The European approach to empowering and protecting children online

Best Practice Forum on 5 December 2008 (Workshop 75)

Children, young people and their families tend to be in the vanguard of new media adoption benefiting from early take-up of new opportunities afforded by these technologies. This means, however, that they may encounter a range of risky or negative experiences for which they may be unprepared: child sexual abuse material is being distributed online, they may get in contact with potential abusers (grooming), access harmful content or being bullied by their peers.

Addressing these risks has been the focus of a succession of Safer Internet programmes implemented by the European Commission since 1999. This is the only pan-European initiative relating to child protection online and has several actions that have proved effective. As part of its actions the programme has initiated a number of European networks bringing together different stakeholders such as NGOs, industry, researchers and law enforcement agencies in order to facilitate dialogue and exchange of best practice on specific issues.

The Best Practice Forum was designed to share the experiences of this pan-European initiative and to address how these networks contribute to make the online environment a safer place for children and young people.

The coordinator of INSAFE, Janice Richardson, presented what this network is doing in order to educate and inform children, families and schools about the possibilities and risks concerning the use of new communication technologies. She informed the meeting that INSAFE is coordinated by European Schoolnet and consists of 26 nodes across Europe, which organise awareness and dissemination activities at national and European levels in order to reach to schools, libraries and media. The members of the network are encouraged to share experience and best practice and many resources have been created such as a good practice market place, an online good practice observatory and a virtual library.

Janice Richardson mentioned further some examples of good practice on how to reach to a broad public like a video clip produced in Germany, which has been translated into 15 languages and been broadcasted in several European countries, and the industry "TeachToday" initiative for developing tools for teachers. The Safer Internet day was mentioned as another successful example of how to reach out to the public. Since its first edition in 2004 by the Safer Internet programme, participation in this event has been steadily growing and 65 countries will take part at the next celebration on 10 February 2009. Many activities will take place at this day such as a collaboration platform for specialists in the form of a virtual universal exhibition, a EC celebration in Luxembourg and the launch of a video clip dealing with cyber bullying.

The next speaker Adrian Dwyer explained that INHOPE is an umbrella organization of the national Hotlines providing a possibility for the internet users to report about illegal content. The organisation was founded in 1999 under the European Commission’s Safer Internet Action Plan to combat growing concerns related to the illegal content.

INHOPE represents and co-ordinates the global network of Internet hotlines and supports them in their fight against illegal content. The global network currently consists of 33 hotlines in 29 countries all over the world. All together INHOPE hotlines have processed 900,000 reports. Out of those 6.000 reports per month have been assessed as potentially illegal and been passed to Law Enforcement for action.

Adrian Dwyer mentioned further that INHOPE is currently looking at the possibility of creating a shared URL database for the member hotlines. A common database has several benefits as it would; reduce duplication of reports passed to Law Enforcement, provide a global view of the problem related to the images of child sexual abuse and provide more relevant information for developing strategies to tackle the problem.

Bojana Lobe and Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, two of the researchers participating in EU KIDS ONLINE, explained that the purpose of this network is to examine European research on cultural, contextual and risk issues in children's safe use of the Internet and new media. The network has research teams in 21 European countries and it has produced a number of reports, which are available at www.eukidsoline.net. Some of these reports define how to research children and online technologies in a comparative perspective like the Best Practice Research Guide and others are cross-national comparisons on children's online opportunities and risks across Europe.

The two speakers mentioned some of the findings of the cross-national comparisons which show that the more parents use the internet, the more the children are too and that it's teenagers who are the digital pioneers. The comparisons also show that there are similarities in risk across countries and that disclosing personal information followed by exposure to pornography and to violent or hateful content and being bullied/harassed are the greatest risks for teens. The network has also identified demographic similarities in risk and concludes that teens encounter more risks than others, children from lower SES encounter more risks than other children, social parental mediation is to prefer to technical approaches and finally that, below the age of 11, children's skills are perceived to be inferior to parents'.

The European NGO Alliance for Child Safety Online (eNACSO) was presented by Dieter Carstensen. He told the meeting that this network was recently established and currently consisted of 13 children's rights NGOs across Europe. The overriding goal is to create a safer online environment for children.

The purpose of the network is to share expertise and best practices on key policy areas related to child online safety and develop common approaches and strategies in relation to protecting children in relation to new and emerging technologies. On this basis, it will forge joint strategies for change and promote its recommendations to national, European and international decision-makers and other relevant stakeholders. The focus will be on the following areas: policy development & exchange of expertise, Internet governance and child protection, online child sexual abuse material and identification and protection of children who have been abused in the production of images, children's use of interactive technologies: protection and empowerment, online grooming, manipulation and sexual exploitation and child participation.

The next speaker Per-Åke Wecksell presented the Cospol Internet Related Child Abuse Material Project (CIRCAMP). This is a thematic network for facilitating cooperation of law enforcement agencies in Europe and internationally. It is run by the National Criminal Investigation Service in Norway and has members in 13 European countries plus Europol and Interpol.

Per-Åke Wecksell stated that the overall goal of CIRCAMP is to limit the market of commercial distribution of child abuse material that is produced and distributed through online technologies. Through cooperation the network will create a common understanding towards global policing of the Internet. It will further reduce harm on society by attacking the distribution of child abusive material on a European level, and disrupt the methods used by organized crime groups responsible for the illegal pay per view sites.

The implementation of the blocking solution in Denmark was mentioned as a best practice example where the national hotline run by Save the Children, industry and law enforcement cooperates since October 2005. The hotline acts a filter for the police and only relevant cases are forwarded to the police, who collects the reported URLs and after they have been evaluated creates the blocking list. 22 ISPs take part in the initiative not by law but by policy code . Their role is to implement the blocking list on DNS servers, to implement the STOP page and to provide statistics.

The last speaker, Jutta Croll, talked about the Youth Protection Round Table. This is a network for facilitating and coordinating exchange of views between pedagogical experts, child welfare specialists and technical experts on technical and pedagogical measures against unwanted and harmful online content. It has 32 members from 13 European countries and the purpose is to encourage a dialogue between technical specialists and children‘s welfare experts covering a broad variety of knowledge, skills and cultural backgrounds.

Jutta Croll stated that the goal for the Youth Protection Roundtable is to encourage a collaborative and cross-sector dialogue focusing on the optimal mix of effective technology-enhanced strategies on the one hand and education-based strategies on the other hand, to enable youth (and responsible adults in the case of minors) for a safe and secure use of the Internet. The roundtable will produce two sets of Guidelines, which will be published on 3 April 2009: one for technical developments in respect of educational issues, and the other product-neutral guidelines for use of filter technologies and pedagogical measures in public and private areas.

In the discussion following the presentations, the European activities for empowering and protecting children online were referred to as "the reference" and delegates from developing countries, in particular, expressed their wish for a closer contact and cooperation with Europe.

Panellists:

Organizer: European Commission, Safer Internet programme

Chair: Antti Peltomäki, Deputy Director-General, DG INFSO, European Commission

Secretary: Margareta Traung, Principal Administrator, Safer Internet programme, DG INFSO, European Commission

INSAFE: Janice Richardson, project coordinator http://www.saferinternet.org/

INHOPE: Adrian Dwyer, membership coordinator https://www.inhope.org/

EU KIDS ONLINE: Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, University of Tartu and Bojana Lobe, University of Ljubljana http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/EUKidsOnline/

eNACSO: Dieter Carstensen, chair of the eNACSO group http://www.redbarnet.dk/enacso

CIRCAMP: Per-Åke Wecksell, Detective Inspector, National Criminal Police, Sweden