Self-published child porn in UK

I just posted on youth as self-published pornographer, but here's an exhaustive take on the subject from across the Atlantic. In the UK so far, 90 UK youth "have been cautioned as a result of posting sexual material of themselves or their underage friends online or on their mobile phones," the Daily Mail reports. I'll tell you more about the piece in a second but want to zoom right in on the operative word "cautioned." Not "arrested," which is what I'm seeing in too many news reports about sexting over here. That, I think, is what has to be law enforcement's role where sexting's concerned: helping youth understand the tragic, potentially life-changing implications of this behavior. Police are often called in when these incidents involving students occur, and rightly so because this is technically child pornography we're talking about, and producing and distributing such is a crime. But where minors are concerned, this is much more a behavioral than a criminal issue, and I feel it has to be dealt with as such. At the very least school counselors and parents need to be involved as well (I'd appreciate your thoughts on this via anne(at)netfamilynews.org or our forum at ConnnectSafely.org). The article's exaggerated in places (e.g., "the avalanche of pornographic material beamed onto every computer screen unless it is actively blocked"), but the reporter, a foreign correspondent who'd just finished researching online pornography for BBC Radio 4 and - before talking with many UK secondary-school students about it - "was not prepared to hear they were also producing it" and to what extent. And she's a mother of three girls, 12, 14, and 15. "I spoke to children from a range of public and state schools. It is certainly not the case that this behaviour is being perpetrated by those from a deprived background or those who lack intelligence. In fact, it's the privileged, supposedly brightest youngsters who are most at risk," she reports.

UK's new national online-safety council

The UK has unleashed a new Net-safety watchdog, the BBC reports. Called the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, it's the panel called for in British psychologist Tanya Byron's Action Plan, which resulted from the year-long study she conducted at Prime Minister Brown's request. Announced by British Children’s Secretary Ed Balls and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, the council has representatives from more than 100 organizations in both public and private sectors, including social-network companies and children's advocates, according to the Children's Office press release. The council's charged with educating the public about safety on the social Web and, among other things, establish what we call "best practices" - as the BBC puts it, "voluntary codes of practice, with an examination of how websites handle videos or messages posted by users." View video of Byron's own look back at her report's development here. Here's my original post on the Byron review last April.

UK data on youth meeting strangers online

"One in five British children has met a stranger they first encountered online," the BBC reports, citing a survey from British identity-verification company Garlik. "As many as one in four 8-to-12 yea- olds ignore age restrictions to use social-networking sites." Bebo and Facebook have a minimum-age requirement of 13 and MySpace of 14. In its coverage, The Telegraph zoomed in on what parents are doing about it: "The research shows parents are taking matters into their own hands with three-quarters snooping on their children online. One in four parents admit to secretly logging on to their child’s social networking page, while the same number have also set up their own page to spy on their kids." This got a lot of coverage in the UK. Here, too, is The Guardian.