Young People and Digital Lives

Abstract

The author stresses the importance of including the youth voice in any policy and subsequent legislative implementation around child online safety, given arguably that they are the citizens whose lives will be most impacted on by such approaches. Drawing from a large survey of young people he highlights that they, even at an early age, are not passive consumers of content but are actively engaged in all manner of social activity online. He expands on this perspective by showing that, from a young person’s perspective, harm rarely comes from content and is actually drawn from a breadth of online environments where the main cause of upset online is not content, but people. As such, filtering and blocking solutions will rarely prevent this from happening. Through evidence as a result of discourse with young people the author raises concerns about preventative approaches to online safety and how a failure to tackle effectively such issues within education settings results in peer oriented resolutions to problems that arise.

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