Firstly a big thank you to Guernsey Police for the huge amount of time, care and resources they invest in protecting our community, and in particular our children, from online harm. Their work in education and enforcement deserves our appreciation.

In recent reports in the media, a member of the police service compared protecting children from the negative impact of the internet to road safety lessons: “We teach children and young people how to cross the road safely so that when they’re on their own, they can do it without getting run over, and this [online safety] is no different.”

However, we must stop believing that educating children alone is enough. You cannot teach a child to “cross safely” when the roads themselves are lawless. Awareness, regulation, and collective action are urgently required to ensure the online world adheres to safety regulations as required in the real world. This is not just a policing issue; it’s a public health and societal issue, and while this sentiment of teaching children to cross the road is well intentioned, the comparison is fundamentally flawed. Teaching a child to cross a road is effective because traffic is a very regulated environment. Roads have laws, enforcement, licensing, safety barriers, signage and accountability. If someone drives dangerously, there are severe consequences. If a road is unsafe, it’s repaired or closed. Every element of that system is designed by experts and continually refined to protect the most vulnerable.

Now imagine if roads worked like the online world. There would be a complex network of highways, all with multiple, unmarked lanes. Anyone would be allowed to drive, with no requirement for age restrictions or licenses. There would be no traffic lights and no speed limits, there would be signs everywhere - but it wouldn’t be clear which ones you could trust and which ones could send you over a cliff edge. At the click of the indicator, you could be led down dark and potentially dangerous alleyways. Billboards would constantly bombard children, trying to sell to, seduce, bribe, scam or manipulate them. And when there’s a crash, there’s rarely justice because no one can find the driver. That’s the digital landscape our children are being asked to “navigate.” It’s not regulated. It’s not safe. It’s not something a child can simply be taught to manage carefully and then left to their own devices (pardon the pun). It is too big for any one area to tackle alone. Parents cannot cover it all, teachers cannot detect it all or be expected to manage it all, and police cannot respond to it all.

Easy and constant access to the internet (particularly through smartphones) is impacting on every aspect of children’s health, from their early cognitive development, to their physical and social development, to their mental health and wellbeing, and academic attainment. To truly protect children, we need far greater awareness, regulation, and accountability. This means governments, regulators, and tech companies must take responsibility for the environments they have built to remove potential dangers - just as we demand safety standards in any other realm that could be addictive and damaging to children, such as age limits around alcohol, smoking, driving and sex.

Yes children are educated about these areas, but the responsibility is not handed solely to them to regulate themselves, lots of regulation is put in place. Currently the way society seems to be dealing with online safety is to put the (huge) onus on children, and then react to the problems and impacts instead of preventing them.

What safety system invests only in trying to manage the impact? Why do we have an approach where we have ambulances waiting at the bottom of a cliff but no safety barrier at the top? We would never accept a road safety policy that had no laws or legislation and hoped that the road crossing lessons had done a good enough job. We give credit to the Guernsey Police for having had the foresight to create a digital safety development officer role, and for the education to the community this role brings. But they cannot do this alone. We need Government, Education and the community to come together to keep our children healthy and safe as they grow up in this increasingly online world.

As published in The Guernsey Press