Who should take responsibility for child protection? The short answer is both simple and obvious: we all have a responsibility. No one agency or group has a monopoly of concern.

Clearly parents and teachers have a pivotal role to play, both in terms of educating children as to the nature of the potential hazards they might encounter online and helping them to avoid or deal with them. But equally, in the context of the digital revolution, companies that invent and market products and services also have a responsibility to anticipate potential risks to children who might use them, and to develop strategies to minimise those risks.

There can be little doubt that the arrival of a range of interactive digital technologies to the mass consumer market has made it possible for several old forms of problematic behaviour, including criminal behaviour, to be repackaged and presented in new guises. Of course, we can debate whether or not parents’ or policy makers’ fears of online crime, or harm to children, are always entirely proportionate or truly justified. But there is no escaping the fact that, in some cases, young people have been subjected to terrible harm, which the new technologies have played a critical part in helping to facilitate. Whatever one thinks about how the mass media reports such incidents, they are emphatically not always making things up.

In an important sense, it hardly matters whether it is two, or 2002, children who have been harmed in this way. Any and every parent who knows of an avoidable risk to their child is going to want to avoid it. Parents do not sit down and say, ‘Ah yes. The probability of little Johnnie coming to grief if he does x is only 0.00001% so I won’t bother even to talk to him about x, lest it spoil his fun.’ More likely, if a parent realises that x is possible, even if very unlikely, they will try to find a way of ensuring that their child is aware of the possible risk and will try to advise them as to how to avoid falling prey to it.

As new technologies or digital phenomena emerge, and social networking sites are a classic example, it is not surprising that there is an initial buzz of concern, but, at least within the UK, we have well established mechanisms for discussing how to resolve any real problems that arise. Since 2001 we have had the home secretary’s Internet Task Force on Child Protection, which not only embraces all relevant arms of government, but also draws in all the key technology players, alongside child protection experts and the police. Via this tri-partite, partnership approach, the experience of the industry marries with the detailed knowledge of law enforcement and child protection experts, to deliver a public policy outcome. Invariably this will be mediated through a consultative, iterative, and very public process.

Right now the Task Force is discussing social networking. I am certain they will recognise the very obvious value and importance of these sites, and of course it will acknowledge that as children start to get a bit older they have a right to, and need, their private spaces. 

In fact, a number of the problems that have arisen up to now have generally been the result of young people not realising that, what they thought they were publishing privately can, in fact, be viewed by anyone and everyone with an internet connection. A key task, therefore, will be to find better ways of get these messages across to the users of the sites and also, in the case of younger users, to their parents and teachers- not so they can police them, but in order to put them in a better position to help.

John Carr is chairman of the UK’s Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety and Associate Director of NCH’s Children and Technology Unit. He is also a member of the Home Secretary’s Internet Task Force on Child Protection and a member of the National Crime Squad’s programme board to establish the new national Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre. In another life he was also a founding trustee of DEMOS, one of the UK’s leading independent think tanks.