The UK government has commissioned a review of children’s access to online material. Are we about to see an attempt by the UK government to introduce CDA, COPA or ChIPA-style laws over here, and without the protections of a constitutional guarantee to freedom of speech that led to those acts being substantially struck down by the US Supreme Court?

Initial pronouncements by the psychologist employed by the government to conduct the review, are worrying. Instead of approaching someone like Adam Joinson, one of the UK’s leading internet behaviour psychologists (author of “Understanding the Psychology of Internet Behaviour” and co-editor of “the Oxford handbook of internet psychology”) the government have been starstruck and employed TV “House of Tiny Tearaways” resident psychologist Dr Tanya Bryon. Now, Dr Bryon does have some credentials in this, but her lack of knowledge of the effect of electronic communication is a significant gap in her qualifications for this. Her background in psychopathology, i.e. the treatment of those already disturbed, strikes me as definitely not the right one to advise the government on striking the correct public policy balance for the whole, generally fairly health, population. A recent piece by her in the Times (scroll down past the first section to her part), grounded in her expertise in psychopathology, suddenly bounds out beyond the effect on children of poor parenting and/or clinical causes for depression, to the impact of the media and to an overly general statement in two ways. She says “I have worked with kids for 18 years and they know so much more now. Thanks to the media, the internet and new technology, they have instant access to information. So they know about the threat from global terrorism, but what they see is usually the most skewed, extreme or sensational side as reported by the media. When they hear it they think it is happening everywhere. We have to help them to believe that the world is a safe place. Otherwise children become unhappy and vulnerable children become depressed because their feeling of safety is undermined. This is shown by the 1977 Stress Vulnerability Model, which proposes that people with a vulnerability to psychosis are at a proportionate risk of developing a psychosis as their stress levels increase.”
There are two ways in which this is a worrying statement from someone undertaking such a government review.
First, she is taking a snapshot in time, by the looks of it principally based on her own personal experiences as much as on the change in children over the last eighteen years. The fact that children today may (and she doesn’t cite any real evidence here, just makes that claim) have access to more information about terrorism and other extreme events (global warming, floods, famines, wars) doesn’t change the fact that a whole generation of children from 1950 to 1975 were utterly “terrorised” by the possible nuclear war. The fact that from 1975 to 2000 there was a lower instance of doom’n’gloom about the world and that this maybe had an impact on avoiding a small number of children falling into depression doesn’t mean that it could possibly justify severe censorship in the name of “protecting the children”.
This leads to the second generalisation she makes which is that she is focussing here on the very small number of children who exhibit serious mental health problems in childhood and adolescence. Any consideration of censorship regimes that are designed to shift the boundary of a disease from, say, 0.1% to 0.05% of the population, must be heavily justified if they are applied to the whole population (even the whole population of children, which censorship almost certainly wouldn’t be).
The answer to problems caused by children’s access to information in any form, whether that be TV, internet, DVDs, magazines, books, friends on mobile phones, is quite simply better education. Engaging parents with their children’s information assimilation, and teaching media literacy in schools must be the way forward. The intense puritanical streak in US, and sometimes in UK, society which attempts to “innocentize” children far beyond reality (actual or possible) is far more damaging than the imagined impact of seeing pictures of naked people online.