Sensationalization of online risk, Munch-Poke-Ping, Twitter & Facebook Time-line
Munch, Poke & Ping – The first Advisry Board meeting took place this week as funding has been awarded for a 16 month project , in attendance:
Stephen Carrick-Davies, Munch Poke Ping
Katie Bacon, Online Youth Outreach
Neil Finbow, – PRUS. Network
Claire Smith – TDA
Julian Parmiter- Ruined City Films
Dr Emma Bond University Suffolk
Tim Mungeam – Springboard
It was such a pleasure to spend time with like minded people who are passionate in supporting and promoting positive use of social media. The aim of the project is to create, disseminate and scale up a series of positive, creative E-safety resources targeted at staff working with vulnerable young people in PRU (Pupil Referral Units). There are 3 work packages; creation of 2 film clips; Young people to choose the theme for the film clip (identity, coping or conflict) and social media. This will build upon the prvious film clip created Nice Pics. The second film will be a case study on the positive use of social media by young people.
NICE PICS – Website for the full report http://www.carrick-davies.com/research/vulnerable-young-people
The second work package is the creation of a set of ’scenario’ lesson plans for PRU staff to use with vulnerable young people which will address the issues of risky behavior which may start online but has very serious offline consequences. The last work package will be at the end of the year a national conference (late 2012) bringing together practitioners who work with vulnerable young people together to disseminate the findings and resources produced.
Comments from the first planning meeting:
One comment ‘I am fed-up with the sensationalization of online risk, yes it exists and we need to ensure that children and young people are skilled to keep themselves safe online. However, we need to change the teaching approaches from FEAR & WOREST case scenarios to promoting and cultivating young people’s digital competencies and self confidence to mange risk.”
Comment from Claire Moore (Training Development Agency – Schools) “It’s crucial that every trainee teacher is confident and has both the skills but also the understanding of the legal responsibility for being a teacher. This project can help ”
Comment from me ‘“Young people are not experts in their own lives when it comes to risk. This project must empower practitioners who have humility and humanity to do the right thing and be empowered to protect and support these vulnerable young people.”
We discussed the practical framework of the 3 P’s Protection, Provision & Participation advocated by Tim Davies and Sangeet Bhullar. As we thought this would provide us with a good ethical framework of practice to promote and enable young people ‘meaningful’ engagement and active participation in the project. Emma Bond had done work on this 4 years ago as part of her ETSI work. Guidelines on the provision of ICT services to young children (Download PDF) The inclusion of ‘PREVENTION’ is important for us as a lot of PRUS simply ‘prevent’ access to the internet and hence not supporting young people to make informed safe decisions when online.
RETHINKING RESPONSES TO CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE’S ONLINE LIVES
Tim Davies & Sangeet Bhullar
ABSTRACT from the discussion paper – sharing preliminary work to develop a practical framework for thinking about rights-respecting advocacy, policy and practice responses to support and empower children and young people in their daily encounters with the Internet and other networked digital technologies. Contemporary public service policy and practice responses to the role of the Internet in young people’s lives focus disproportionately on strategies involving web blocking and filtering, restriction of access to online spaces, and safety messaging highlighting what young people should not do online. We argue that such strategies can be both counterproductive, and lead to a neglect of the role of public services in promoting young people’s digital literacy and skills.
Social Media Training Sessions- Group discussions
This week I delivered a half day Twitter training course and a 1 day Facebook (intermediate level) course. Each course had some lovely people attending who were not hesitate in asking me some tough challenging questions. On the twitter training course we had a lengthly group discussion about how to use Twitter to support, encourage and strengthen the trust between a young person and a counsellor. We explored how organisations working with vulnerable young people on sensitive issues need to consult in depth with their target audience on ‘how best’ to engage with them online either on Facebook or Twitter- online branding. On this particular occasion young people ages 16-25 years can access sexual health advice and counseling services. A young person may not want to ‘follow’ and communicate with a organization via Twitter if the logo and Twitter bio is not discreet.
We discussed how practitioners/counsellor within the organization could have ‘professional’ individual twitter accounts and make these discreet so that they can ‘invite’ young people (directly during a counseling session) to engage with them on twitter (if they actively use twitter) to keep in contact in-between counseling/support sessions. If young person agrees that the support would compliment their treatment plan then ‘tweets’ can be sent via ‘DIRECT’ message option. I.E. ‘Hope u had a good day and you have been able to take some time out 4urslf. Remember to complete ur reflective diary b4 nxt session’ or a young person could ‘tweet’ when they are struggling and just need to touch base and have reassurance. All of the above would need to be contracted explicitly with the young person and the organization and necessary risk assessment and policies considered.
In attendance at the Facebook training session we had 2 social workers from Sweden who are currently in the US on a European transnational professional practice exchange and youth practitioners from across the UK . We also had 3 staff team members from the National Deaf Society, so we had 2 BSL signers they did an excellent job of signing as I speak rather fast. We had a lively discussion about the necessity for inclusive provision for all young people and communities on social network platforms. Majority of film clips released from Facebook use white people to present and there are often no english subtitles.
The group watched the Facebook ‘Time-line’ launch film clip. We then discussed the positive and possible conflict/difficulties and implications for vulnerable young people. Firstly the film clip, is again very ‘white’ and ‘middle’ class. The time line also follows a ‘traditional’ life pattern; schooling, graduation, travel (journey of self discovery) dating, marriage, child birth etc. This is not to undermine those life choices, but for many young people and adults that is not their timeline. They may want/desire those experiences/opportunities but possibly to lack of funds, education or economic climate they are unattainable. Or they many not want these traditional life choices and if sharing this on Facebook could cause conflict among their peer group. A positive aspect of Time line it could be used as a engagement tool to learn about a young person life and their choices at various stages.
Check out Facebook Time-line launch film clip.
Categories: Blog
5 Responses
Leave a Reply
Katie Bacon
Email: info@katiebacon.co.uk
Tel: 07841 023626
Subscribe to this site's RSS feed.
Hey Katie,
Great reporting of the MPP work, and great to hear about the team taking this forward.
Two quick thoughts though:
It worries me to see claims like “Young people are NOT experts in their own lives when it comes to risks”, as this could be used to justify adults absolutely knowing best when it comes to young people’s encounters with risky situations. The claim has an implicit assumption that there is someone who IS an expert in young people’s lives when it comes to risk – and I’m pretty sure that’s not true.
We can say things like “Young people may not have all the information they need to judge risks”, and “Young people tend to weight potential future harm lower than adults do when judging situations”, but we need to be careful not to diminish the different forms of expertise in their own lives that young people do bring to risky situations – and to avoid giving the impression to policy makers etc. (accidentally often) that as young people don’t know everything, adults must do – and so adults can decide what is best for young people without reference to their views and experiences (which is how a lot of e-Safety materials appear to be have been developed in the past).
I’m also cautious about including ‘Prevention’ as a ‘Right’ as Emma does in her model. Prevention is a strategy for creating safe spaces, and realising rights to protection: but it is not a right in itself. Prevention is one amongst many strategies (building resilience is another one – and one it could be in conflict with…) – and so I think we have to be careful with pre-empting the strategies that work, and that work within a framework of promoting the full range of children and young people’s rights.
Hi Tim,
Thanks for the feedback. The comment was made in the context of another professional, sharing that ‘Young people are experts in their own lives.’ In my experience working with vulnerable young people in various difficult settings both online and offline. On occasions they simply not aware of the risks and/or that they are being exploited and that they have the right to be safe and protected. The model of practice adopted is aspires to be ‘person centered’ when a CAF (Common Assessment Framework) is conducted and to ensure the that the child/young person has the opportunity to share their views about the situation, aspirations for the future and their preferred form of support. It also allows them to ask questions so they understand they reasons for the interventional support and pathway plan. However, many times at CAF/child protection meetings very difficult decisions have to be made to protect the child/young person with or without their consent as there is a duty of care. A child/young person may reject and/or disagree as they may not understand that they are at and will continue to be at risk of harm I.E Persistent domestic violence in the home but young person wants to stay to protect mother or siblings and not be placed in care, Sexual exploitation by family member (online & offline) the young person does not understand they have been exploited, Young sibling being groomed by old siblings to ‘run’ drugs or store weapons. This opens a wider debate about ‘values’ & ‘what constitutes a safe environment (physically & psychologically)’ as this differs depending on demographic, economic status, ethnicity and cultural differentials.
It’s a tough discussion about the right to PREVENTION, it depends how this is interpreted and activated. I need to muse over this some more over a cuppa tea. Hmmmmm
Hey Katie,
I’ll join you in a cuppa some time for more musing. This is definitely a challenging area to find the balance: but it probably should be challenging – as they are really tough situations you describe.
I was struck reading Children, Rights and Childhood by David Archard (http://amzn.to/plZrvh) this week to prepare for Safer Internet Forum by his treatment of the potential tension in UNCRC between ‘best interests of the child’ and Article 12 rights to be heard. I’ve not got the book with my right now – but I think essentially it does support the sort of situation you’ve described above: being expert about my own life should mean being expert about my views, and my own subjective experiences – but it doesn’t necessarily mean being expert about what might be best for me. And when other people claim expertise over my live, the burden should be on them to explain why…
Finding foundations for decision making in tough situations is key.
Tim
[...] out previous blogs to learn more about the MUNCH, POKE, PING project: Sensationalization of online risk, Munch-Poke-Ping, Twitter & Facebook Time-line Each young person lives in their own personal mobile universe, and each mobile universe is [...]
[...] out previous blogs to learn more about the MUNCH, POKE, PING project: Sensationalization of online risk, Munch-Poke-Ping, Twitter & Facebook Time-line Each young person lives in their own personal mobile universe, and each mobile universe is [...]