Louisa

Hello. This is the Online Resilience podcast with me Louisa Street and Professor Andy Phippen. We're discussing all aspects of young people's online lives and giving practical advice on how to support the young people you work with. Music is by Roo Pescod.

Okay. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Online Resilience Podcast. Today we're actually revisiting some of our earlier topics because some of the sound quality wasn't brilliant in those early days, and our recording set up is a lot better and our editing a lot better and so we're we're kind of going back to that.

So you may have heard our original podcast all about the harmful behaviour category in the online resilience tool. But as we are relaunching the tool and we've got some new behaviours, we're revisiting what each category means.

We're going to start by looking at the extremism category. So the new tool is organised by the types of behaviour and then they're organised into categories of harmful, potentially harmful and not harmful.

And if you've seen the tool, you will have seen that everything in the extremism category is harmful. Hopefully that kind of makes sense. But we wanted to explore in a bit more detail because there is a little bit of nuance to that. Andy you've got a really good example of why that nuance is important when thinking about extremism. Do you want to kick us off with that?

Andy

Yeah. And obviously we've listed stuff in the extremism category as harmful, but I think it's, you know, the whole idea of this tool is that it encourages conversation and it encourages evidence based decision making. I think that's a really important thing. It would in any safeguarding decision, but particularly with online issues and I think, a lot of schools and colleges now have monitoring systems in place.

They have a statutory duty to do it, which will pick up a lot of the keywords associated with extremism. But the example that sticks in my mind was I was contacted by a colleague and said the adopted son has been the subject of a prevent referral at their primary school. So prevent referrals at primary schools is interesting in itself anyway and so I said, okay, what happened?

Now this young man is a… he was born in the Kurdish region of Turkey. He's a Kurdish descent and he was encouraged by his class teacher reading between the lines from what my colleague was saying, he is he has a tendency to be a little bit higher energy and a little bit disruptive in class. So they wanted to give him a project that he could focus on.

So he was asked if he would build a presentation for his classmates around Kurdish culture. So he got on with that, with some enthusiasm. And then it turned out that the monitoring system at the school was triggered because one of the things he searched for was Peshmerga. Well, you know, a part of the Kurdish military and have been involved in actions against ISIS in the past.

So Peshmerga triggered the monitoring system. Now, you'd hope at that point that with a little bit of investigation, it would be okay well, he's been asked to do this. He's come across this word, he’s searched this word to get a bit more information about the Kurdish military. That's not a prevent referral, however, because the monitoring system had been triggered, the head teacher decided that it had to be a prevent referral because it had been triggered for extremism.

And the next thing that happened was the young man who was ten at the time was sat in the head teacher's office with the head teacher, the deputy head, his adoptive parents, and the prevent lead for Devon and Cornwall police. Which strikes me as somewhat problematic. And you know, we talk a great deal about wanting young people to be confident they can disclose concerns or harms of things.

I can't imagine that young person would disclose anything ever again. And that's because they'd be terrified. And I know.. I knew this was a few years ago now. I knew the preventative police that have been in there about 5 minutes before they would have said this is ridiculous and they’d have left. However, that doesn't detract from the fact that this young man was presented with a uniformed police officer asking them questions about what they've been looking at online.

Yeah. So it's really, really problematic. And you know, there's a couple of companies I know in the past have been asked to provide monitoring solutions and if provide a  monitoring solution. So that's where they are providing a cloud based solution. And they will tell the school if alerts have happened. They have sometimes made decisions to not raise an alert, even though the monitoring system has picked up on it because they don't think it's in the young person's interest.

Okay. You know, there was one case they talked about where of it was triggered for sexual content, but it was very clear when they actually looked at this young person's activity, they're exploring, experiencing war and gender and sexuality. And they didn't think that it would be in the young person's interest, because clearly they were doing it in school because maybe they weren't able to do it at home because of the monitoring at home.

So, you know, they made a very sensible and progressive decision not to inform the school. But if schools have in-house monitoring, it's just something to be aware of.

Louisa

Yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, we talk a lot in the training and I think in this podcast as well about the importance of context when you're looking at these things. I think this is a really good example of that. I remember when I was at school many years ago and we were asked to do a presentation about someone we found inspirational, and a group of boys in my year decided to do their presentation about Hitler.

Now, this was back in the late nineties, early 2000s, so I don’t think Prevent had even been conceived of and if it had, it certainly wouldn't have been thinking particularly about the far right. But had they… if they were to do that now, that might well trigger some of those things and they might find themselves on watch lists because they'd been Googling all of the speeches that Hitler had given.

And the point that they made at the end of the presentation was actually we recognize that this person was really bad, but he was a very inspirational speaker. And that's what we wanted to reflect and, you know, your always, particularly with teenagers, your always going to get those young people who want to be contrary, who will pick things that are shocking for shock value.

And as a professional, you have to pick whether you think that that is, because they're trying to be shocking for the sake of being shocking or whether they're actually sort of agreeing with some of the points that perhaps they're regurgitating.

Andy

Yeah, I think, you know, you have to assume some people are the edge lords and they'll go pull out the freedom of speech and the freedom of expression stuff which, you know, we talked about on the podcast. But, but yeah, it's, it's worth an exploration.

Louisa

Yeah. And I mean in the extremism category one of the one of the behaviours is repeating extremist views read about online which you know in both of those cases people may well have done. But you are going to know as a professional whether that context makes it make sense that they're repeating those views because they're saying this is what this particular group believe or whether they're saying, Oh, yeah, I read this and so it must be true.

Andy

I dealt with another case a while ago about a young man who had a big TikTok following and he was putting out some fairly nasty content about sexual activity with underage children. And again, the first point is that does this young man actually have a sexual interest in young children? Because that account could be reported and he could end up with a visit from the police as a result of that.

And the college dealt with it well. And as a result of a number of complaints from the students to TikTok, the account was taken down, which again shows the value in doing things in a tech aware way rather than just going, oh my God, what are going to do about this? Well, TikTok will take that sort of thing down.

They're famously conservative. I think the other thing, just in terms of the extremism stuff and the technology, is that the counter-terrorism Internet referral unit list, which is used for a lot of these technologies, is quite opaque and subjective. So it's based upon the decision of someone to add that to the list. So I think they do a bit of more investigation, but it's been triggered.

We need to do a prevent referral now. See what's in there because. Yeah, it's, it's one of those areas that's not subject to freedom of information and yeah. It's difficult to find out how they make the decisions.

Louisa

Yeah.

Andy

About why something gets added.

Louisa

And I mean if people are interested in learning a bit more about Prevent, there is a podcast which I would highly recommend and as you're listening to this podcast, I assume that maybe you like podcasts and it's called the Trojan Horse Affair, and it sort of explores how Prevent came about and some of the kind of political machinations that were happening at the time.

And it was actually recommended to me by someone who works in Prevent. So I feel like I'm not not being unduly biased against the system by recommending that.

Andy

I think I think a lot of these things, there's usefulness in them, but don't use it as a black and white tool.

Louisa

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So the next behaviour that we're going to look at a little bit sort of actually appears twice in the tool. And it has to do with a prolonged period of upset or anger after either having a device removed or after gaming. So with younger children, you might expect if they're playing with an iPad and you just take it away from them, you might expect that they might get a bit angry about that.

They might get a bit upset about that. And similarly with young people of any age, if they've been playing a game and they lose, they might have a bit of a… bit of a tantrum afterwards. But we've worded it slightly differently in the tool to say it's about that prolonged period of upset or anger, and that means that it would go on for longer than you might expect.

So again, this sort of context is going to be quite important if you know a young person fairly well and you know that they might throw the controller across the room if they lose a game, but then 20 minutes later they'll be quite happily sitting and watching TikTok or doing something else. Then, whilst that outburst isn't good, it's probably quite normal for them.

If they're still angry half an hour later then that could be a sign that something more problematic is going on. Andy, do you want to add anything to that?

Andy

Yeah, I think the other thing you haven't mentioned is you just have a little bit more of an exploration around the nature of the withdrawal of the device, shall we say. You know, if you're 90% of the way through a level and someone marched into your room and goes you've been playing on that too long, and just switches it off, I wouldn't say it's justified aggression, but it's quite frustrating when someone does that.

You know, if we talk to parents about this and things like this, tell them that ten more minutes, they just march in there and switch it off and tough luck. And I don't really care about your game because these things are important, particularly if someone considers themselves to be a gamer. Things are important. But yes, the prolonged period of time afterwards and the withdrawal of things in gaming addiction and what is defining the mental health condition now within the DSM 5 of mental health conditions?

This implies it's a very difficult thing to to diagnose. And that's, as you say, a rage quit is one thing and by which we mean someone who will throw the controller across the room or or as I was told by one student took out the disc for Fifa and started biting it because he was so angry he'd been beaten before.

But you know, they can reflect on that go that stupid is when they are it is a prolonged period of aggression or upset and they're not acknowledging that that was a dumb thing. Yeah. So yeah, it is. Again, clearly there are some problematic behaviours there. But if you've just got someone, for example, you say parent of a young person, the morning and go oh they’re terrible. If I have to get them off their gaming, they they won't talk to me for the rest of that morning. Maybe also do a little bit more investigation with that person. Or are you just like literally unplugging at the wall when halfway through something or you telling them how long they're allowed to play for and yeah. Helping them manage that flow.

Louisa

Yeah, definitely. And I think also something that a lot of professionals and I've been guilty of this myself that we fall into is this trap of having more, perhaps more red flags when the game itself appears violent. So a lot of professionals will say to me, all of the young people in my in my tutor group are playing GTA.

And that was a really violent game. It's age restricted. They shouldn't be playing it. I'm really worried about it. And yeah, every time I talk to young people about gaming, they are clear that the game that causes the most anger management problems is FIFA. It's it's not GTA. It's not the violence.

Andy

It oh, well, that and Minecraft, you know if someone trashes your Minecraft village that can spillover into violence in the playground. And I say.

Louisa

Okay that's interesting. And, you know, I think it's really easy to look at games like FIFA, Minecraft and say that the less concerning end of the spectrum, we're not going to pay any attention to them because we've got kids playing GTA and those are the ones we're going to be worried about. But actually it may be that the ones playing GTA if they lose, I mean, I have not played GTA myself for probably 15 years, but the way I understand it is if you lose, you just go back a stage.

It's not like if you lose a football match and then you've kind of dropped down in the rankings and you know, those those games which are cumulative, can perhaps have more… The stakes are higher, I suppose. Yeah.

Andy

Yeah. I believe at the start of our book about the Head Start project, we do talk about a specific case where a DSL says they saw someone being violent and they'd heard they were playing violent video games. Therefore it must be the violent video game that caused it and couldn't really deviate them from that opinion, even explaining that it was literally 40 years of research trying to show causation. They all have failed to prove causation. They were convinced. Yeah, which is an interesting mindset to cite. You know, again, going back, we talk a great deal about evidence based reaction, evidence based responses and needing to be informed based upon evidence not I reckon that.

Louisa

Yeah. And you know I'm a big fan of the correlation does not imply causation which for anyone who isn't aware of basically says just because two things happen coincidentally it doesn't mean that there's any underlying cause. And one of the examples of this is that the number of pirates has increased in line with increasing global temperatures.

So clearly, pirates are to blame for climate change. And I think that is something that we can kind of say that there might be correlation, there might be young people who are violent at school or who are aggressive at school playing violent video games. But that doesn't tell us that it's the game that's causing the violence.

Andy

Absolutely. Yeah. I think one that I'm sure I've talked about before was a news headline a while ago saying In 1000 grooming cases, Kik Messenger was used as if something problematic with Kik messenger.. You know, there are so many variables in that scenario. I am sure you could probably find similar clothing worn by in a thousand grooming cases or whatever.

You look at the number of downloads. Kik Messenger It was about 300 million. You know, Messenger was a messaging app like WhatsApp. So those, those implied causation are completely unhelpful because if you see that headline and then as a parent you go, my kid's got Kik messenger, I'm going to demand what's on it now.

And they're probably just messaging their mates and things as well. Yeah. You know, a similar headline might be in a thousand grooming cases. They were wearing jeans. Yeah. No one's going to be screaming that we need to ban denim.

Louisa

I don't know. Could be the the underlying cause.

Andy

Of double denim.

Louisa

Well, yeah, the old Canadian tuxedo. My favourite look. Um, excellent. So, yeah, I mean, with both of those, we can kind of clearly see the importance of context, the importance of having these conversations. And as you say, it might be a case with the gaming example of having a chat with parents about how they manage behaviour around gaming, something that we've talked about on this podcast before and that we've talked about in the training.

And, you know, I think quite a lot of the time we talk about is that of all of the young people that we speak to on this project, no one has ever said, I don't think you should have any rules around my digital life. Children, young people, they all understand that there need to be rules in place. So, you know, it's not it's not a case of us saying just let them get on with it.

They they understand the need for rules. And having those really clear rules is really beneficial. Itmight be at home those rules aren't as clear as they could be, which could help. Or it could be that, you know, if parents are struggling with a teenager's aggression or even a child's aggression, they might need more support. Generally, it might be a sort of sign of a of a bigger issue.

Andy

Yeah.

Louisa

Shall we move on to the next one?

Andy

I think so.

Louisa

Okay. So the next behavior that we're going to look at as an example of a harmful behavior is the excessive or compulsive use of pornography. So within the tool, these are two distinct behaviors compulsive use of pornography is classed as harmful for every age group. And we've sort of defined compulsive as something that's getting in the way of the young person doing what might normally be expected. Then for excessive use of pornography or excessively watching pornography, it's harmful up to 15. And then for the 16 to 18 age group, we've put it as potentially harmful. Andy do you want to talk a bit about what the difference between excessive and compulsive might be.

Andy

I think, again, we keep coming back to this. This needs to have a conversation. I think compulsive is the person that's looking at it at the back of the class in tutor time and then then going at break time and then looking to the friends about what they've seen. And, you know, it becomes something where rather than interacting with peers, they are sat in a corner watching porn or something, something that they don't seem to have much control over.

Excessive is obviously for the vast majority of age groups. Excessive is looking at it a lot. We really rather that that young people weren't accessing pornography but we know they are and particularly when they get to all things it's not an unusual thing. But again, it's asking or exploring why they are doing that. And we'll do a separate session on mostly harmful anyway. But it is one of those things where because of the nature of the content, there is generally speaking a lot of discomfort around it. And even people I've worked with in this area for years, some people are just like no pornography is disgusting and it should be banned.

Well, there's a reason pornography exists is because loads and loads of people consume it. So, you know, we, we ought to have those sensible and mature conversations about it. But it's really, you know, if you're talking about excessive with accessing it for hours and hours and hours and not doing anything else that's feeding into compulsive stuff anyway. But I do think you need to have those conversations.

Louisa

Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. I think the way that you might recognize the difference between compulsive and excessive would be that thing of are they are they watching pornography at school? That would seem to be compulsive.

Andy

Are they doing it when they're queuing up to vote in the House of Commons, for example.

Louisa

Yeah. I mean, yeah, like and I mean, this is another thing about harmful behaviours is there are a lot of behaviours that we might see in adults which are potentially harmful or harmful. We don't want to be holding young people to a higher standard than the rest of society. So, you know, whilst, as you say, we might not want young people to be watching pornography, is quite normalized within our society.

It's very accessible. So we can't kind of say that just general watching pornography is is a problem. It's when it might be starting to impact on other things. And if it's happening at school or college, if they've kind of dropped out of sports teams and seeing friends, then that's really clearly causing problems and could be a sign that actually they might need some help and support to cut down or stop using. In the same is that support would be offered with any other sort of addictive behaviour. Excessive, I guess the way that you are likely to know that it's excessive is probably going to be if the young person tells you, because that probably isn't so much going to be happening in public. And it might be that they come to you if you're sort of working with a young person in a pastoral capacity at school or or in a 1 to 1 scenario, then they might say, actually, this is starting to affect my enjoyment of sex. Whether that's solo sex or sex with a partner, it might be that they feel that they can't have sex without using pornography. So again, that might just be about talking about how that's impacting them and what they can do to hopefully reduce the impact of that.

Andy

I think with pornography in particular, where the moral perspective on it can take some quite extreme views, it's important to be quite factual. You know, if you look South West Grid For Learning’s ‘So you look at porn’ resource, it encourages a factual discussion. It's like, you know, this is a film set, you know, this is, you know, normal, normal behaviour and similar.

And, you know, it's it's not this is the the I hesitate to use the word hilarious, but hilarious in that government policy saying if we put age verification of pornography sites, then we've solved the problem. Well, that just means they have to wait till they're 18 to be consuming it. If they they were successful. But if they are successful and having conversation with relate counselors, they will talk about couples they've supported, some of whom have good relationship with pornography, some of whom have a problematic pornography if one of the partners is deliberately staying up late so they can access pornography.

Well, the other partner goes to bed, but you know, that's a problematic use of it. So it really does need a sensible discussion and not, oh, my God, you're looking at pornography. That's bad. You're going to hell.

Louisa

Yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, ideally there would be good PSHE around pornography before young people are really likely to be exposed to it. You know, obviously that may may not be the case, but typically there's a lot of quite anti-porn messages in PSHE where they'll be things about how it can teach young people to have unrealistic expectations of sexual performance, of body image, of of, you know, what a partner may or may not be willing to consent to.

And that is I think those are important messages to teach young people about. But if a young person is watching porn, we shouldn't necessarily assume that it's harmful unless we're seeing that sort of compulsive or excessive use of it over a certain age and if we kind of look at the tool, we've organized it by age group watching pornography for any pre puberty child is is going to be problematic because they're not going to be looking at that for their own sexual gratification.

Andy

There are questions about how they're accessing it, to provide tools to to do a lot of blocking and prevention at that sort of age. They are useful tools for that. But yeah, I think again, going back to what we're saying about correlation versus causation, there are lots of problematic issues around excessive use of pornography and similar, but that doesn't necessarily mean anyone who's accessing pornography will experience those problematic issues, and we need to be mindful of that.

Otherwise, if you look at, for example, PornHub’s traffic data, otherwise we have massive societal problems because there's an awful lot of that content being consumed by an awful lot of people. Yeah. And on the whole, people will consume that without experience experiencing problems. The reason I use the House of Commons example was specifically to sort of go if we're going to be worrying about teenagers from this, let's let's look at how all our leaders responsibility in this area as well. I mean, it was kind of an interesting one that because I made the calls to have him prosecuted for harassment and things seemed a little bit excessive because it like he was trying to show other people. But it is problematic when you're queuing up something that you think or might have a quick look at that pornography.

Louisa

Yeah. I mean yeah. And I think when you look at, you know, occasionally statistics will come out around how many people have been, you know, fired or face disciplinary proceedings at work because of pornography on their work computers. And I think people are incredibly complacent about that sort of thing. You know, there was some pretty bad moments in early lockdown when people were still getting used to how video calls work, then I'm sure people will have seen the the.

Andy

The shared screens and the open tabs.

Louisa

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So, yeah, it's important to remember that as young people get to the oldest age group when they're 16, 17, 18, the sort of standard that we should expect from them should be the standards that are normal within society. We shouldn't be expecting that they won't watch any pornography ever because that's probably unrealistic.

Andy

I think a lot of the upsets about it generally comes from a place of someone's own belief system rather than any objective evidence based concern. Yeah, clearly there people have a problematic relationship with pornography. But as I said, if you look at the volumes of people that consume it, you know, if there was a problematic causation, we'd have seen a massive increase in sexual crime in the early 2000s when it became very freely available.

And we really didn't. And there have been increases in sexual crimes in more recent times. That's generally as a result of reporting and disclosure and police response rather than, you know, something that you can track back to increase use of pornography or whatever.

Louisa

So just to wrap up a little bit, I suppose, on harmful behaviours is just to think a bit about what you can do if you recognise a harmful behaviour. We've got a little bit of advice in our in our tool, which you will see on the Headstart website, I suppose the first thing is to say, follow your organisation, Safeguarding Policy.

It might not always be that you need to safeguard a young person because you've recognized the harmful behaviour. As we said, it might not be that you always have to do a prevent referral, but with any harmful behaviour, you're going to need to do some sort of intervention. You know, in the in the case of extremism, it might just be chatting to that young person about what they've seen on these sites, because it might have been upsetting to them, it might have been shocking to them that might be the extent of the the support that you need to offer.

Whereas at the other end, if a young person is expressing extremist views regularly, then that is going to be a case of talking to your safeguarding lead and making prevent referrals as appropriate. So the kind of purpose of the tool isn't to say this is what you should do, is to say these behaviours need an intervention, whereas perhaps these behaviours don't need an intervention.

It's not to say that we just ignore not harmful behaviours, but we will follow up on what you can do when you recognize not harmful behaviours with another podcast soon. Andy - Did you want to add anything before we…

Andy

Just to say, you know, we will reiterate this a lot, but as with anything safeguarding related, it should be contextualised in the specific incident. Just because we define something is harmful in this tool, as you say, it doesn't mean call the police. I mean, speak to a young person because potentially there could be something bad going on here. To have some discussion.

Louisa

Absolutely. And if you if you speak to the young person, you speak to a safeguarding lead and you're still not sure what to do, you can always contact myself or Andy. We're really happy to kind of help unpick some of these things and you'll find our email addresses in the show notes.

Andy

I think probably one of the we we do talk about a lot. And so one of the worst things that might happen is we end up somewhere where they go, well, it said it was harmful in your tool. So we took their phone off them. That’s exactly not what we want, you know. We're providing guidance for decisions when we're not telling you how to do your job as a safeguarding professional.

Louisa

Absolutely brilliant. Well, we will end there and we'll be back soon with our Potentially Harmful podcast.

That's it for another episode of the online resilience podcast. If you liked it, please tell someone you know who might also enjoy it. You can share on Facebook, Twitter, or even just pop a link in an email.