Increasing Youth Safety and Responsible Behavior Online: A FOSI Discussion Paper

 In the recently published paper from the American Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), the authors of  Increasing Youth Safety and Responsible Behavior Online make some interesting points about the aims and evaluations of internet safety programmes.


As with the recent report from EU Kids Online, they distinguish between 'risk' and 'harm', and also take learnings from the failed anti-drugs campaigns of the 70's and 80's, which simply demonised drug use and were later shown to be largely ineffective, whereas later approaches have emphasized resistance skills, and changing peer group norms.

Here are a couple of extracts from the report which I found of interest:

What are the goals of Internet safety education?

A first step in moving to a culture of evidence is to be clear about our goals. When it comes to helping youth, some prevention goals are clear. Cigarette smoking, illegal drug use, or binge drinking are behaviors that science and public opinion agree cause harm.

In the Internet safety domain, there are some equally apparent and agreed upon goals. For example, reducing the number of youth who receive harassing messages online or who develop online sexual relationships with adults.

But other commonly cited goals in Internet safety may lack a similar consensus and scientific basis. We may think it is a good idea to encourage young people not to talk with strangers online and not to give out personal  information. But these are not established harms in and of themselves. They are risk behaviors that some people think may be related to harm.

In evaluating safety programs, ultimately we want to demonstrate that programs reduce harms and increase benefits, not that they just change “risk behavior”. Thus education programs need to target and measure the ultimate behaviors and conditions of concern.

Do’s and Don’ts in Prevention Education

While the field needs to begin the process of testing the most promising Internet safety programs with evaluation, there is still much we can do to improve what is already in place. Prevention research has provided us with excellent guidelines about what to do and not do:

1. Don’t use scare tactics. Do show examples of successful solutions and helpful actions by victims
and bystanders. Do show adults who are being helpful.

2. Don’t rely on one-shot assemblies. Do find ways to incorporate materials into a curriculum that
includes small group discussion, group activities and role-plays.

3. Don’t promote misleading, exaggerated or unsupported information. Do provide information on
rates, risk factors, and consequences that are based on the best and most current research.

4. Don’t use stereotyped impersonations of teenagers. Don’t over-simplify or over-dramatize
Internet safety problems and risks. Do depict typical situations, typical outcomes, and typical
teenagers. Do illustrate the complexity of the problems youth run into using new technology.

5. Don’t rely on gimmicks alone to get your message across. Do help youth build needed skills.
Do draw from what other evidence based programs are doing.


You can read the full discussion paper here: http://www.fosi.org/images/stories/resources/fosi_whitepaper_increasingyouthsafety_d6.pdf