OPEN LETTER TO GOVERNMENT FROM CHILD PROTECTION PROFESSIONALS
We are coordinating an open letter to the Prime Minister, from child protection professionals across the UK, warning of an unprecedented safeguarding crisis caused by children's access to personal internet-enabled devices.
If you’re a child protection specialist or Designated Safeguarding Lead in any field (education, police, healthcare, social services) please sign and share with your colleagues.
Why
Child protection specialists are consistently warning that children need urgent protection from the range of harms inflicted daily on children through smartphones.
This ranges from sexual exploitation and criminality, to bullying, screen addiction and distraction from real-life activities essential for healthy development.
It is an unprecedented safeguarding crisis, which will take time to address.
The government has signalled the possibility of a social media ban for under 16s, which we welcome. However, we must also remove smartphones from schools as a matter of urgency to protect children from the additional safeguarding risks posed by these powerful devices.
Open letter to government from child protection professionals
Dear Prime Minister,
Nearly 200 years ago, the UK government passed the first law to protect children. The 1833 Factory Act, which banned children younger than 9 from textile factories, was the first step towards making children economically worthless but emotionally priceless. We stopped sending children up chimneys and down mines and the UK has, for more than a century, been one of the safest countries in the world to be a child.
That is changing Prime Minister. This is because addictive-by-design technology, delivered 24/7 via smartphones and high-speed mobile data, has made children’s time economically valuable once more. The longer children spend scrolling, gaming, sharing, etc, the more money big tech companies make from advertising and data-harvesting. As such, apps are designed to be as engaging and addictive as possible, providing a constant dopamine hit, which developing brains simply cannot resist.
We welcome last week’s passing of an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to ban social media for the under 16s, and your government’s commitment to protect young people's wellbeing and ensure safer online experiences.
A minimum age of 16 for social media will come as a relief to millions of parents, children and educators across the country, and we need to go even further to address the additional harms being caused by powerful mobile devices, especially during the school day.
As child protection professionals, we see an alarming array of harms being inflicted on children throughout the day, including at school and on the way to and from school, through smartphones. These include:
- Minors being groomed to take/share intimate photos;
- Sexual extortion - ‘sextortion’ - where children are pressurised to share more intimate and sexualised images and videos with the threat of previous images/videos being shared;
- Children using ‘nudification’ apps and deepfake AI technology to produce fake, inappropriate images of their peers;
- Financial extortion - for example, threatened dissemination of intimate pictures;
- Children viewing and distributing violent pornography and other illegal images, and material that encourages online harms;
- Minors viewing and distributing other types of inappropriate (though legal) material;
- Exacerbated bullying via smartphones (’cyber-bullying’) - e.g. by broad circulation of images/videos of humiliating incidents;
- Reduced educational attainment due to online access that distracts from learning, filming teachers/pupils, phones going off in class; and
- The constant threat of being filmed or photographed against the individual’s wishes.
Smartphones are one of the biggest threats to our children's safety and welfare and they have no place in our classrooms, playgrounds or school buses.
Prime Minister, online platforms and powerful digital devices have unleashed the biggest child protection crisis since child labour. This is a moment in history that requires the strongest intervention from the highest level of government. Just as we made seatbelts mandatory and illegalised the selling of cigarettes and alcohol to children, so we must prohibit smartphones in schools.
We welcome the government's recognition of the failure of the mobile phone guidance for schools (published February 2024) to protect children when under the duty of care of schools. But non-statutory guidance will never be enough.
We therefore urge you to support a statutory ban of personal internet-enabled devices in schools (unless they are used for medical monitoring) so that every child in every school is afforded the immediate protection and freedom of a smartphone-free learning environment.
For two hundred years, the citizens of Britain have relied on their government to put the welfare and safety of our children first, irrespective of political leaning. We fear that without decisive and immediate action by your government, history will look back at this time as one in which we were too slow to protect children from these known harms, mistakenly prioritising the monetary interests of big tech companies over the preservation of a safe, nourishing childhood.
On this basis, we urge you to implement these protective measures immediately and to restore the UK’s position as a world leader in child protection.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Ciarán Murphy,
Senior Lecturer in Social Work, Edge Hill University.
Board Member, Trustee & Research Lead - Association of Child Protection Professionals (Reg Charity No. 1190441)