Cover of Click Clever, Click Safe

I blogged on Tuesday about Click Clever, Click Safe, the UK Council on Child Internet Safety’s strategy, and my belief that it misses the opportunity to frame a positive, and rights-based debate around supporting children and young people to navigate online risks.

However, in fairness to the drafters, the UK Council on Child Internet Safety is a large body of over 140 individual and organizational members – and invariably any attempt to put together a progressive strategy in that environment is tricky. Advocates of informal education & children’s rights; and practitioners who have developed positive approaches to online safety are under-represented in the Council’s Membership, and so there is a clear need to make sure that voices and views on the strategy from research, practice and, crucially, children and young people themselves, have a space to be heard.

To that end, I’ve put a copy of the strategy up on Write to Reply, a fantastic service run by @josswinn and@psychemedia to allow paragraph-by-paragraph comments to be added to public documents.

You can read through and add your insights and comments to the strategy here. If you are involved in supporting children or young people who use the Internet, or you are involved in supporting them to navigate online risks, then I really encourage you to take a few moments to look at where your insights and experiences could form a comment on the strategy.

I am committed to making sure comments get fed back to UKCCIS, and will be encouraging members of the Council to take a look at the shared insights also.

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In other Child Safety linked news – the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society have a call out for “Descriptions of Projects and Interventions that Address Risky Youth Behaviours and Online Safety” and it would be great to see them receive brief summaries from UK & European Practitioners who have been exploring positive approaches to supporting young people online.