by Mary Aiken
In the developed world, we historically boycotted goods made by children in Third World sweatshops in the belief that these children were being deprived of the right to childhood. Exposure to extreme disturbing content online also deprives a child of innocence and a childhood. You don’t need a rocket scientist or cyberpsychologist to figure that out.
This is the law of the cyber-jungle. This is throw-your-children-into-the-deep-end-of-the-swimming-pool to teach them to swim. If we accept this argument, then it means exposure to pornography is a positive thing—and learning how to fend off adult predators is a skill that should be instilled by experience online. I simply don’t agree. Teaching resilience in the cyber context is a white flag of surrender.
The Internet is clearly, unmistakably, and emphatically an adult environment. It simply wasn’t designed for children. So why are they there? Many experts argue that the positives of the Internet outweigh the damage. If we accept that children are online, will be staying online for greater and greater amounts of their lives, and are by and large having useful and positive experiences there—like learning to read, learning to make friends, and improving fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination—then can we accept responsibility for the damaging things, the disturbing content that could have lasting ill effects on an entire generation?
I would argue that this particular gamble is too great. We cannot gamble with the future development of children who will someday be adults who weren’t cared for and raised in the best way. A generation of what I describe as “cyber-feral children.” I return to John Suler’s analogy: To allow young children online without proper monitoring and supervision is like taking them to New York City to run around, all alone.
And I have to wonder about the children who are falling through the cracks, those who have seen such disturbing things and content that their childhood has been effectively stolen from them. I am thinking of thousands of children in the Philippines who are forced to undress and engage with strange men from all over the world via their webcams. Who is doing more harm to them—the strangers or their own parents, who are selling their innocence online?
Or the children in Africa and other emerging nations who are just now discovering the Internet café. If we think kids in the developing world are vulnerable, what about children elsewhere? Children in Europe and the United States and the rest of the developed world have informed parents, teachers, and other support. What will happen in parts of the world where there is suddenly an increasing availability of devices and services but very little support for these children?
The mean-spiritedness of cyberspace is “fine for an adult,” said Andrew Keen, former University of California professor and author of The Internet Is Not the Answer, in an RTÉ Radio 1 interview in 2015. “We can deal with it. We have thick skins. But not twelve-year-old girls.”
As for childhood? I stand with philosophers Locke and Rousseau in their belief that children have a right to innocence, and a right to a childhood. I think all human beings deserve to have one.
The Rights of a Child in an Age of Technology
Of course, a cellphone in itself is not necessarily dangerous. But now that a greater number of children have access to mobile devices that connect with the Internet, an almost entirely adult environment where we know that one-third of the sites contain pornography, we have to discuss the implications of the impact.
A mobile device offers exposure to inappropriate content—which may lead to the development of addictive or compulsive behaviors. It can expose a child to cyberbullying, or turn a child into a cyberbully. The worst-case scenario involves exposure to forensic risk.
In an age of ubiquitous technology—mobile phones, tablets, and public Wi-Fi—surely monitoring youth behavior online is almost impossible for parents, grandparents, teachers, or caretakers. The point at which technology companies design an app that allows children to take risky images that are transmitted and viewed and then disappear, is the point at which a child’s covert behavior is arguably being enabled by technology.
Burdening parents with all the responsibility of cyber-regulations is asking them to raise their families in a lawless environment, a cyber frontier where they must become their own 24/7 sheriff or marshal. Age-inappropriate content is everywhere online, and any tech-savvy child knows how to access it. Have we adequately discussed this as a society? I raised this in an editorial called “Parents Alone Cannot Police Our Youth in Cyberspace” and was drenched afterward with positive responses from thankful parents.
In the real world, we don’t expect parents to throw themselves across the doors of all bars and pubs to prevent their children from buying alcohol, or expect them to guard cigarette vending machines to keep them from smoking tobacco. In the real world, kids are kept from buying tickets to movies with sexual and violent content. Printed pornography is kept in special areas of convenience stores.
So why is it so easy to find online?
I argue for more governance, more regulation, and much more protection. For a start, let’s look at how the child-protection laws are written now. Child abuse is defined by the World Health Organization as “all forms of physical and/or emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, neglect or negligent treatment or commercial or other exploitation, resulting in actual or potential harm to the child’s health, survival, development or dignity in the context of a relationship of responsibility, trust or power.”
When the United Nations set out to describe the rights of children in the late 1980s, prior to the Internet, the result was a document of fifty-four articles and two optional protocols. The basic human rights of children were highlighted: to survival; to develop to the fullest; to protection from harmful influences, abuse, and exploitation; and to participate fully in family, cultural, and social life.
The four main principles of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child are: devotion to the best interests of the child; nondiscrimination; the right to life, survival, and development; and respect for the views of the child. I would argue that many of these articles are being broken by the presence of an unregulated Internet, and that the prevalence of age-inappropriate content online is an international children’s-rights issue.
When a child is exposed to extreme content online—be it adult pornography or violence like decapitation, suicide, cutting, or bulimia—who is responsible? Whether it is the device manufacturer, the Internet provider, the host, or the generator of content, I believe all parties involved are collectively participating in the abuse of that child. This should be considered a direct breach of the U.N. Convention, and all those complicit should be held accountable, if not legally, then morally and ethically.
What are the solutions? Age verification and validation online would be a good start. With a little assist from our brilliant tech innovators, age restriction and age verification are possible.
Worldwide, several governments are beginning to try to tackle the current situation—and prepare for a future of more complications. In my opinion one of the world leaders is now Germany, where a long discussion led to the creation of new laws that protect children aged fourteen and under online. The Germans have a word for it, Selbstgefährdung, which translates to “self-endangerment” and describes the inevitability of encountering both dangerous content and potential harm in cyber environments. Germany has been working on this since the early 2000s and could be a fine model for the United States and other developed countries that I believe are lagging behind—and have not yet dealt with the matter of the digital age of consent.
In France, the government is looking to tackle extremism on the Internet by legislating that networks that allow hate speech are accomplices in those crimes. In the U.K., there’s been a serious debate and now a groundswell of support for more governance. I attended a closed-session hearing at which age-inappropriate content was discussed in the House of Lords, organized by Julia Davidson, a professor of criminology at the University of Middlesex, where I am a research fellow. Now the U.K.
government is testing an initiative to require all Internet service providers to offer an effective way to stop adult content from coming into the home. Prime Minister David Cameron stated in 2015 that automatic porn filters, to protect children from the darkness of the Internet, will be made “law of the land.” The following year, one of the U.K.’s largest broadband providers, Sky, announced that it will turn on porn filters for all of its new broadband customers—not giving new customers a choice of whether parental controls are on “as standard.”
In 2013, I was appointed by the Minister of Communications to the Internet Governance Committee in Ireland and was a relentless royal pain concerning the rights of the child. Shortly after our report was published in 2014, an initiative was launched by Ireland’s largest Internet service provider to introduce new opt-in child-safety filters on its home broadband connections as part of an industry initiative to take responsibility for protecting kids from adult and age-inappropriate content. It works on laptops, tablets, and smartphones accessing the Web through the company’s service.
Enormously encouraged by this success, I took things one step further in what has become, to be honest, a personal crusade. On the seventieth anniversary of the foundation of the United Nations, I went to The Hague and delivered a keynote address about children’s rights in cyberspace. Following that, on Universal Children’s Day 2015, I formally proposed that a new amendment be considered to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child that would enshrine children’s rights in a cyber context. From my perspective, this is an emergency.
Technology is in a constant state of upgrading, updating, and evolving. Society needs to get much better at keeping up with it. Amending a U.N. Convention is a daunting task and traditionally takes a long time. But in the meanwhile, children are growing up, the content is there—and accessible. A colleague once called me a “disruptive agent of change.” But children deserve better. They are our most valuable resource and our hope for the future, as U.S. president John F. Kennedy said. We all need to get a little less complacent and a lot more disruptive.
CHAPTER 5
Teenagers, Monkeys, and Mirrors
Inside her classroom at Coral Springs Charter High School, Susana Halleck was in distress. The Florida teacher, seven months pregnant, was suddenly experiencing labor contractions. She sat down in a desk chair and struggled to endure the pain—her mouth open, her eyes wide, one hand on her brow. That’s when one of her students, junior Malik Whiter, class of 2015, pulled out his mobile phone.
It was time for a selfie.
In dreads, cap, and big sunglasses, Whiter flashed a big, happy-go-lucky grin for his camera while angling the lens to show his grimacing, pain-stricken teacher in the background. “Selfie with my teacher while she having contractions,” he tweeted.
Selfies bring new meaning to the word self-conscious. These quick, seemingly innocent self-portraits—typically taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media—serve many functions. They can be a preened vision of a public self, a bragging moment of accomplishment, a display of humor, or a declaration of irony to the world, almost a performance. The ubiquitous mobile phone with its mirror-image camera technology makes self-portraits easy to take, delete, filter, or fix, and even easier to share.
Some kids would call what Malik Whiter did, taking his own picture with a featured but unsuspecting person in the background, a kind of photobomb selfie. It’s a prank or joke. Photobomb moments are something like a tourist’s snapshot souvenirs. I was there. But this time, the background wasn’t Mount Rushmore or Niagara Falls. It was Halleck’s suffering.
Whatever you call it, in the time it took for Halleck to reach the hospital to be examined by doctors, Whiter’s pic was making the rounds on social media, first to other high school students at Coral Springs, and then quickly beyond. By evening, it was viral—and had been retweeted by thousands. When asked later by local TV news reporters what possessed him, Whiter said he was just hoping to record the unexpected event for himself and “for her.” He had asked Halleck to smile for the camera, he said, but when she refused, he had no other choice but to catch her “off guard.”
It went viral mainly because people found it funny. BuzzFeed raved: “Behold! The greatest selfie of all time.” Was it funny? Sure, if you don’t take a moment to consider this act in a deeper way—and what it means to use a human being in distress as a visual joke in the background of a curated self-portrait shared on a public social network.
There are more troubling trends to notice here—invasion of privacy, breach of good manners, absence of empathy, not to mention a demonstrated lack of respect for pregnancy, motherhood, the classroom setting, and a teacher’s authority. I could continue this list for another page. But let’s be honest with ourselves: Nobody looks to teenagers as role models of civility and decorum. They can be jokesters, disrupters, provocateurs. Pushing the limits is what they do best. Why? In psychology we explain that they are forming self-concept, or identity, and enjoy experimenting with boundaries and taking risks.
They also crave feedback, which helps them figure out, eventually, who they are—and what the world expects of them. So when teenagers take selfies and share them, what are they hoping to discover? Probably themselves.
Prior to the Internet, this crucial time of identity formation was spent in the real world—a more intimate greenhouse where feedback, both positive and negative, was received from a real-world audience of friends, family, and figures of authority. The social norms and what was expected of these developing human beings was fairly consistent. Twenty or thirty years ago, would a teenager have been allowed to take a photograph of a distressed teacher in a classroom and, without permission, been allowed to publish it in a magazine?
As for Whiter, his teacher’s early labor was declared “a false alarm,” and she returned to the classroom two days later. By then, her image had become an online sensation, or “meme.” (It has since been retweeted 60,424 times and favorited 64,808 times.) Had Whiter crossed a line? Did he get in trouble? Halleck didn’t mind, says Whiter (who got a B in her class). “I have honestly laughed until I cried looking at that pic on two different occasions tonight,” he tweeted. “Think I’m making it my wallpaper.” By the month’s end—a long time in cyberspace—the picture had been appropriated by other pranksters online who cropped Whiter’s smiling face from the classroom setting and superimposed him in the foreground of historical events like the crucifixion of Christ and the Hindenburg blimp explosion.
The Internet is now a primary adventure zone where teenagers interact, play, socialize, learn, experiment, take risks—and eventually figure out who they are. This chapter will try to grapple with this shift, and look at the impact of this new environment on youthful identity formation.
Could growing up in cyberspace change a teenager’s sense of self?
Why So Heartless, Selfie?
The same year as Malik Whiter’s cyber-celebrity moment, another controversial selfie was seen by millions. A lovely young woman with long blond hair, aviator sunglasses, white knit scarf, and matching hat was caught in the act of posing for her own selfie while, behind her, a suicidal man was hanging on the rails of the Brooklyn Bridge.
What, aside from basic psychopathic tendencies, would cause a person to be so cold and unfeeling about another human being’s emotional crisis? Let’s stop and contemplate this. Just as Whiter made a joke of his teacher’s moment of physical crisis, the young blond (she would remain anonymous), whether she planned to share her selfie with a wide audience or not, was apparently making fun of a stranger who was so emotionally troubled and confused that he wanted to end his life. Yes, her selfie seems more heartless than Whiter’s selfie, but aren’t the sense of disengagement and lack of empathy eerily similar? I am not the only person to notice this. The day after the Brooklyn Bridge moment, an observer’s photograph of the anonymous young woman took over the entire front page of the New York Post with the apt headline “SELFIE-ISH.”
This slap of disapproval only encouraged a new trend. (You know how that goes.) In 2014, when traffic was stopped on a Los Angeles freeway due to a man threatening to jump from an overpass, a group of drivers left their cars to pose—big smiles—for group shots and selfies with the suicidal man in the distance behind them. The same year, a policeman in Istanbul was called to the scene of the Bosporus Bridge, where a desperate individual was clinging to the rails. The suicidal man jumped three hours later, but before he went, the officer took a selfie. The bridge and the jumper were in the background. More recently, in March 2016—in perhaps the ultimate example of this trend—a hostage on an EgyptAir flight posed for a bizarre smiling selfie next to a hijacker in his suicide vest. (If you google “suicidal” and “selfie,” you can find more of these.)
Let’s try to consider the mind-set of these people—not the distressed suicidal individuals, but the selfie-takers.
Were they conscious of what they were doing? Or were they so lost, so separated from ethics and empathy, that they weren’t able to clearly consider their actions? Are they emotionally impaired, or has cyberspace impacted their judgment?
A condition that results in lack of empathy toward another person’s distress is narcissism. This is a personality trait that exists to varying degrees in almost all human beings and can be facilitated by cyberspace. I’ll have more to say about this later in the chapter, but for now, I want to acknowledge that a little narcissism can be a good thing, psychologically speaking, and even necessary. It can be one of the drivers behind achievement—leading individuals to seek attention, acclaim, fame, prizes, or special treatment. Actors are famously perceived as the ultimate narcissists, and the psychologically healthier ones even crack jokes about it. They aren’t necessarily heartless people. But a narcissist’s desire to be noticed and become a focus of attention can override a concern for other people—and result in callousness about their suffering.