e-Youth: (future) policy implications: reflections on online risk, harm and vulnerability

article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL Introduction Most children in the world's wealthy countries use the internet at home, school and elsewhere, with ever more children gaining the broadband and mobile access that thoroughly embeds online activities into the timetables and spaces of their daily routines. Accompanying this notable change in the conditions of childhood, education and participation, a growing body of academic, public policy and market research is charting the unfolding nature and scope of children's use of the internet, revealing the considerable opportunities it affords, the intriguing and complex digital literacies that children are gaining and the diverse pleasures of use. At the same time, there is growing concern that online opportunities are accompanied by a diverse array of risks. Before any policy actions can be formulated, a clear view of the evidence base is vital. The EU Kids Online network classified online risks to children in terms of content risks (which position the child as recipient, generally of mass produced content though increasingly also of user‐generated content), contact risks (in which someone contacts the child, requiring him or her to participate in some way, if unwittingly or unwillingly) and conduct risks (where the child is an actor, generally as part of a peer to peer or networked interaction), as shown in Figure 1 (Hasebrink, Livingstone, Haddon, & Olafsson, 2009). Figure 1: Classification of online risks (with exemplars) Summarising some 400 studies across Europe, the EU Kids Online network further estimated that five in ten teenagers have given away personal information to others online, four in ten have seen online pornography, three in ten have seen online hate or violent content, two in ten have received bullying or nasty messages and one in ten has gone to a meeting with someone first met online. This suggests that content risks are the most common, followed by contact risks; less is known on a cross‐national basis about conduct risks, where the child is positioned as perpetrator rather than victim or, indeed, about many other risks on the policy agenda. Although evidence of risks is difficult to obtain and open to methodological challenge, researchers do seem to be reaching some consensus on how to ask children …