to have oodles of statistics on paedophile techniques for grooming to hand, but I believe that most perpetrators of this crime are known personally to their victims, are more often than not members of their family or extended family and on the whole, don’t need the added hurdle of the internet to ingratiate or force themselves into their victim’s lives. But it does happen online, and A/S/L (age/sex/location) are the big three questions you do not answer when approached by a stranger online.

This obvious, basic and common-sense knowledge clearly bypassed Perthshire Advertiser (who I refuse to reward with a link) reporter ANDREW WELSH. Actually that’s not fair, having trawled around online for Mr Welsh’s online presence I’m sorry to say he doesn’t have one, which for a so-called journalist in this day and age is pretty lamentable. So I can hardly accuse Mr Welsh of endangering his own privacy with the flippant release of his personal information online. No, Mr Welsh instead published enough information in his 26th October Perthshire Advertiser article, “School fight prank posted on Youtube” to positively identify a 15 year old girl. Not only did he publish this child’s A/S/L, he made this information public along with her Youtube ID. Should I wish to I can now give you this child’s phone number, her parent’s names, her household make-up, when they bought their home (and how much they paid for it), and an aerial photo of their street, all for free. For a paltry £2 I can get much much more.

So what exactly was Mr Andrew Welsh thinking or not as the case may be? There can be no journalistic merit in his actions, the so-called offensive video (more on that later) that prompted the article was long since removed and indeed his report said as much. Other than identifying this child there seems to have been no real purpose to publishing this information. As far as I am concerned this is a serious child protection issue and Mr Welsh needs to be called to account for his actions. If he had done this to my child you can rest assured he would be.