Culture, Media and Sport CommitteeSupplementary written evidence submitted by the NSPCC

Introduction

1. The NSPCC welcomed the opportunity to respond to the Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) Select Committee inquiry into online safety in September, and we were delighted to be invited to come before the committee in October to give oral evidence.

2. Since then, the NSPCC has released further research on the issue of online safety and was the only children’s charity to be involved in the Prime Minister’s internet safety summit in November. As such, we have requested to submit supplementary evidence to the inquiry, to be read alongside our original response. We hope both the statistics and perspectives included here are helpful for the Committee when making its recommendations.

Harmful Contact Online

New Key Stats

10,600 young people contacted ChildLine in 2012–13 for support and advice on how to deal with internet safety related issues– a 65% increase on the year before1

4,507 young people contacted ChildLine in 2012–13 for support and advice on how to deal with being bullied online—an 87% increase on the year before2

More than One in Four 11–16 year olds with a social networking profile have experienced something upsetting on a social networking site.3

3. Research the NSPCC is about to launch research which shows that 28% of young people who have a social networking profile have experienced something that has upset them in the last year. These experiences include cyberstalking, being subjected to aggressive or offensive language, being sent sexually explicit pictures and being asked to provide personal or private information. However, the greatest proportion of this group (37%) told us that they had experienced “trolling”. Another alarming statistic showed that over half of these young people said they did not know the person who was responsible for the behaviour that upset them.

4. Alongside this evidence that online bullying is clearly a problem for young people in the UK, the latest ChildLine statistics showed an 87% increase in 2012–13 in the number of young people contacting us to ask for support and advice about being bullied via social networking sites, chat rooms, online gaming sites, or via their mobile phones. We believe the increasing ownership of smartphones and tablets by young people is likely to be contributing to this trend.

5. In our original submission to the Committee the NSPCC described the need for online safety, including information about respectful behaviours and managing upsetting experiences, to be a core part of the national curriculum, taught through compulsory Sex and Relationships Education (SRE). We also called for social networking sites and other technological leaders to provide straightforward and meaningful ways to report abuse online. We continue to call for this action and in addition the NSPCC would be delighted if the Committee could support the following asks:

The UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) Executive Board should make tackling the risks children experience on social networking sites a priority

Ofcom—should play a greater role in providing easily accessible information to parents about social networking sites

Social networking sites and others—should offer a range of options for how to report illegal or offensive bullying or content and default privacy settings should be set to the highest levels possible for users under 18. The NSPCC also believes sites should provide incentives for new users to take safety and etiquette tutorials.

6. Additional to the issue of online bullying, the ChildLine annual review, Can I tell you something? also showed that 1061 young people specifically talked about online sexual abuse, with girls being the most affected. ChildLine also saw a 28% increase in contacts from young people who talked about being asked to post sexually provocative images online, or share them via a mobile phone.

7. The NSPCC remains adamant that children should be given strategies to resist unwanted sexual approaches, encouraged to report upsetting experiences online and be taught about online safety as part of compulsory SRE lessons at school. We are pleased that the Government has committed to emailing out to every school SRE advice developed by Brook, the Sex Education Forum and others. This is a helpful interim measure to address the current shortfall in up-to-date statutory SRE guidance. However, we believe the Government should commit to updating the official SRE guidance from 2000 to include issues children face in today’s world, like staying safe online.

8. We do, of course, believe parents have a central role in talking to their children about how to stay safe online. We appreciate these conversations might feel daunting, but we believe parents needn’t be experts on the internet, but instead treat online safety as they would any other form of parenting where rules and boundaries need to be set.

9. We also recognise that other agencies that work with children and prioritise children’s safety should play a role alongside schools and parents in providing online safety advice and education. The NSPCC in October 2013 launched the ChildLine ZipIt app to discourage children from sending sexually explicit messages. This has already been downloaded by 40,000 young people so far. We have also developed in collaboration with CEOP the Keeping Children Safe Online e-learning course aimed at any organisation or professional working with children.

Age-inappropriate Content

New Key Stats

63% of children aged 11–12, who use a social networking site, have a profile on Facebook, and 28% use Twitter despite the minimum age for registration on both sites being set at 13.4

28% of over 601 school pupils surveyed by the NSPCC think pornography definitely “influences how young people have to behave in a relationship.”5

10. Based on our research, we estimate that half of all the 11 and 12 year olds in the UK use services that have a minimum age of 13. The NSPCC is concerned that this leaves them vulnerable to engaging with content and behaviours that are not appropriate for their age. In addition, ChildLine counselled 475 young people who had been exposed to sexually explicit images or internet pornography and almost one third of children surveyed by the NSPCC about watching pornography said it affected the way they acted when they were in a relationship.

11. We support plans by the major Internet Service Providers (ISP) to launch a national campaign to help parents use the filters and tools that are available to them to manage the online content to which their children have access, and more broadly help parents to understand more about internet safety. To support these efforts, the NSPCC also calls for:

UKCCIS—to undertake a robust and independent evaluation of the ISPs campaign to measure its effectiveness and push for improvements where needed

The Government—should evaluate the effectiveness of active choice plus and be prepared to explore legislative solutions to children accessing adult content and services.

Child Abuse Images

12. In our original evidence to the Committee the NSPCC explained that a Freedom of Information request we made in 2010 revealed that nearly 26 million child sexual abuse images had been confiscated in the preceding two years from just five of the 43 police forces in England and Wales which were able to check their records. At that time most forces said it would take too long to interrogate files to see how many pictures of children being sexually abused they had accumulated during investigations. However, estimates of the number of online child abuse images confiscated by police in England and Wales each year in the UK range from 100–360 million.6

13. The NSPCC welcomed the opportunity to contribute to the Prime Minister’s internet safety summit in November, and we were pleased by the commitment shown by the leading search engines to ensure that tens of thousands of the most disturbing search terms will return only “clean” results and warnings about child abuse imagery. We now urge the Government and industry to work together to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of these technological solutions and make improvements where needed.

14. Alongside this proactive approach from industry, we want to see a tireless commitment to policing efforts to tackle child abuse images from the CEOP command within the new National Crime Agency. Images of child abuse was mentioned briefly in the NCA’s 2013–14 Annual Plan as an operational priority:

“To tackle the enablers of crime that have both utility and impact across several threat areas. For example cyber-enabled criminality where access to the hidden internet can facilitate criminal acts such as illicit drugs supply, images of child abuse and the trade in stolen credit card data.”7

15. However, we hope that the Agency’s programme of work on child abuse images will feature much more extensively in its next annual plan, and more broadly on policing the NSPCC wants to see:

A greater number of arrests and prosecutions for offences relating to child abuse images.

A commitment to identifying and destabilising the criminals at the centre of child abuse image networks.

A greater focus on tackling child abuse images at a local level from Police and Crime Commissioners, and in Police and Crime Plans.

16. The NSPCC also eagerly awaits the work of the UK/US taskforce on child abuse images which we hope will encourage action from the internet and technology industries to apply their technical expertise to develop innovative solutions to this global challenge.

January 2014