During the pandemic, online grooming crimes in Scotland were more than 30% higher when children were not at school compared with the same months last year.
The NSPCC has been calling for legislation to protect children from grooming, abuse and harmful content online since 2017. After years of the charity campaigning, on December 15 the UK Government announced the framework for a future Online Harms Bill that has the potential to provide much greater protection for children when they use the internet.
This is a landmark moment, a major step towards legislation that can make an enforceable legal duty of care on tech companies a reality.
For too long children have been exposed to disgraceful abuse and harm online.
Social media companies will have a duty to protect young users from child abuse and harmful content online and face fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their global turnover if they fail.
But that doesn’t mean the work we do stops now. For instance, the proposals fall short of ensuring criminal sanctions against named directors whose companies fail to uphold their duty of care.
Child protection and children’s voices must remain front and centre of regulatory requirements. We have set out six tests for robust regulation – including action to tackle both online sexual abuse and harmful content, and a regulator with the power to investigate and hold tech firms to account with criminal and financial sanctions. Failing to pass any of the six tests will mean future generations of children will pay with serious avoidable harm and sexual abuse.
We will now be closely scrutinising the proposals against those tests. Above all, legislation must ensure Ofcom has the power and resources to enforce the duty of care and be able to identify and take appropriate action against tech firms that fail.
For more information, search NSPCC six tests.
Joanna Barrett, Policy and Public Affairs Manager for NSPCC Scotland.
Social costs of inequality
Re drug deaths and calls for changes to the law.
Early deaths of Scots from “diseases of despair” are the result of decades of social dislocation, undermining of community ties, austerity measures, endemic poverty, hopelessness, joblessness, and timid policy responses.
While I am not letting the Scottish Government off the hook entirely, they have been trying to tackle this with one hand tied behind their back, without the full range of policy levers to work with.
These trends predate devolution but have been exacerbated because already vulnerable people have been left behind during years of benefit crackdowns and public-sector austerity, meaning communities themselves have not been able to lever the sort of resources required to tackle this effectively at the grassroots level.
M Roy.
This article originally appeared on the Evening Express website. For more information, read about our new combined website.