Once again I am grateful to those members who took the trouble to contact their MPs to alert them to our concerns about internet information and chatroom web sites which promote suicide.  To date we have received expressions of interest and support from eight MPs nationwide.  If you have contacted your MP on this matter please do let us know so that we can follow it up.

 

Since our last report we have been in communication with Fiona Mactaggert MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Home Office who has replaced Baroness Scotland in dealing with internet safety matters. We have also been in communication with Rosie Winterton, Minister at the Department of Health.

 

Our campaign has always had three elements – to raise awareness of the issue; to seek voluntary regulation by the industry and ultimately to achieve legislation that will make the promotion of suicide very much more difficult.

 

We are making progress on the awareness front. The issue is kept on the government’s agenda through enquiries from MPs responding to our members.  PAPYRUS was recently asked to contribute a section on suicide internet sites and chatrooms to a new government website www.internetsafetyzone.com which also includes details of HOPElineUK.  This is the first reference to the subject on any internet safety site!

 

In February I was invited to give a presentation on behalf of PAPYRUS at the European Safer Internet Day organised by the Cyberspace Research Unit based at the University of Central Lancashire.  The conference was attended by many representatives from the industry including Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the Internet Watch Foundation; Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre; BBC and many other organisations concerned with child safety online. I was able to demonstrate examples of both the information sites and an extract from a real chatroom conversation which had concluded with the death

of an 18 year old man. The conference was left in no doubt as to how serious we take this issue.  It produced some immediate results - one organisation which supervises the provision and use of computers to children in care requested our list of offensive sites so that access to them could be denied on their systems. Also, AOL offered to take our list of sites and consider restricting access to them on their systems.

 

The conference focussed on the varied ways children are now using the internet. Children are no longer simply passive receivers of information but they are increasingly active in making their own contributions.  Young people write blogs or online diaries; publish photographs; contribute to message boards and chatrooms; text and email messages; play interactive games with groups world wide. Online social groups based in schools or colleges are increasingly popular. The growth in these activities means that young people are creating and publishing content which has implications for them as broadcasters. How should we moderate these activities? There are issues of online bullying, privacy in a public forum, consent and intellectual property.

 

 We heard from a major ISP on more robust means of filtering and monitoring for parents.  The BBC undertakes extensive moderation of message boards and emails it receives, especially for children’s programmes. A new body, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, is to be launched in April

bringing together the police, the industry and government to tackle the sexual exploitation of children which continues to be a major concern.

 

Education is a key concern. We should be thinking not just of internet safety but an all embracing concept of “cyber wellness”. This means children need to be equipped with the emotional as well as intellectual skills to deal with the challenges they will meet both on and offline. Young people need to be able to critically challenge the content they receive but also to be aware of, and to take responsibility for, what they create and publish in the cyber world.

 

In a wider context there are also signs that things are improving.  It is now undoubtedly more difficult to access these sites than it was a few years ago.  One site has closed its suicide methods pages directly as a result of Australian legislation that makes it an offence to promote suicide over the internet.  Most sites now have a disclaimer and a warning as to their content – but this is not likely to deter a severely depressed young person from accessing them. They are still out there and we have much work to do to reduce their influence further.

 

There is now a greater willingness by the industry to take on our concerns. Major companies such as Microsoft, BT and AOL are providing ‘family friendly’ filters and systems that give parents much more control of how computers are used by their children.  It is clear that ISPs also have discretion to take down sites that they consider offensive; however, there is still no one official body to which a concerned member of the public can complain.

 

Despite the example of Australia, and also legislation in France and Portugal that criminalises the promotion of suicide, our government remains of the opinion that legislation to restrict these sites is not an option. With the help of our membership we will continue to try to persuade them otherwise!

 

 

You can see more detail of Paul’s conference presentation on our website www.papyrus-uk.org or contact the PAPYRUS office for a hard copy.