EU Kids Online – what the future holds

We’ve already blogged about EU Kids Online Final Report, presented on June 11th, and now I get to be the first ‘guest blogger’ on the eModeration website to give my impressions, since I was representing eModeration at the conference in London.

This research, gathered over three years from 21 EU member states in their diverse languages, has been, according to Sonja Livingstone Director of EU Kids Online, like working within a Tower of Babel. I can imagine. Kudos to the LSE then, for pulling it together, and providing such an interesting display of work from the research centres involved, which demonstrated how their respective countries were fairing when it came to online usage and safety, plus promoting best practice to young people.

The various speakers highlighted the key areas within the report (presentations here), and were, in the main, knowledgeable and interesting. But I have to confess, it was a lot to take in, and the inevitable between-caffeine-shots haze was beginning to creep over me when I was saved by the entrance of the formidable Tanya Byron, author of The Byron Review: Safer Children in a Digital World (2008)

She spoke of the disappointing questions she had put to her in her recent 'grilling' by the government think-tank and expressed frustration at the 'Daily Mail' attitude of even those who should know better. She felt political currency was getting in the way of moving forward and making changes. Information needs to get to the people at large but not via hysterical media headlines or politicians vying for political gain. Effectively, politics and journalistic hype were wasting time and resources: the more they messed around, the more people – especially children - have bad experiences on the web. Cutting through the flack in typical style, she managed to sharpen to a point all the issues that had been and would be discussed during the day.

Which has just made me think about the Digital Britain report which came out today, parts of which we have read - but which appears to be slightly tricky to inwardly digest. More from eModeration about that as soon as it’s gone down ...

Anyway, on to future plans: There’s to be an immediate launch of EU Kids Online II: this will be a further data collection exercise, via interviews with parents and children in 20 member states, started 12th June 2009. For more information, see here.

The Safer Internet Programme 2009 – 2013 is being launched, which will cover 4 actions: 1) Ensuring public awareness of online risks and precautions, 2) Fighting against illegal content (in particular child sexual abuse material) and tackling harmful conduct online (grooming and bullying), 3) Promoting a safer online environment and finally, 4) Broadening the knowledge base that will provide input to the development of policies and actions. For more information, see here.

There will be further research in the form of ‘POG’ - a study into understanding the process of online grooming, an offender-related study. Also, research into online grooming from the victim’s perspective, with the aim of feeding the learnings into policy making, child welfare work and awareness raising.

The conference identified some future needs to be addressed: there need more research on those under 12 years of age – understandably a difficult group to study. It is important to have a good level of online content aimed at children (of all ages) as this helps divert their attention from ‘wandering’ elsewhere on the net. And a point made several times: content aimed at children should be ‘granulated’ – different for all ages/genders/cultures/risk levels. One size really doesn’t fit all.


Rebecca Fitzgerald
Account Manager, eModeration