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cyberbullying
We Can't Make the Same Mistakes With Online Child Safety That We Made With the AIDS Epidemic
As a physician I saw the deadly consequences of government inaction on AIDS. Today, I see a parallel—with big tech.
Mar 30, 2024
In the late 1990s, I was working as a physician in Zambia when I decided to pull over my car to stop at the side of the road. I couldn’t have prepared myself for what I would see at the intersection right in front of me: coffins of all sizes—including tiny ones for children and babies—for sale.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been shocked. I had been watching many friends and colleagues who were dying of AIDS, and the hospital wards were overflowing with dying patients, at two to every bed, with others lying on the hallway floors. People diagnosed with HIV were living without hope as the medicines that could slow the progress of the disease were largely unavailable to those outside the U.S. and Europe.
Still, the sight of the coffins lined up neatly by the road remains one of the starkest and most disturbing memories from my time in Zambia.
This experience led me to found the Global AIDS Alliance in 2000. As a leader of the organization, our movement mobilized to pressure lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to convince them to fund programs to get medicines to those diagnosed with HIV no matter where they lived. At first it was disheartening to see how little many lawmakers and people in power initially seemed to care that people were dying preventable deaths.
As our movement built power, eventually we were successful—when the U.S. government launched the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the global community mobilized to create the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, two organizations that have saved over 40 million lives in the last 20 years.
Today, I fear I am seeing a similar pattern on another issue: child safety.
As a survivor of familial childhood sexual violence, I have been a longtime advocate for laws to protect children from the trauma that I went through at the hands of my father.
Fortunately, my trauma happened in the 1960s decades before the internet, as children who are violated today are often photographed and videoed by their perpetrators. Content is often shared on the Internet and on storage platforms like iCloud where they can circulate endlessly.
In the last decade it has become increasingly clear that social media and tech companies are irresponsibly allowing sexual violence, harassment and exploitation to spread widely through all social media and internet platforms. On a daily basis children are experiencing abuse, harassment and cyberbullying, which is driving too many young people into a mental health crisis.
Yet the U.S. government has been tragically slow to take action.
Recently, the Senate grilled the CEOs of five big tech companies on child safety in an unprecedented hearing. Among those attending were the parents and loved ones of young people who have been harmed by social media, including some who died as a result.
Though the hearing was a good first step, much more needs to be done.
Countless of young people—including my friend Leah Juliett, a survivor of image-based sexual violence whose underage nude images still circulate on the internet despite their efforts to get them removed—continue to be harmed by social media and technology companies. And companies like Apple, which has refused to detect and remove known images depicting sexual abuse of children, were not required to testify.
The hearing has yet to result in any concrete legislative action—and time is running out. Young people across the country continue to be traumatized every day by this inaction. Were it not for the fact that my abuse took place decades ago and was not documented or uploaded on the internet, I may have been in the same situation as my friend Leah.
I urge President Biden and Congress to urgently take action—starting by requiring companies to enact policies to detect and remove known images depicting child sexual violence, abuse and to prevent cyberbullying. We need to treat this crisis of neglect of children like the public health emergency that it is.
I hope that the government will listen to survivors like myself and Leah—rather than turn a blind eye like I witnessed during the AIDS crisis. There’s an opportunity to save the lives of many young people, but if we don’t act soon it will be too late. We hear their silence, and we hope that they will hear all of our voices and be brave!
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Get Smartphones Out of K-12 Schools, Say Child Advocates and Educators
"How can we expect kids to learn and teachers to teach when there are concerts, movies, parties, cyberbullies, shopping malls, and drug dealers in their pockets?" said the leader of a letter to the U.S. education secretary.
Oct 25, 2023
Dozens of parents, child advocates, and researchers this week called on U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to issue an official advisory "urging U.S. K-12 schools to adopt phone-free policies" to "promote student achievement, foster educational excellence, and ensure an equitable experience for all."
"We are a community of individuals and organizations who see an academic, mental health, and teaching crisis in every state of the union that can be improved automatically and effectually with a single strategy: removing students' personal mobile devices from our places of learning (with notable exceptions for those with special educational or medical needs)," states the Monday letter to Cardona.
"If all students are phone-free during the school day, there will be less distraction, less inappropriate content viewed, less cyberbullying, less planned fights," the letter stresses. "There will be more focus on academics, development of social skills, and students engaging with each other—in class and at extracurricular activities."
In 2019-20—the most recent data available—nearly 77% of U.S. public schools prohibited nonacademic use of cellphones or smartphones during school hours, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. However, research suggests much more needs to be done.
As the letter details:
According to the Common Sense Media report, Constant Companion: A Week in the Life of a Young Person's Smartphone Use, released this month, "Phone use during school hours is nearly universal but varies widely, reflecting a patchwork of different school policies." 97% of participants used their phones during school hours for an average of 43 minutes per day. The majority of students' time was spent on social media (32%), gaming (17%), and YouTube (26%). Mobile devices are a deterrent to learning.
Those findings are part of the growing collection of research and reporting that the signatories—including experts in early childhood development, education, psychology, and technology—highlighted to make the case for phone-free U.S. schools.
Researchers and journalists have documented differences in students' note-taking and grades as well as "alarming" misuse of personal devices, "from sexting to air-dropping compromising photos to hundreds of classmates with one click, to purchasing drugs," the letter notes. A theater teacher in Colorado toldThe Denver Post that her students are "more hesitant to take risks in class because they fear that they will be recorded, the video will be posted online, and then they will be judged."
The journalism referenced in the letter also captures positive responses to well-implemented policies, such as "phone hotels" where kids stash their devices during instruction. Public school district superintendents from Illinois to Maine toldEducation Week that students have thanked them for ending the distraction of phones in class.
Florida's newly implemented statewide ban "has been extraordinarily positive for [students'] mental health from an anecdotal perspective," one principal toldEducation Week. "Our kids are way more engaged. The apathy that we had seen from them in the last year to two years has seemed to wane. They seem more like they're waking back up to a social experience."
In addition to an official U.S. Department of Education advisory, the letter signatories urged Cardona to "encourage state boards of education to offer grants, like those offered in Massachusetts," to implement policies on the use of electronic devices.
The letter emphasizes the urgency of the situation, citing U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy's May advisory about the effects of social media on young people, which states that "at a moment when we are experiencing a national youth mental health crisis, now is the time to act swiftly and decisively to protect children and adolescents from risk of harm."
As Common Dreams reported, 41 states and the District of Columbia on Tuesday filed a pair of lawsuits against Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to protect children from features they argue are designed to keep users addicted to social media.
Efforts to better protect kids from social media platforms and electronic devices used to access them are far from limited to the United States. The letter points to China, England, and France's education-related phone policies as well as a recent United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report that advocates for a global ban on smartphones in schools.
"Phones are polluting our schools. They sabotage the teaching and learning processes," said Lisa Cline of the Screen Time Action Network at Fairplay for Kids, who spearheaded the letter to Cardona, in a statement on Wednesday.
"We know empirically that they are distracting—by design—so it's not a fair fight," she added. "How can we expect kids to learn and teachers to teach when there are concerts, movies, parties, cyberbullies, shopping malls, and drug dealers in their pockets?"
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