In this safeguarding podcast we discuss with Simone Vibert, Senior Policy and Public Affairs Analyst, the unique powers of the Children’s Commissioner’s Office, what they are and what they aren’t, the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on child online safety, the mental health services chasm, whether there’s a fundamental flaw in the Online Harms white paper and the dubious practices of the online gaming industry.
There’s a lightly edited for legibility transcript of the podcast below for those that can’t use podcasts, or for those that simply prefer to read.
Neil Fairbrother
Welcome to another edition of the SafeToNet Foundation safeguarding podcast hosted by me, Neil Fairbrother, where we talk about all things to do with safeguarding children in the online digital context.
Child safeguarding in the online digital context is at the intersection of technology, law and ethics and culture and it encompasses all stakeholders between a child using a smartphone and the content or person online that they are interacting with.
The role of the Children’s Commissioner’s Office in England is independent of government and Parliament and it has unique powers to help bring about long term change and improvements for all children, particularly the most vulnerable. To help explain how the Children’s Commissioner’s Office uses its powers and to explore some recent activities they’ve undertaken, I’m joined by Senior Policy and Public Affairs Analyst at the Children’s Commissioner’s Office, Simone Vibert. Simone, welcome to the podcast.
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Thank you. It’s great to be having this chat.
Neil Fairbrother
Can you give us a brief resumé Simone of yourself please and describe your role at the Children’s Commissioner’s Office?
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Of course. I’m a senior policy analyst as you’ve mentioned, and I’ve been working at the office for two years now. Before that I worked for a cross party think tank called Demos, which actually does work on social media and all the related internet areas.
At the Office, I lead on digital policy. I advise the Commissioner on all sorts of areas ranging from data privacy through to online harms; at the moment I’m doing quite a lot of work on the digital implications of COVID-19. We do quite a few projects, so we’ve done projects on a whole range of those areas including our most recent report, which was called Gaming the System, looking at the ways in which gaming shapes children’s lives and the sorts of ways in which they spend money in online games. So a whole range of areas there. So that’s me.
Neil Fairbrother
On your website, the Children’s Commissioner’s website, it does say that you have some unique powers. What are these unique powers that the Children’s Commissioner has? Can you explain what the role of the Children’s Commissioner is?
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Absolutely. So the Children’s Commissioner, her job is to speak for all children in England but particularly the most vulnerable and our powers really help us to understand the experiences of those vulnerable children in quite a lot of detail. So the first one is the power to visit children in places where they’re away from home. So that’s things like youth offender institutes and secure training centres, mental health wards, children’s homes, those kinds of places.
Our second power, our second key power, is the power to request information from public bodies that exercise a function towards children. So again, that’s a lot of those institutions I’ve just mentioned. But the sort of set of institutions which have a really big role in shaping children’s lives in which our powers don’t extend is clearly online platforms and the Children’s Commissioner has actually made the case in the past that our powers should extend to these institutions because clearly there needs to be a lot more data for us to really understand how children use social media platforms and other online services. So our powers are really important, but we’d like to go further to help us in the digital sphere.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now the Children’s Commissioner’s Office also has a helpline called “Help at Hand”. What does that do and how does it differ from Childline?
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Help at Hand is a service that’s directly targeted at children who have a social worker or who are working in social services in some way or who are living away from home perhaps in a Youth Offender’s Institute or wherever that might be. And the purpose of the helpline is to help children where things are going in a way that they don’t want them to and to give them support, to make their voice heard and hopefully to get them a better outcome. Maybe they’re being moved out of a foster care placement that they don’t want to be moved out of. Maybe they’re not getting the right kind of support they need in a children’s home or wherever it might be.
But on that helpline, we actually do get quite a few inquiries about digital aspects of safeguarding from both professionals and children and sometimes raising concerns. So it’s really a useful way of us learning about all sorts of different aspects of children’s experiences, particularly vulnerable children.
Neil Fairbrother
Last week, the UK government extended the Corona virus lockdown by at least three weeks. Some of our contacts in the education world think that schools will actually be shut down until the end of the summer holidays in September. What impact of this extraordinary situation, if any, are you seeing on children, either through the Help at Hand helpline or through other means?
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Well, I think all of us are having to adjust massively to the situation. The picture’s no different for children. It’s actually just one of the most significant things to have happened in many children’s lives, particularly vulnerable children. So I mean we’re seeing all sorts of impacts and the sort of impact varies according to, you know, the sort of background of the child. But one thing we’re really concerned about is the impact on children’s education. So we know that the government had in mind that 20% of children would be in school right now. Those are children whose parents are key workers and also vulnerable children who have social workers. But actually we’re seeing much lower levels. We’re only seeing about 1% of children in school at the moment. So many fewer of vulnerable children are attending.
That’s really worrying because we don’t know whether those children are safe. It’s really difficult sometimes for social workers to know whether the children are safe, they’re not being able to visit as they normally would except for in emergencies. So that’s really problematic. And obviously from the educational disadvantage point of view, it’s really, really concerning because every summer we have a six week break and what happens in that six week break is well, all children’s attainment goes down over the summer holidays, but the effect is particularly pronounced for disadvantaged children. And that’s because they might have a less comfortable environment to learn at home. They might not have digital access at home, access to the internet, access to devices. They might have parents who are less equipped or have fewer resources to help their children learn.
So basically we’re seeing a much more extended time where children, disadvantaged children, are going to be falling behind and falling behind at higher rates than their wealthier peers unless something is done. So we’re hearing of children in a cramped homes, children unable to get out, unable to let off steam, and that isn’t a good environment for the children to learn as they’re being expected to at home, or just for them to be happy, to be healthy. There’s a real impact here on children’s mental health and the stress and anxiety levels are going through the roof as far as we can tell.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes. In January the Children’s Commissioner’s Office published a report on the provision of mental health services for children, which warned that there was a chasm between need and provision. What is this chasm? What was that referring to?
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
So the chasm we’re drawing attention to is the difficulty in accessing specialist mental health services for children with more moderate or severe end of mental health problems. So we’ve seen services are improving. For example, there’s then an extra £16 million invested in treatment recently and an additional 53,000 children entering treatment. But there’s still not enough services to meet the significant level of demand there is.
Just over 3% of children were referred to services last year, but that’s about one in four children out there who have a diagnosable mental health condition. So that’s where the chasm is. You know, the services are picking up, there are more of them, there’s more funding, there’s more services across the country where they need to be, but we’re still not meeting that massive level of demand, that 25% of children with a diagnosable mental health condition.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes, this is touching on Adverse Childhood Experiences, I think, and in some of the data that I’ve read in your report children, who account for 20% of the population but only 10% of total mental health spending. And on average, the NHS spends £225 for every adult, I assume that’s per annum, and £92 for every child, which is less than half. Is that the right emphasis though? Isn’t it the wrong way round? Surely more should be spent on children than adults to help children overcome their Adverse Childhood Experiences so that less needs to be spent on adults?
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Absolutely. We’d say that early intervention is much more preferable to, as you say, piling on those costs later on in life where they become much bigger to deal with. You’ve said on average the NHS spends £225 for every adult, just £92 for every child and that is absolutely the wrong way round. And that’s why we were calling for the next spending review to provide help for a hundred percent of children, not just 20%. But who knows when that spending review is going to happen now because, presumably everything that’s going on is going to, in terms of coronavirus, is going to impact on all sorts of aspects of domestic policy including in making improvements, much needed improvements, to children’s mental health services.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes, indeed. When we talk about online harms, we’re really talking about the mental wellbeing or the mental health of children and trying to protect that from abuse. Is it possible to help protect children online without knowing who they are, without knowing that they are indeed children? Do we need to have some sort of age verification or age estimation process in place so that children are treated differently online from adults?
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
We absolutely do. I think that is the key insight. You cannot protect children online unless you know who the children are. Age verification is something that’s going through rapid technological development. There is all sorts of new ways to this can be done. Various organizations are working on this because actually last year there was meant to be an introduction of age verification, particularly in relation to online pornography.
Neil Fairbrother
Yeah. So I was going to say that’s in relation to excluding children from legitimate adult online pornography sites as opposed to the generic social media sites.
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Yes. So that was going to be specific to commercial online pornography. The plans were pulled. As you might expect, there was all sorts of arguments put why they shouldn’t happen at all, mostly from people very concerned with privacy of adults. Nevertheless, the legislation got through, but the plans were pulled on the view that actually it’d be better for age verification to be introduced to a whole bigger range of websites including commercial online pornography websites, but also social media platforms, gaming platforms and so on as part of this online harms legislation package that was meant to be going through during this parliament. So yes, it was sort of put off to become part of this much bigger piece of work on online harms, but you know, we don’t know what shape or form age verification requirements are going to be in this new package. So we’re really looking out for that to be a key component of online harms legislation when it happens.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Encryption for privacy is often cited as being a good thing, for example for our own online banking services and shopping and so on and so forth. But I think the Children’s Commissioner’s Office has some concerns about encryption. What are those concerns?
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Obviously privacy is important. But there’s a balancing act here between the rights of adults in particular as well as children actually, all of us have a right to privacy, but there’s this balance between rights to privacy and also right to protection. There are particular concerns around end-to-end encryption in relation to children. So this is when a message is sent between two users and not even the platform itself that is hosting this conversation, say for example, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or whatever it might be, not even they themselves can read the contents of that message; it’s end-to-end encrypted and only the two users involved can read or access the message. That’s really significant because it means that even the police might not be able to access these messages if there are concerns about the welfare of one of the users involved, if the user is a child.
So that’s one reason to be worried. It’s very difficult to know what’s happening because we can’t read these messages. And the other reason to be worried is it’s very unclear at this stage whether end-to-end encrypted services like these are going to be covered by new Online harms legislation. In the white paper, setting up the plans for this legislation, it said that private communications would be dealt with differently. So there’s perhaps an incentive here for platforms to encrypt their services because it means they’ll be sidestepping these new protections, strong protections which should supposedly going to be coming in as a result of this on Online harms legislation, the Statutory Duty of Care as it’s called.
Neil Fairbrother
So are you saying Simone that either inadvertently or by design, the online harms white paper, which has ostensibly been designed to protect children online, has a fundamental built in floor which will allow the social media companies to sidestep the very efforts that the online white paper…
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
That is to me how, sorry!
Neil Fairbrother
Well, I think I’ve finished my question there. So do carry on.
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
So yes, we’re certainly concerned that yes, either by design or by mistake that these sort of messaging services are going to be out of the loop and not covered by the duty of care. Fortunately we have seen, you know, there is one platform that’s come out recently and done a responsible thing which is TikTok, which is banning under sixteens from private messaging. Obviously the problem here is they don’t always know who the under sixteens are because there’s not a good age verification. But we’ve also seen, for example, Facebook Messenger is, you know, there are plans to encrypt that and we’re just concerned that the measures to protect children just aren’t in place and haven’t been thought through so far.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. One of the consequences of our current lockdown situation is that children are spending a lot more time playing games online. And the Children’s Commissioner’s Office has some concerns here. What are those concerns about online games?
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
So I guess the first thing to say is that children get an awful lot out of online games, as do a lot of adults actually, you know, online gaming has opened up a whole new world of fun and creativity for children. But yes, we do have some concerns and this is based on a piece of research we did with Revealing Reality, looking at children’s experiences of gaming.
Some of them might be quite familiar. For example, children say that sometimes they find it very difficult to control how much time they’re spending playing games. You know, those hours can ratchet up very quickly, they feel quite a lot of social pressure to carry on playing because all their friends are online and they’re part of their same team, so locked into gaming when perhaps it might be better for them to have a bit of a break and do something else.
But the thing that really worried us the most I’d say is that children are spending money in games in ways that we might be concerned about. So for a lot of your listeners you might think you buy a game, say for your console or for your PC, and you might pay, say £40 up front, and that’s that. Then you’re playing the game. Well actually we know that children and adults, but particularly children are spending a lot of money within the game itself, after they’ve already paid the outlay…
Neil Fairbrother
Yes, indeed. You cite an example with a very popular football game, FIFA, where players can buy the digital equivalent of the Panini stickers, those playing cards, those photographs of players, and at some considerable cost. I think one example cited, well there’s a whole range of costs, but at the upper end you could be looking at £80. But there are no guarantees as to who the players are that you will get with that purchase, which seems to me, as far as certainly children are concerned, to be a very morally dubious practice on behalf of the game designer and manufacturer.
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Absolutely. So we need to distinguish here between in-game purchasing, where you know what you’re going to get. So you pay for say, a star player or a particular item to help you within the game. That might be a weapon or something. That’s one thing we might want to control, we would want to control that in some ways for children. But as you say, the really worrying thing is where children are paying for a shot at getting the thing they want.
They pay for a player pack on FIFA and they don’t know if they’re going to get that star player. The money can quickly ratchet up, the amount they’ve spent, because they’re so desperate to get that star player because they’re playing this game with all of their friends. And the alternative to spending money is to spend hours and hours and hours doing what’s called grinding, just playing endlessly trying to get enough virtual currency to buy the same thing that you can basically just take a shortcut to by paying with real money to get that star player. It’s really concerning.
Neil Fairbrother
Yeah, indeed. And if you are a 13 year old and you’re playing one of these games, where does the money come from? How do they pay? Because they can’t have a credit card, they can’t have a debit card.
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
So there’s often here parents’ debit cards being used or parents’ credit cards. Sometimes it might actually be that the payment is done without the parent even realizing. Maybe the card is taken for a short while or maybe more likely on many websites or many apps and many games credit card details have been saved automatically. So you get cases of actually very young children spending money without their parents even realizing. It is worth pointing out that an increasing number of 14, 15, 16 year old children have their own debit cards. This is a market that’s grown. So some of the children we spoke to for this research, their parents didn’t actually have a clue what was going on. How much money was being spent.
Neil Fairbrother
The purchases in FIFA or other games, for example Call of Duty, the well-known shoot ‘em up, often use digital coins, digital payments, which are divorced from the actual credit card or debit card. Is that kind of in-game currency actually money?
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
That’s a really good question. So platforms often have this very convoluted process by which you actually pay for what you want to get. So you start with your debit card, you buy some virtual coins, which you then use for what you actually want, whether that’s a star player, whether it’s a certain weapon, whatever it might be. That design makes it slightly more difficult for all of us, but particularly children, to understand that when you’re spending virtual currency, you are spending real money.
It also makes it hard to understand the value of the end item. Say you it takes 2,500 virtual coins of whatever this game is to buy this item. You’re not really linking that mentally to what the value is in British pounds. It’s much more difficult to understand the value of items. You don’t really know how much you’re paying for something. And this is, we feel, a really underhand way of getting children to spend more than they really should be spening, if they should be spending anything at all with a particular game or app.
Neil Fairbrother
If there’s no guarantee of the players in a football game that you end up with, or in the case of a shoot ‘em up, what weapons you might end up with, it’s potluck. It’s a gamble. It’s quite simply gambling by any other name.
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Well, that is certainly what the children we spoke to told us, the children who play games and spend money in this way told us; “I know I’m gambling. It feels like a gamble”. So it’s really funny and it’s not right that gambling legislation doesn’t recognize it as such and I think most of us intuitively would describe this kind of activity as gambling. The problem is that in law gambling is defined as a playing a game of chance for a prize, and a prize is defined as being either money or money’s worth.
Now the argument is that these items, whether it’s a weapon or a star player, they’re not money clearly, but neither do they have money’s worth. Which means they aren’t a prize. They’re not gambling. But we know that these items have immense value to the children who play these games. They’ll do anything for these players or weapons, they’ll spend any amount of money or certainly a large amount of money. So it’s really not fair and it’s actually sort of a sign that the Gambling Act as it stands is pretty outdated in regards to online gaming and what we have described as online gambling.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes, indeed. And the Conservative party’s 2019 election manifesto, which wasn’t actually that long ago, although it seems like a lifetime ago, stated that the Gambling Act 2005 is increasingly becoming “an analogue law in a digital age”, and they pledged to review the Act with a particular focus on tackling issues around loot boxes and credit card misuse. So let’s unpack that a bit. What are loot boxes? We’ve kind of spoken about credit card misuse, but how far have they got with this review, what are they actually doing or are they so diverted by both Brexit and the Corona virus that nothing has happened?
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Yeah. So loot boxes are actually what we’ve just been talking about. So it’s when you pay for something and you don’t know what you’re going to get. So you know, it’s almost like in many games it actually looks like a box on the screen. You don’t know what you’re going to get. You’re hoping that there’s something in there. You pay for the chance of it, and then on screen after you’ve paid it opens and you see what’s inside and it might be something really helpful to you or it might be something not very helpful to you. So that’s what a loot box is and FIFA for example, the player packs might be described, we would describe them as loot boxes.
So we were really pleased to see that commitment to look into loot boxes in this review of the Gambling Act, we think it’s really important and we really welcome the government doing this. But as far as we’re aware that Gambling Act review remains a priority for the government. But there are many other competing priorities at the moment. As you say, Brexit and not least, Coronavirus. So we really hope though that this is something that government does see through because children are spending more and more time at home, more and more time on online games and this issue isn’t going to go away.
Neil Fairbrother
What did the Online harms white paper have to say on the topic of online games?
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
The Online harms white paper didn’t say anything particular about games as far as I can recall. The idea of the Online harms white paper is that it applies to all sorts of internet services equally whether it be social media, gaming or whatever other sites. We think that there needs to be a really strong emphasis on gaming because it’s actually just as important, if not more important to children than say, social media. But something that isn’t covered in the Online harms paper that’s particularly relevant for gaming is financial harm, as we’ve discussed. The Online harms white paper sort of sets out all the different harms that can be covered by the legislation, but financial harm is one of them. And we’d really like that to be added.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes. And financial harm is actually one of the risks that was identified a few years ago in Sonia Livingstone’s EU Kids Online project.
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Absolutely. So this isn’t a new thing. I think the ways in which platforms are monetizing that says it is changing, but financial harm has been there for quite a long time now. We really should be thinking about it.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Just to finish off, I’d like to just quickly touch on the Children’s Commissioner’s business plan if I may for the coming year. And something that struck me as being particularly interesting in there is a reference to some research that was carried out, which explored children’s feelings of danger on the streets and how unsafe they felt. And in the business plan you say that “…this is not random. It arises from the interaction between social media, the swift exchange of news and rumour with the lack of policing on the streets, spiralling exclusions leaving more and more children for whom a gang is the best hope of a place to belong”. Is there a link then here between online harms in the online digital context and Dr Carlene Firmin’s contextual safeguarding model, which looks at safeguarding in the offline context?
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Yeah, I think there is loads of interesting cross over here and there has been growing evidence coming to light about the link between vulnerability offline and vulnerability online. In fact, I think it was the NSPCC released just this week evidence to show that children who are lonely in, let me say real life, are much more vulnerable online. So we certainly can’t be separating out the online harms, the sort of online aspect of children’s lives from the rest of their lives because we know the two are so linked.
Neil fairbrother
Simone, this is the final year of Anne Longfield’s position as Children’s Commissioner for England. What is the future plan? You’ve obviously got the 2020 to 2021 business plan. What looking forward is going to happen with the Children’s Commissioner and do you have a view as to who may be the new one?
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Well as you say, over the past couple of weeks we’ve released our new business plan, setting out all the things we hope to achieve. And actually it wasn’t two weeks ago, it was a bit more than that and it was just the Corona virus situation really came to light, just how serious it was going to be. So all those plans, you know, we’re still hoping to go through with them. We’re still intending to, but we’re also doing an awful lot of work trying to make sure that children’s rights and children are protected as the Corona virus situation develops. So we’ll be balancing those two things I think over the next year, really trying to make sure that the key things Anne has focused on during her time are still there. So things like vulnerability, making sure that the invisible children aren’t forgotten, children who are falling out of education, children who aren’t getting the services they need. That’s the priority for us this year.
As to who the next Children’s Commissioner is, we really don’t know. It’s something that the DFE, the Department for Education that is, I’m sure are thinking about at the moment. There’s an application process. But we really don’t have a clue, but we do hope that there’ll be some of these key things we focused on and will continue to be a focus moving forward.
Neil Fairbrother
Simone, thank you so much for your time. A fascinating insight into the work of the Children’s Commissioner. I hope all goes well for you and that you all stay safe certainly for the period of the lockdown.
Simone Vibert, Children’s Commissioner’s Office
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.