Organisational Responses to Social Media Storms: An Applied Analysis of Modern Challenges [1st ed.] 9783030499761, 9783030499778

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Organisational Responses to Social Media Storms An Applied Analysis of Modern Challenges Andy Phippen Emma Bond

Organisational Responses to Social Media Storms “Written in a clear and lively style, this book examines the breadth and depth of social media storms across a series of carefully crafted case studies. It offers a compelling analysis of how a new risk culture is transforming social relations and advances our critical understanding of a changing, digital world. Based on original empirical research and thought-provoking argument—this is an important and timely book.” —Professor Eamonn Carrabine, University of Essex and Editor Crime, Media, Culture “A very interesting analysis of the changing face of online safeguarding, how social media storms can create moral panics, and how organisations can respond. For anyone working in online safeguarding, this is an essential book to read.” —David Wright, Director of the UK Safer Internet Centre “This book is the fore-runner when considering new aspects of online media activity and its impact on those charged with safeguarding children and adults. It offers a topical and compelling discourse on the impact of social media storms on educational establishments and their responses to such phenomena. The authors highlight the need for safeguarding professionals to develop a far more critical approach to digital literacy through their examination of four real-life scenarios. They get you thinking “what would I do in those circumstances?” which leads to the very purpose of this book—to open up debate in an endeavour to ensure that best practice is achieved in all our dealings relating to the protection of children and adults. Well worth reading.” —Tink Palmer, MBE—CEO Marie Collins

Andy Phippen · Emma Bond

Organisational Responses to Social Media Storms An Applied Analysis of Modern Challenges

Andy Phippen Department of Computing and Informatics Bournemouth University Bournemouth, UK

Emma Bond Suffolk Institute of Social and Economic Research University of Suffolk Ipswich, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-49976-1 ISBN 978-3-030-49977-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49977-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

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Organisational Responses to Social Media Storms: An Introduction—Fake News, Post-Truth and Policy-Based Evidence Forming 1.1 The Rise of the Post-Truth Era 1.2 Social Media Storms 1.3 Approach 1.4 Structure References

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The Case of Vanessa George and the Little Teds Nursery in Plymouth: Calls for a Return to Capital Punishment? 2.1 Background 2.2 Child Sexual Abuse 2.3 Social Constructions of Childhood and Gender 2.4 More Than Technology 2.5 Organisational Impact References

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Momo Week: A Perfect Social Media Storm and a Breakdown in Stakeholder Sanity? 3.1 Background

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CONTENTS

3.2

Failing to Learn from History—The Story of the Blue Whale Challenge 3.3 The Emergence of the Momo Challenge 3.4 Momo Week—A Perfect Social Media Storm? 3.5 Organisational Responses 3.6 Implications References 4

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Teen Sexting: The Challenge for Secondary Schools—Where a Society Decides Criminalising Children Is Perhaps Not the Best Safeguarding Approach 4.1 Background 4.2 The New Normal? 4.3 Teen Sexting and Social Media Squalls 4.4 A Turning Point? 4.5 Organisational Response References

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The Warwick University Group Chat: Where Reputation Is Placed Ahead of Safeguarding? 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Cybersexism 5.3 The Warwick Online Rape Chat 5.4 Context 5.5 They Should Know Better 5.6 Warwick’s Response 5.7 Conclusions References

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Conclusions: What Happens When People Only Hear Echoes of Their Views and No-One Knows What a Fact Looks Like 6.1 Fake News and Echo Chambers 6.2 Responding to Social Media Storms

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85 85 86

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6.3 Learning from Case Studies 6.4 An Intense Reflection of the Zeitgeist References Index

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87 90 91 93

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Fig. 5.1

Google Trends of searches for “Vanessa George” in the UK between 2009 and 2020 (Data source Google Trends https://www.google.com/trends) Google Trends data for “Blue Whale Challenge” searched for in the UK (Data source Google Trends https://www. google.com/trends) Google Trends data for “Momo Challenge” searched for in the UK (Data source Google Trends https://www.goo gle.com/trends) Google Trends data for “Blue Whale Challenge” and “Momo Challenge” searched for in the UK (Data source Google Trends https://www.google.com/trends) Search frequency for Momo-related terms in RM-filtered schools over previous year Search frequency for Momo-related terms in RM-filtered schools for “Momo week” Google Trends for teen sexting in the UK (Data source Google Trends, https://www.google.com/trends) Charge and caution statistics for minors arrested under Home Office code 86/2 (Data source Ministry of Justice 2018) Google Trends for “#shameonyouwarwick” between 2019 and 2020 (Data source Google Trends https://www.goo gle.com/trends)

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CHAPTER 1

Organisational Responses to Social Media Storms: An Introduction—Fake News, Post-Truth and Policy-Based Evidence Forming

Abstract Social media storms are a modern-day digital phenomenon, whereby online platforms provide citizens with the opportunity to express their opinions on key issues of the moment which, in turn, raise awareness among friends and followers, who then also express opinions. In this book, social media storms around issues related to online safeguarding, and the responses that organisations once the storms start to blow, are explored. Using a mixed-methods approach of thematic analysis from the storms themselves, and ethnographic observations from work in the field, we make use of four case studies to demonstrate the role of social media storms in organisational change in the education section, as well as wider cultural and legislative impact. Keywords Social media storms · Ethnography · Online safeguarding · Case study research

1.1

The Rise of the Post-Truth Era

Following the publication of a rigorously researched and reviewed scientific paper that considered the impact of social media on young people’s well-being (Orben et al. 2019), media reporting (Harding 2019) picked up on the results that concluded that there was little evidence to suggest © The Author(s) 2020 A. Phippen and E. Bond, Organisational Responses to Social Media Storms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49977-8_1

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that social media had little wide-ranging and serious impact upon the well-being of young people. The resultant public response drawn from social media was, at best, mixed, with some welcoming accurate analysis against the usual media narratives and conjecture that “well it must be bad for them!”; however, there was much generally disbelieving, reinforced with the reporting of the study in the media, at a time when media and policy discourse (UK Government 2019) wished to place social media as a purveyor of harmful content and upset for children and young people, alongside a groundswell of stronger regulation and greater responsibility by social media companies. This small social media event was a wonderful encapsulation of the post-truth era (McIntyre 2018) in which facts and evidence are dismissed in favour of opinion and conjecture. Clearly, as McIntyre explored in his text, social media has a role to play here—the echo chambers of opinion and agreement, in spite of evidence to the contrary, underpinned by media reporting with prolific use of sensationalist headlines in order to more sales and online traffic. Why would we believe evidence, when we’ve decided something different ourselves and we can find others who will reinforce our viewpoint? The impact of social media on lives and organisations is still only just beginning to be understood (bearing in mind that the technological phenomenon has not been around for even a generation yet), but its impact has been significant. Political parties invest billions on social media advertising and analytics platforms in order to be able to reach supporters and persuade others, media courts social media share and click rates as a means to replace the revenue once generated by print sales, and in the midst of this cultural adaptation, social media storms take place, blowing in cultural change as a result of mass social consensus.

1.2

Social Media Storms

While there is a dearth of academic research exploring social media storms, without even an established definition of what they are, there is general cultural recognition of what it is when it happens—an event, reported through the media, will trigger a social media response that will reach a large audience, through shares, reposts and online commentary, such that the event moves into a public consciousness where everybody seemingly has an opinion on the event in question. The role of the media in influencing public opinion has long been debated (e.g. Gene Zucker

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1978; Kozma 1994; Kitzinger 2004); it is generally agreed that mainstream media has some influence over public opinion. Whether this is compounded by the use of social media by news channels remains to be clearly understood. Perhaps one of the best contemporary explorations of social media storms is Jon Ronson’s (2015) exploration of the reemergence of public sharing via social media, showing the impact of a groundswell of technologically facilitated public opinion on individuals and how organisations respond as a result. This book explores the growing phenomenon of the social media storm in the context of educational establishments and their organisational responses. With a methodological approach that draws on aspects of virtual and offline ethnography, we present a series of case studies of public online risk-related incidents (i.e. an incident that the organisation has to deal with that is either technologically facilitated or motivated), the role of social media storm in organisational responses, and whether we can consider these storms to be a positive or negative modern cultural phenomenon.

1.3

Approach

Our ethnographic methodology adopts the use of unobtrusive data collection approaches, to exploit publicly available data from online interactive behaviours. This text is motivated by seminal works such as Cohen’s (2002) exploration of moral panics, which richly explored the nature of moral panics and how public opinion is fed by media narrative around “seven objects” of cultural identity mistrusted by the mainstream. We will be drawing upon techniques established by Internet research pioneers such as Hine (2000), Miller and Slater (2000) and Turkle (2011) in making use of both online data sources and observations from the field to inform our ethnographic account, in order to provide an in-depth exploration of the public and organisational discourses arising from four high-profile Internet risk case studies in the education sector ranging from early year to the university sector. It will consider the social construction of risk society (Beck 1992; Giddens 1990, 1991) and a new risk culture in late modernity arising computer-mediated social interactions, its impact on the organisations, and organisational and societal responses. This book purposefully focuses on the education sector, as they are often at the front line of online incidents, media interest and social media response resulting from their habitation in what Cohen (1972) refers

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to as ‘Object 4 – Child abuse, satanic rituals and paedophile registers’. Under protectionist discourses specifically, people are concerned about the abuse of children and respond strongly to media reporting on these issues. Schools and other education settings are therefore sometimes the focus of these issues, either as the location for abuse (as we describe in Chapter 2), or an institution with a responsibility for the safeguarding of children and young people, with expectations that exceed far beyond the school walls. Educational establishments face challenging online incidents, due to the public nature of these organisations, the breadth of stakeholder interest and the often-salacious nature of public online incidents in this sector. The book illustrates how incidents can have far-reaching consequences, and how digital technology can be a late modern double-edged sword (see Giddens 1990) both a boon and extremely detrimental to organisations. The relationship between the offline (organisational process) and online (the influence of stakeholders such as parents and wider communities, the role of mainstream media, the contemporary means to express opinion on the operation of the school beyond a discussion at the school gate) contexts highlights issues beyond the education section around organisational response. Moreover, social media is a platform in which virtually everyone invests and therefore has an opinion. Or, to put it another way, being able to use a technology seems to empower everyone to have an opinion on its use, regarding any understanding of its operation or any responsibility for abuse that occurs. In taking the above example of the school gate, if one chooses to express discontent about the organisation’s operation there, the audience will be smaller and geographically condensed. If one expresses the same opinion online, the audience can be extensive, and the opportunities to disseminate further are many. Therefore, educational establishments have to find new ways to manage the event that has caused a storm to arise, and develop proactive and preventative strategies so these storms are anticipated and addressed pragmatically. They can no longer respond in private, with just the school board securitising response that would have arisen in a traditional complaint by a parent, for example, about the conduct of a teacher in class. Now, rather than going to a school, a parent engaging with the media to trigger a social media storm could place the organisation under the global spotlight. We are reminded of a case of a teacher collecting (public) photographs of pupils from Facebook in order to deliver an assembly to make them think about their own privacy setting (Robinson

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2014). One of the images used was of a pupil in a bikini. The pupil, upset by the embarrassment of seeing herself in swimwear in the assembly hall, complained to her parents. This was a well-intentioned, but misguided, attempt to get pupils to “Think before they post”, and if the parent had visited the school to make a complaint face-to-face, there might have been swift resolution of the upset caused. However, one of the parents chose, instead, to go to a national tabloid newspaper, who ran the story the next day, and subsequently incited a social media storm which reached the other side of the Atlantic on the same day and resulted in attacks on the teacher, young person, parents and school. From one contributor, calls for the teacher’s dismissal were justified because no one in that position should be “looking at children online”. However, others were of the view that the young person themselves was at fault because they had posted the picture with no thought to privacy, while other commentators drew conclusions as to the motivation of the parent to go to the press with a story when they should have spent more time worrying about what their child was doing online. Social media storms generally do not originate from a random collection of private individuals posting on social media, as the average social media user has relatively little reach and therefore cannot create a groundswell of opinion necessary to fire up a storm. The storms are formed when influential individuals or organisations (e.g. newspapers), with an order of magnitude in a higher number of followers, use social media to disseminate information or share their opinions or views. Newspaper headlines are deliberately written to attract attention and draw the reader to the story, particularly in the online world where it has been estimated that a reader decides on whether to read an article in less than a second. Once the winds of these storms reach a significant number of social media users, it will be them further accelerated by others sharing and retweeting these influential posts. In all of the case studies analysed in this text, the catalyst for all of the storms has been mainstream media’s use of social media to disseminate inciteful stories. It is interesting to note that in three of the four cases, the stories were based upon truth, and one was a hoax. However, dissemination was swift in all cases and impact was significant.

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1.4

Structure

The following four chapters each present a case study of a social media storm around either a specific event (in three cases) or a long-term trend where social media discourse played a strong role in shaping public opinion. They are: 1. The case of child abuse that occurred at the Little Teds preschool childcare setting in a city in the South West of the UK. More specifically, it focuses on the release from prison of Vanessa George, a former worker at the nursery who conducted, recorded and distributed the abuse online with two contacts—Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen. As one might imagine, the social media response to such a horrific case was powerful and angry, and the impact of the case caused significant changes in practice across early years settings in the whole country. 2. The Momo Challenge—an online digital ghost story that, for one week in 2019, caused a social media storm, driven by tabloid media, authority figures and celebrities which as can be demonstrated had a negative impact on children and young people. Momo was, it was proposed, an online app that connected to young people via YouTube and Fortnight, and encouraged them to self-harm and hurt their families. However, as was swiftly demonstrated, this story was entirely false. However, that did not stop adults driving children to look for Momo and become upset as a result. This case is a demonstration of a failure of professionals and other adults with safeguarding responsibilities to react to unfounded stories with a critical eye, rather than being swept up in the storm themselves. The Momo case demonstrates very clearly the need for much more digital literacy in staff at primary settings and online safeguarding training in general. 3. Teen sexting and the criminalisation of children are the focus of the third case study which, while not having an explosive, violent storm such as that experienced in the above two cases, is interesting in itself as it certainly collected a mass of public opinion which arguably resulted in a change of practice in the criminal justice system (albeit one that has potential not improved things for the better). While early media opinion on teenagers exchanging self-produced indecent images was general focused on the corruption of youth and

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the depravity of their actions, once young people started to become criminalised the media view adapted to a position of questioning the social value of young people ending up with criminal records based upon legislation near 50 years old. The storms followed, and this case explores this change in attitude and also the impact of the storms on changes to the justice system. 4. The final case study explores a still unresolved legal case that resulted from leaked group chats among students at Warwick University in the UK, where male students were discussing enacting violent sexual acts upon female peers, often in the same classes. Once this was discovered, the messages were used at the basis of a complaint and a subsequent disciplinary process that had extremely unsatisfactory outcome which, ultimately, resulted in media coverage and ongoing legal case that has had serious repercussions for a sector who, until this case, did not believe they had any responsibilities for the online safeguarding of their students. While each of these cases has their own themes and nuanced differences, the approach to the analysis was similar in all cases, making up of a thematic analysis of social media commentary that was drawn from the media stories that generated the storms. However, aside from celebrities, we make use of those comments anonymously. While all of the comments collected have come from public sources (i.e. they are freely accessible to anyone wishes to search for them—we have not made use of fake social media accounts or befriended subjects), we see little value in the use of identity data in expressing the themes of the storms, except in the case of celebrities, where their identity is necessary to demonstrate the volume of followers they have and the associated reach. Alongside this data, we have made use of Google Trends to clearly illustrate the ferocity of a storm in the collective consciousness. While Google Trends data only gives an indication of term popularity over a given time period and is not an accurate measure of search volume, it does give a relative value, which is a strong indication of search term interest compared to others at a given time and therefore extremely useful to measure storm strength. Coupled with the online data collection approaches, we draw upon our own experiences as actors in the online safeguarding context during these storms. We have, collectively, well over 30 years experience researching online phenomena and working actively in the online safeguarding world

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with many different stakeholders, such as young people, teachers, parents, children’s workforce professionals, lawyers and policymakers. For two of these cases, we have been professionally involved in the activities surrounding the storms; for the other two, we have had input into the storms via stakeholder engagement. While the basis of our research work lies in the statutory education sector, it is interesting to note that over the past three years we have moved our focus to higher education, specifically in response to our own experiences in the sector and observations about the dearth of policy, knowledge and training around online safeguarding. We have, therefore, a perhaps unique perspective as both research academics and active participants in the practices and stakeholder perspectives on these cases. Following on from the cases studies, we draw the book to a close by returning to our original intention of reflecting on the nature of organisational response to social media storms. The case studies give a wide range of perspectives on the nature of social media storms and we consider whether this learning can be used by organisations. We stated at the start of this chapter that social media storms are not well researched in academia and we hope this book starts to generate questions and reflections on the phenomenon and how researching them allows us to better understand cultural change in a connected world and hopefully help organisations become more proactive in dealing with them.

References Beck, U. (1992). Risk society towards a new modernity. London: Sage. Cohen, S. (1972). Folk devils and moral panics. London: Routledge. Cohen, S. (2002). Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the mods and rockers. New York: Psychology Press. Gene Zucker, H. (1978). The variable nature of news media influence. Annals of the International Communication Association, 2(1), 225–240. Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity Cambridge. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Harding, E. (2019). Social media does NOT harm teenagers, Oxford study says amid claims online activity only has a ‘trivial’ effect on their happiness. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6999807/Socialmedia-does-not-harm-teenagers-Oxford-study-says.html#comments. Hine, C. (2000). Virtual ethnography. London: Sage.

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Kitzinger, J. (2004). Framing abuse: Media influence and public understanding of sexual violence against children. London: Pluto Press. Kozma, R. B. (1994). Will media influence learning? Reframing the debate. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 7–19. McIntyre, L. (2018). Post-truth. Cambridge: MIT Press. Miller, D., & Slater, D. (2000). Internet. New York: Berg Publishers. Orben, A., Dienlin, T., & Przybylski, A. K. (2019). Social media’s enduring effect on adolescent life satisfaction. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(21), 10226–10228. Robinson, M. (2014). Schoolgirl, 15, humiliated by teacher who showed a picture of her in a bikini to 100 fellow pupils to demonstrate dangers social networks. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2782126/Schoolgirl-15-humili ated-teacher-showed-picture-bikini-100-fellow-pupils-demonstrate-dangerssocial-networks.html. Ronson, J. (2015). So you’ve been publicly shamed. New York: Riverhead Books, A member of Penguin Group (USA). Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. New York: Basic. UK Government. (2019). The Online Harms Whitepaper. https://www.gov.uk/ government/consultations/online-harms-white-paper/online-harms-whitepaper.

CHAPTER 2

The Case of Vanessa George and the Little Teds Nursery in Plymouth: Calls for a Return to Capital Punishment?

Abstract Starting our trajectory through educational settings, this chapter considers the first social media storm discussed in this volume, which garnered public attention on an early year’s organisation and nursery education in the UK. Vanessa George, a mother of two, was charged with seven offences in 2009, including two of sexual assault by penetration and two of sexual assault by touching and producing 124 indecent images of children. She was also charged with making, possessing and distributing indecent images of children. Such behaviours are hard to comprehend, and public outcry and horror related to the case is evident across many social media platforms with hundreds of people sharing their views on the case and her subsequent release from prison. Littered with words such as ‘scum of the earth’; ‘pervert’; ‘monster’; depraved’; ‘repugnant’; ‘heinous’; and ‘evil’, the social media storm that surrounds ‘Britain’s worst female paedophile’ is a fascinating example of the public’s view on the lack of justice for the children she abused. Keywords Little Teds · Child sexual abuse · Case review · Indecent images of children · Hate speech

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Phippen and E. Bond, Organisational Responses to Social Media Storms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49977-8_2

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2.1

Background

Starting our trajectory through educational settings, this chapter considers the first social media storm discussed in this volume, which garnered public attention on an early years organisation and nursery education in the UK. It is a timely chapter given recent political developments kept the case in the public eye. On 11 February 2020, the then MP for Plymouth, Luke Pollard, supported the proposed introduction of a new UK law to prevent the early release of child sex abusers who refuse to name their victims. The proposed Prisoners (Disclosure of Information about Victims) Bill, otherwise known as Helen’s Law, would place an obligation on Parole Boards to taken into consideration any nondisclosure on the part of the offender when applying to be released from prison. This political development, and specifically Pollard’s support for it, was influenced by the public outrage towards the proposed release from prison of Vanessa George, a former nursery worker from Little Teds nursery in Plymouth where she abused the young children in her care and shared images of the abuse online with two contacts—Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen. Unsurprisingly, the public commentary on social media was driven by anger and outrage with calls to keep child abusers locked up, capital punishment to be reintroduced for those who abuse children or various forms of physical abuse exacted out on Ms. George (such as burning and starvation). Under UK law, namely Section 160 of the Criminal Justice Act (Home Office 2003), it is a criminal offence to possess an indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph (i.e. computer-generated) of a child, as well as the taking, making, distributing and sharing of an indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child (Section 1; Protection of Children Act; Home Office 1999). George, a mother of two, was originally charged with seven offences in 2009, including two of sexual assault by penetration and two of sexual assault by touching and producing 124 indecent images of children. She was also charged with making, possessing and distributing indecent images of children. The three offenders—George, Blanchard and Allen—met on Facebook. Using various online platforms, George had an online relationship with Blanchard, whom she met online in 2008, who had a previous conviction for possessing indecent images of children. As Vandiver (2006) points out, it is not uncommon for male child abusers to choose a female companion based on the fact that the

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relationship enables an access to children. George would send Blanchard images taken on her phone of her abusing children at the nursery, they shared sexual fantasies of a graphic nature and Blanchard further shared the images with Allen, with whom he also had an online relationship and subsequently introduced to George in 2009. The strength of feeling towards George was clear to see on social media, with many claiming she should not be allowed to live and others suggesting they would be happy to enact an execution themselves. Such behaviours are indeed hard to comprehend and related to the case is evident across social media platforms as depicted in the quote above. While it is not the intention of this chapter to provide a psychological account for explaining such behaviours, Ramiro et al. (2019: 2) suggest that social norms are ‘practices we engage in primarily because we think they are the right thing to do’ and what ‘moral society demands of us’. However, descriptive norms—‘practices we engage in because we want to coordinate with what other people in our reference network are doing’— become dominant in cases such as this. As illustrated by the following quote from the Guardian: Transcripts obtained by the Guardian of Blanchard’s interviews with detectives – extracts from which are published here for the first time – together with details from the heart of the Greater Manchester police’s lengthy operation to catch him, describe instead a serial abuser who transfixed vulnerable women with access to children.

Luring these women into a male version of a honey pot, Blanchard twisted their moral compasses so they would feed his dark fantasies, abusing children to order, photographing the deeds and sending him the image files as evidence in an act of sordid ventriloquism (Levy and Scott-Clark 2011). Use of the Internet to share images of child sexual abuse by adults has attracted much media attention, and at the time of her arrest in 2009, public shock and anger were evident on both traditional and social media. Similarly, public interest in the case again peaked in the weeks before her release from prison in September 2019. If we plot the Google Trends in the UK for Vanessa George, these peaks in public interest are clearly shown (Fig. 2.1):

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Fig. 2.1 Google Trends of searches for “Vanessa George” in the UK between 2009 and 2020 (Data source Google Trends https://www.google.com/trends)

A Google search rendered hundreds of news headlines focusing on her release from prison and the reaction on social media was one that was primarily focussed on not granting parole (because paedophiles will always reoffend and are incapable of rehabilitation, in the view of some commentators).

Nevertheless, the Parole Board found George no longer posed “a significant risk” but would face strict conditions upon her release. George has refused to name the children she abused, and therefore, concerns remain over many children who attended the nursery at the time as to whether they were also abused by George, leading to media headlines such as the below: Families ‘tormented’ by nursery abuser’s silence.

It was this refusal that dominated the public discourse around the time of her release and the subsequent call for Helen’s law, with calls for George to be incarcerated until such time she did disclose the names of victims, as this would show she can, at least, demonstrate remorse and empathy. The 1366 comments on the Daily Mail article headlined ‘Britain’s worst female paedophile Vanessa George, 49, will be freed from jail after

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convincing a parole board she no longer poses a ‘significant risk’ to children’ published in July 2019 were littered with phrases such as ‘scum of the earth’; ‘pervert’; ‘monster’; depraved’; ‘repugnant’; ‘heinous’; and ‘evil’ as well as hundreds of comments referring to the lack of justice for the children she abused.

2.2

Child Sexual Abuse

The World Health Organisation (WHO) (1999) defines child sexual abuse (CSA) as ‘the involvement of a child in sexual activity that he or she does not fully comprehend and is unable to give informed consent to’. It is well acknowledged that victims of CSA carry the experience of abuse into adulthood (Tener and Murphy 2015) and the very serious impact of CSA on survivors’ physical, social and mental health is well documented (Bond et al. 2018; Fisher et al. 2017). The comments from the social media storms illustrated the known impact of CSA on mental health on victims but also the strength of feeling towards George for what she did with, again, calls for the death penalty enacted with a variety of methods including electrocution or hanging. According to MacLeod (2015: 97), ‘child sexual abuse has reached epidemic proportions in the United States, and one of the most underrepresented groups of sexual offenders in the criminal justice system is that of the female sexual offender (FSO)’. As discussed below in this chapter, the fact that George was female is one of the most significant factors in the public social media interest and commentary. The number of individuals being sentenced for child sex offences has increased across the UK (Crown Prosecution Service 2016), and there is also an increase of conviction rates for viewing, distribution and production of online child sexual exploitation material (CSEM) in the last two decades (Merdian et al. 2017). The spread and use of online CSEM is a significant problem that proliferates as digital technologies advance (Seto 2013) and it is increasing (IWF 2019). In addition to burgeoning numbers, online abuse images of children are increasingly more sadistic and violent and the children in the images are increasingly younger and it is not unusual to see images of young infants (Bunzeluk 2009; CEOP 2014). Online CSA and CSE have an additional abuse dimension in the image(s) in that: Behind every image, video or screen, there is a real child victim being sexually exploited. Like other forms of sexual abuse, online abuse can scar victims

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emotionally and physically for a lifetime. But unlike other forms of abuse, the child can potentially be re-victimized millions of times – every time an image is watched, sent or received. (Ecpat, online)

Therefore, as Palmer (2005) argues, the effects of CSA may be exacerbated for children whose abuse is recorded, especially when images of abuse are intentionally disseminated, and viewed and collected via the Internet. Online child sexual exploitation has dramatically increased in recent years (Kloess et al. 2014) and the increasing role of the Internet in child sex offenders’ behaviour has been well documented for over a decade (see, for example, Beech et al. 2008). Public concerns relating to indecent images of children online reflect the media discourse of stranger danger online, children being groomed online and being coerced into producing and sharing sexual material or performing sexual acts online— the sexual extortion of children in cyberspace (AÇAr 2016). Rimer’s (2019: 160) study highlights the role of cultural othering in offending and found that offenders of online child sexual exploitation and abuse ‘constructed children differently: as less or not “real”, and as sexualised. This rendered the children in CSEM fundamentally different, which facilitated offending, assisted in overcoming barriers and allowed participants to hold conventional beliefs about children and childhood while engaging in incongruent online activity’. In this case, however, the abuse took place in the trusted space of an early years setting, the Little Teds nursery, and then shared online. According to official statistics of such crimes, cases like this are seemingly few but it is important to remember that such statistics are only the tip of the iceberg as they only reflect the cases which come to the attention of Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hubs (MASH), law enforcement and the criminal justice system as Wonnacott (2013: 32) observes: while still few in total, these instances of abuse provoke shock and outrage due to the young age of the children and the fact that the offenders were in a position of trust within an organisation assumed to be the subject of rigorous inspection regimes.

Palmer (2005) argued that while little is known about the effects of knowing that images of their abuse exist, children have the right to know about information that is directly related to them. Martin (2015: 278) further argues:

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Due to the possible effects of such knowledge, it is important to explore issues such as the age at which a child should be informed of abuse images online, the criteria used to make decisions about informing a child, and who should be responsible for making this kind of decision. It is also important to clarify how the particular harms perpetrated by the recording of the abuse, and by the intentional online distribution of the images, may affect the victim. This kind of vital knowledge will have implications for how to respond to such cases and how the therapeutic needs of the children are addressed.

However, as George refused to name the children she abused and, as many of the images of the abuse did not include the faces of the children, and the young age of the children who could not talk about what had happened to them, identifying all of her young victims has not been possible.

2.3 Social Constructions of Childhood and Gender Dubbed the ‘UK’s worst female paedophile’, the public shock and outrage evidenced in the Vanessa George case is underpinned by the socially constructed nature of childhood and the role of gender in the case of a female offender. Childhood as culturally and socially constructed (Prout and James 1997) is not a universal and unchangeable concept, but rather a heterogeneous one that differs across historical, geographical and cultural contexts (Montgomery 2003). The Westernised constructions of the ‘priceless child’ (Lancy 2008: 13) are apparent in the very public social media commentary on the ‘innocent victims’, and it is the concept of the innocent child that continues to be a familiar aspect of contemporary Westernised discourse and which underpins child-centred educational initiatives including nursery provision in the UK (James et al. 2010). While in relation to older children, the child appears in public and media discourse as both victim and offender (see Chapter 4 on sexting in this volume), the very young children in this case of Vanessa George were clear examples of vulnerable beings in need of protection and who were in the care of professional nursery worker. The fact that they were abused by the very person who should have been protecting and caring for them is also fundamental to the public reaction we saw on social media. That women are viewed as caring individuals who simply cannot engage in sex crimes (Strickland 2008)

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exemplifies social and cultural constructions which are important to understand the public discourse and social media storms that surround the Vanessa George case and the pervasive belief that sexual offenders are typically male and victims typically female. ‘Female sexual offending has typically generated considerably less interest when compared with that of male sexual offending’ (Gillespie et al. 2015: 285). While there is a dearth of research on female sex offending (Levenson et al. 2015), there is evidence to suggest that female sex offenders tend to have high rates of psychological problems such as depression, low self-esteem and social isolation (Elliott et al. 2010), which are often a result of their own sexual victimisation (Elliott et al. 2010; ten Bensela et al. 2019). Rates of female offending for CSA vary but according to Cortoni et al. (2017) official records indicate females account for approximately 2% of all sex offenders. As women encounter the criminal justice system, typically as victims rather than as offenders, there is ‘limited empirical research on women who have sexually offended against children, but there is a clinically-significant group of victims who have experienced female-perpetrated child sexual abuse’ (Weinsheimer et al. 2017: 446). Furthermore, ‘It is a commonly held assumption, stated implicitly or explicitly in both public debates and scholarly research, that child sexual abuse is a typically male crime, in so far as offenders are generally held to be men and the level of sexual aggression involved in their offences is seen as closely related to masculine behaviour’ (Martellozzo et al. 2010: 592). Findings from a US study ‘showed that female perpetrators were identified in one out of every five substantiated cases of child sexual abuse as the first listed or theoretically implied primary perpetrator. When two perpetrators were listed, the number of females identified as co-offenders in a secondary capacity was over 42%’ (MacLeod 2015: 108). Worryingly despite the minimal research dedicated to addressing the long-term effects of female sexual abuse on victims, emerging studies have revealed that the general public and professionals working in the area of child welfare perceive sexual abuse by women as relatively harmless as compared to sexual abuse by men (Denov 2004). This point was also apparent in the comments on social media, where members of the public expressed, as fact, that female offenders are treated differently and are subject to lesser sentences, and that the justice system attempts to not go down a custodial route. As Weinsheimer et al. (2017: 447) point out, it may be that ‘social norms and social stereotypes associated with women demand a higher

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degree of evidence of abuse before parties will report alleged offenses perpetrated by females rather than males. For these reasons, the true prevalence of female-perpetrated sexual offenses might be masked and understated’. Furthermore, ‘the reluctance to believe that a female, a mother in a caring position, could sexually abuse a young child was undoubtedly a factor in the lack of challenge to Vanessa George’s increasingly worrying behaviour’ (Wonnacott 2013: 41), and as such, the social construction of childhood and innocence interplays with the social construction of gender and stereotypical female traits of nurturing and caring and the professionalisation of early years practitioners. Other comments, however, did not differentiate on gender but felt the punishment should fit the crime, even though, in a lot of cases, their perception of punishment would not align with official sentencing guidance, instead of calling for execution. It is this complex interrelationship which underlies the public commentary which has throughout remained focused on the previously trusted, female nursery worker figure of Vanessa George with little attention given to Blanchard nor Allen.

2.4

More Than Technology

Recording the sexual abuse of a child, and the production of CSA images, predates the Internet (Martin 2015: 275). Yet without doubt, ‘technology has had a profound effect on child sexual abuse and exploitation; particularly the production, distribution, viewing, and collection of child sexual abuse images online (CSAIO)’ (Martin and Slane 2015). It is public shock and outrage that arguably fuelled the social media storms that have surrounded the case, the enquiry and subsequently Vanessa George’s release from prison. The call for a ban on mobile phones initiated by a parent at Little Teds nursery exemplifies public concern at the time but also the lack of understanding of the complexity of such cases. The interoperability of the mobile phone has become ‘taken for granted’ and embedded in late modern society (Ling 2012; Bond 2014) but writing in the Guardian in 2009, Josie Appleton rightly questions the subsequent ban on mobile phones in nurseries imposed on staff with the headline ‘mobiles ban won’t stop child abuse’, as if the mobile phone caused the abuse. Such simplistic reactions fail to acknowledge the motivating psychological factors associated with online CSA such as sexual arousal; pleasure in collecting; facilitating online relationships with

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other users; replacing negative offline relationships; a form of “therapy” to escape problems; and a manifestation of “addictive” aspects of the Internet (see Quayle and Taylor 2002) and the implicit theories held by CSEM users, the ‘interlocking core beliefs’ hypothesised to underlie offence-supportive thoughts (Bartels and Merdian 2016: 17). Thus, while the ban on mobile phones reeks of technological determinism, it also masks the underlying causes of CSA and OCSA and the problems which delayed the abuse being discovered in that, according to the subsequent inquiry, the Little Teds nursery in Plymouth ‘provided an ideal environment’ for George to abuse the children she was being paid and trusted to care for, an observation that was picked up on and much quoted in the UK press at the time (Morris 2010). Interestingly, in the Birmingham serious case review into the abuse by Paul Wilson, arrested in 2010 for rape and 47 counts of grooming girls online, the Little Stars nursery where he worked was also criticised. The serious case review reported the Guardian (Davies 2013) stated: Jane Held, the chair of the safeguarding children board, said: “Responsibility for this awful abuse must, and does, lie with the perpetrator. He was clever, duplicitous and manipulative and took advantage of weaknesses in the system.” “In this case there were unfortunately a number of weaknesses in the way that nursery was run and a number of opportunities to intervene earlier and prevent the continuation of abuse which were missed,” she said. “There are three key lessons arising from this review. One is that those in charge of settings caring for children must ensure there are strong, clear practices and systems to minimise the risk of abuse.” “The second is to listen to and ask about children’s experiences rather than just speak to adults.” The third, and potentially the most important, is that safeguarding children is a job for everyone, and every single person who looks after or cares for children needs to know how to recognise when something is not right and what to do about it, and have confidence they will get the right response when they do act.

Wilson pleaded guilty in June 2011 to two charges of rape, 16 of causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity, 25 of making indecent

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images and three of distributing images of children (BBC News 2011). It is also interesting to note that ‘the abuse within the nursery perpetrated by Vanessa George and Paul Wilson was detected only because of an investigation into their online activities, raising a legitimate question as to whether or not, prior to the advent of the internet, these offences within a nursery would have come to light’ (Wonnacott 2013: 34). However, while there are some similarities between the offending in both cases, a Google search for Vanessa George reveals hundreds of posts and comments including calling for the death penalty on both social and mainstream media, and a search for Paul Wilson suggests less public interest in the case with a fraction of the coverage. But what commentary is there is also interesting in terms of attitude towards gender and blaming parents, for example many claiming that one should never trust a male nursery worker, given that most paedophiles are male. And in one comment the respondent rather curiously stated they believed in gender balance in early years settings but would not personally send their child to a nursery with a male member of staff: Whilst there are a number of comments in similar vein talking about not trusting men working in nurseries, there are also a number challenging such stereotypical attitudes where they felt there was too much prejudice regarding male nursery workers, mainly as a result of personal experience with their own children attending a setting with both male and female staff. Other comments chastised those who had accused all male nursery workers as being narrow minded and prejudiced.

Interestingly and perhaps most surprisingly given that there were an estimated 72 thousand providers offering 1.7 million Ofsted registered childcare places in England in Spring 2019 with an early years’ workforce of an estimated 363,400 staff (DfE 2019), there were also comments relating to parents looking after their children themselves, the implication being if parents cared sufficiently they would not make use of early years settings and would keep them at home instead.

2.5

Organisational Impact

Article 39 of the UN Convention on the Rights (1989) of the Child stipulates:

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State Parties shall take all appropriate measures to promote physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of a child victim; of any form of neglect, exploitation, or abuse; torture or any other form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; or armed conflict. Such recovery and integration shall take place in an environment which fosters the health, self respect and dignity of the child.

The traumatic impact of CSA is well known to have lifelong affects. Images of the abuse that have been shared compound the problems for victims. ‘Child victims who know, or become aware, that images of their sexual abuse are circulating online must live throughout their lives with the knowledge that these images may exist in cyberspace forever’ (Martin 2015: 277). ‘Child sexual abuse has a devastating impact on people’s lives. Online child sexual abuse is increasing globally, with criminals using technology to evade detection. Children are revictimised every time their images are viewed online’ (IWF 2019: 6). The case of Vanessa George and what happened at Little Teds nursery in Plymouth incited public outrage and anger depicted in the social media storms that surrounded her both arrest and subsequent release. Compared to similar cases with a male offender, public opinion appears far stronger due to the fact that she was female and this is evident in discourse from social and print media. Reflecting the risk society thesis (Beck 1992), some comments, however, did focus on the nature of the crime rather than the gender of the offender and suggested that gender was an artificial prejudice when considering crimes against children. The key messages emphasised in the social media storm were the abuse of trust placed in someone working in nursery with vulnerable, innocent children especially given policy initiatives and developments in child protection, safer recruiting and keeping children safe in education, and that Vanessa George was female. While media commentary often influences and shapes public opinion, it was public views and attitudes that dominated media coverage of the case and highlighted the fact that female-perpetrated child sexual abuse is often overlooked in debates on child sexual abuse. It is important that the potential harm of sexual abuse by women is better understood and indeed better recognised by both the public and the professionals who play a crucial role in the recognition and treatment of sexual abuse. The ban on camera phones remains in place in many nurseries and early years settings in the UK but taking on board the recommendations

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from the serious case reviews it is clear that there were a variety of other factors which contributed to the traumatic events which took place at Little Teds. As reported by the BBC (2010), the review into the Vanessa George case found that there was a lack of formal staff supervision, a weak governance framework with no clear lines of accountability, staff did not feel able to challenge some of her inappropriate behaviour and that either the individual inspections were not rigorous enough, or the framework for inspection is not adequate. Considering the question of the similarities and differences between abuse within a nursery and other organisational settings, and whether the preventative measures that will reduce the likelihood of abuse can be translated easily from one context to another, the evidence from these two cases [ Vanessa George, Plymouth and Paul Wilson, Birmingham] would suggest that there are clear overlaps with measures already established elsewhere as good practice. These include effective management, sound safe recruitment processes, a well-trained and supervised workforce and an environment within which poor practice is challenged both internally and externally. (Wonnacott 2013: 42–43).

References AÇar, K. V. (2016). Sexual extortion of children in cyberspace. International Journal of Cyber Criminology (IJCC), 10(2), 110–126. https://doi.org/10. 5281/zenodo.163398. Appleton, J. (2009). Mobiles ban won’t stop child abuse. The Guardian. Available online from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libert ycentral/2009/oct/05/vanessa-george-camera-phone-ban. Bartels, R. M., & Merdian, H. L. (2016). The implicit theories of child sexual exploitation material users: An initial conceptualization. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 26, 16–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2015.11.002. BBC News. (2010). Little Ted’s was ‘ideal’ place for Vanessa George abuse. Available from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-11682161. BBC News. (2011). Paul Wilson: Ex-Little Stars Nursery worker jailed. Available online from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-143 04793. Beck, U. (1992). Risk society towards a new modernity. London: Sage. Beech, A. R., Elliot, I. A., Birgden, A., & Findlater, D. (2008). The internet and child sexual offending: A criminological review. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 13, 216–228. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2008.03.007.

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Bond, E. (2014). Childhood, mobile technologies and everyday experiences: Changing technologies = changing childhoods? Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bond, E., Ellis, F., & McCusker, J. (2018). I’ll be a survivor for the rest of my life: Adult survivors of child sexual abuse and their experience of support services. Ipswich: University of Suffolk. Available from https://bit.ly/2NZ0Mvz. Bunzeluk, K. (2009). Child sexual abuse images: An analysis of websites by Cybertip.ca. Available online from https://www.cybertip.ca/pdfs/CTIP_Chil dSexualAbuse_Report_en.pdf. CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre). (2014). Executive summary: A picture of abuse. Available online from http://www.ceop.police. uk/Documents/ceopdocs/CEOP%20IIOCTA%20Executive%20Summary. pdf. Cortoni, F., Babchishin, K. M., & Rat, C. (2017). The proportion of sexual offenders who are female is higher than thought. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 44(2), 145–162. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854816658923. Crown Prosecution Service. (2016). Crown prosecution service annual report and accounts 2015–16. Available at www.cps.gov.uk/publications/docs/ann ual_report_2015_16.pdf. Davies, C. (2013). Concerns over nursery worker who raped child ‘were not investigated’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/ aug/27/ofsted-council-rape-toddler-nursery. Denov, M. S. (2004). The long-term effects of child sexual abuse by female perpetrators: A qualitative study of male and female victims and context. Journal of Sexual Aggression, 19 (1), 32–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/135 52600.2012.747631. DfE (Department for Education). (2019). Survey of childcare and early years providers: Main summary, England, 2019. Available online from https://ass ets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/845080/SCEYP_2019_Main_Report_Nov19.pdf. Ecpat. (Online). Online child sexual exploitation. Available online from https:// www.ecpat.org/what-we-do/online-child-sexual-exploitation/. Elliott, I. A., Eldridge, H. J., Ashfield, S., & Beech, A. R. (2010) Exploring risk: Potential static, dynamic, protective and treatment factors in the clinical histories of female sex offenders. Journal of Family Violence, 25(6), 595–602. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-010-9322-8. Fisher, C., Goldsmith, A., Hurcombe, R., & Soares, C. (2017). The impacts of child sexual abuse: A rapid evidence assessment. London: IICSA. Gillespie, S. M., Williams, R., Elliott, I. A., Eldridge, H. J., Ashfield, S., & Beech, A. R. (2015). Characteristics of females who sexually offend: A comparison of solo and co-offenders. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, 27 (3), 284–301.

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Home Office. (1999). Protection of children act 1999. Available online from http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1999/14/contents. Home Office. (2003). Criminal justice act 2003. Available online from http:// www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/44/contents. Internet Watch Foundation. (2019). Once upon a year. Annual report 2018. James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (2010). Theorizing childhood. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kloess, J. A., Beech, A. R., & Harkins, L. (2014). Online child sexual exploitation: Prevalence, process, and offender characteristics. Trauma Violence Abuse, 15, 126–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838013511543. Lancy, D. F. (2008). The anthropology of childhood: Cherubs, chattel, changelings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levenson, J. S., Willis, G. M., & Prescott, D. S. (2015). Adverse childhood experiences in the lives of female sex offenders. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, 27 (3), 258–283. https://doi.org/10.1177/107906 3214544332. Levy, A., & Scott-Clark, C. (2011, January 10). Colin Blanchard: The disturbing backstory to a crime of our times. The Guardian. Ling, R. (2012). Taken for grantedness: The embedding of mobile communication into society. London: MIT Press. Martin, J. (2015). Conceptualizing the harms done to children made the subjects of sexual abuse images online. Child & Youth Services, 36(4), 267–287. https://doi.org/10.1080/0145935x.2015.1092832. Martin, A., & Slane, A. (2015). Child sexual abuse images online: Confronting the problem. Child & Youth Services, 36, 261–266. MacLeod, D. A. (2015). Female offenders in child sexual abuse cases: A national picture. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 24(1), 97–114. https://doi.org/10. 1080/10538712.2015.978925. Martellozzo, E., Nehring, D., & Taylor, H. (2010). Online sexual abuse by female offenders: An exploratory study. International Journal Cyber Criminology, 4(1), 592–609. Merdian, H., Kettleborough, D., McCartan, K., & Perkins, D. E. (2017). Strength-based approaches to online child sexual abuse: Using selfmanagement strategies to enhance desistance behaviour in users of child sexual exploitation material. Journal Criminal Psychology, 7 (3), 183–192. Montgomery, H. (2003). Childhood in time and place. In M. Woodhead & H. Montgomery (Eds.), Understanding childhood: An interdisciplinary approach (pp. 45–83). Chichester: Wiley. Morris, S. (2010, November 4). Little Ted’s nursery was “ideal environment” for Vanessa George child abuse. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www. guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/04/vanessa-george-serious-case-review.

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Palmer, T. (2005). Behind the screen—Children who are the subjects of abusive images. In E. Quayle & M. Taylor (Eds.), Viewing child pornography on the Internet: Understanding the offence, managing the offender, helping the victim (pp. 61–74). Dorset: Russell House. Prout, A., & James, A. (1997). A new paradigm for the sociology of childhood? Provenance, promise and problems. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood (pp. 7–33). London: Falmer. Quayle, E., & Taylor, M. (2002). Child pornography and the internet: Perpetuating a cycle of abuse. Deviant Behavior, 23, 331–363. https://doi.org/10. 1080/01639620290086413. Ramiro, L. S., Martinez, A. B., Tan, J. R. D., Mariano, K., Miranda, G. M. J., & Bautista, G. (2019). Online child sexual exploitation and abuse: A community diagnosis using the social norms theory. Child Abuse and Neglect, 96. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2019.104080. Rimer, J. R. (2019). “In the street they’re real, in a picture they’re not”: Constructions of children and childhood among users of online child sexual exploitation material. Child Abuse and Neglect, 90, 160–173. Seto, M. C. (2013). Internet sex offenders. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Strickland, S. M. (2008). Female sex offenders: Exploring issues of personality, trauma, and cognitive distortions. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 23(4), 474–489. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260507312944. ten Bensela, T., Gibbsb, B. R., & Raptopoulosa, K. (2019). The role of childhood victimization on the severity of adult offending among female sex offenders. Victims and Offenders, 14(6), 758–775. https://doi.org/10. 1080/15564886.2019.1630044. Tener, D., & Murphy, S. B. (2015). Adult disclosure of child sexual abuse: A literature review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 16(4), 391–400. UNCRC. (1989). Available online from https://downloads.unicef.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2016/08/unicef-convention-rights-child-uncrc.pdf?_ga=2. 222928796.645578956.1585815251–627165287.1585815251. Vandiver, D. M. (2006). Female sex offenders: A comparison of solo offenders and co-offenders. Violence and Victims, 21(3), 339–354. Weinsheimer, C. C., Woiwod, D. M., Patricia, I., Coburn, P. I., Chong, K., & Connolly, D. A. (2017). The unusual suspects: Female versus male accused in child sexual abuse cases. Child Abuse & Neglect, 72, 446–455. Wonnacott, J. (2013). Keeping children safe in nurseries: A focus on culture. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 19(10), 1137–1156. https://doi.org/10. 1177/0886260504269093. World Health Organisation. (1999). Report of the consultation on child abuse prevention. WHO: Geneva.

CHAPTER 3

Momo Week: A Perfect Social Media Storm and a Breakdown in Stakeholder Sanity?

Abstract The Momo Challenge, an entirely fake online phenomenon that exploded into public consciousness in early 2019, was what we might view as a perfect social media storm. The tabloid press endeavoured to raise awareness of the Challenge, which purported to infect young children’s videos on YouTube with upsetting images that then instructed the child to perform acts of self-harm, echoing the hysteria around the (also fictitious) Blue Whale Challenge in 2018. However, these attempts failed to cause a social media storm until the combined forces of the media, authority figures and, crucially, celebrities created a mass public awareness in late February 2019 and became, for a very short period of time, the key online safeguarding issue affecting young people in primary settings and a moral panic upon which everyone had a view, which they often shared on social media. The storm allows us to reflect upon the nature of online safeguarding training and the accountabilities of professionals and stakeholders with caring responsibilities as we can show, rather than keeping young people safe from harm, the response of many adults directly causes them to search for Momo and become upset at what they found. Keywords Momo · Moral panic · Online suicide games · Digital ghost stories · Media influence

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Phippen and E. Bond, Organisational Responses to Social Media Storms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49977-8_3

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3.1

Background

Moving on from the early years sector in this chapter, we explore a significant social media storm that impacted heavily upon the primary education sector within the UK. Given that the focus of this text lies in how organisations within educational settings have responded to these situations, this particular case was not specific to a single organisation, but to settings as a whole, reflects the impact of knee-jerk reactions upon those for which we might have a safeguarding responsibility and the digital literacy of the children’s workforce in general. In contrast to Chapter 2, this chapter, and the next, will also draw also from the lived experiences of the authors, as two academics working in the online safeguarding space who were working with schools at the time of these social medial storms and whose professional opinion was called upon a number of times during these events. The rise of ‘Momo’: TERRIFYING doll-like character used in controversial ‘suicide games’ spreads fear online as social media users crown the viral figure the ‘Slenderman of 2018’. (The Daily Mail 2018)

The social media storm we will explore in detail is the Momo Challenge—an ‘online suicide game’ that became part of the online social media collective conciseness during the early part of 2019. These ‘digital ghost stories’ have increasingly come part of contemporary online phenomena and fit into cultural concerns around the impact of digital interaction on children and young people, which stretch from whether video games make them violent to concerns regarding screen time. While history can show that concern for elements of digital technology such as video games goes back as far as 1976 (Kocurek 2012), online suicide games are more modern phenomenon, with the first being, arguably, the Blue Whale Challenge in 2017 (Mukhra et al. 2019). We should differentiate between games that have been argued to be correlated to influential factors associated with children and young people taking their own lives (e.g. as a result of anxiety or depression from playing the game), and those that are, as it is purported by those wishing to promote awareness of these phenomena, designed specifically to drive children and young people to self-harm and take their own lives. The Slenderman meme and its subsequent development as a digital ghost story (Chess and Newsom 2014) was perhaps the first time that

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online folklore was cited as a causal factor in an attempted murder by two 12-year-old girls (Jones 2014). However, when the case came to trial, while conjecture still attempted to suggest this Slenderman character, who was little more than an image on a meme site, was partly responsible, the outcome was rather more sensibly that the attackers’ own mental health was the main causal factor, and both were sentenced to indefinite detention in mental health facilities. Nevertheless, a public official still used the outcome to raise concerns for parents regarding the dangers of the Internet, quoted in the article as stating: This should be a wake-up call for all parents , the Internet has changed the way we live. It is full of information and wonderful sites that teach and entertain. The Internet can also be full of dark and wicked things.

In another example of a concerning (over)reaction from a responsible public body is the Doki Doki Literature Club, an interactive video game with horror and upsetting story threads, which was cited by a coroner in the North West of England as being linked to the tragic suicide of Ben Walmsley (The Sun 2018). As a result of this warning, many police forces issued alerts that were sent to schools and, via social media, to parents. However, taking an objective perspective on this case, causation is far more difficult to demonstrate. If causation was a factor in young people taking their lives, we would expect to see impact in other cases yet the game has been downloaded over 2 million times (Jomes 2018). Evidence suggests that causation would be extremely difficult to prove, and with all moral panics , conjecture is sometimes far more powerful than evidence. Moral panics were first introduced to the popular lexicon through Stanley Cohen’s (2002) seminal work which considered how media discourse can be used to vilify social subcultures and fire up social concern about things of which mainstream culture has little knowledge. The discursive formulae Cohen (2002) adopted to represent moral panics are pertinent to our discussion here in that they are: 1. new (hard to recognise, “creeping up on the moral horizon”), but also old (relating to traditions and fables); 2. damaging, but also warning signs for real danger;

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3. transparent (out in the open for everyone to see) but also opaque, requiring detailed explanation from “experts” to make people aware of the “real harm”. Applied to the Slenderman folklore: 1. It refers to a modern phenomenon (a digital ghost), and it relates strongly back to ghost stories and threat coming from the unknown. 2. Slenderman cannot, of itself, harm, and the real danger (in this case physical assault) is driven from the ghost story. 3. Slenderman is easily searchable online, but requires effort to build up the discourse around the stories. There it is difficult to easily grasp for those who are not immersed in the folklore, and therefore, “experts” can “inform” with inaccurate information that fills the mainstream vacuum. Cohen also, as a result of observing moral panics for over 30 years, defined 7 objects that were the foundations for panic one, two of which fall very much into our analysis in this chapter—child abuse and blaming the media (in this case online media).

3.2 Failing to Learn from History---The Story of the Blue Whale Challenge Returning to the phenomenon of online suicide games, arguably the first to gain mainstream notoriety was the Blue Whale Challenge, which emerged in 2017 with a modus operandi that comprised: • Public officials raising concerns about children taking their lives as a result of playing the game; • Social media being used as a channel to raise awareness and bring into mainstream discourse; • Media reporting with uncorroborated figures related to associated cases. In particular, there was media reporting about young people taking their own lives in Russia in large numbers. As one headline from the Daily Mail (2017) illustrates:

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Police warn Blue Whale ‘suicide’ Facebook game linked to 130 teen deaths in Russia is heading to the UK.

The game was purported to be an app which when downloaded allegedly gave out 50 different instructions which the recipient would have to enact and report back to the curator of the app with evidence the direction had been carried out. The 50th instruction was to take your own life, but prior to that there were other acts such as getting up early to watch scary videos, not speak to anyone for a day or the act which used to name the game—carve a picture of a blue whale into your skin with a razor blade. At the time of the moral panic, the Blue Whale Challenge was referred to by many so-called responsible bodies (police, education professionals and academics) all wishing to raise alarm to such a harmful game but from a few badly fact-checked news stories and grainy online images, and used as evidence of causation when, in reality, it was very difficult to prove. Nevertheless, social media soon swelled with media headlines to share and social media presence, through likes, shares and comments, to collect. Typically, people posting would describe the nature of the game, linking it to child suicides and calling for people not to download it. The game was also being constantly named in posts, as if to help others identify the risk or, equally, be factually accurate in perpetuating the myth. Some posts went into great detail to explain the nature of the “game” (even though it did not exist and therefore did not reflect the descriptions used) and embellishing along the way with claims of data protection threat, hacks and technically impossible feats such as installing itself in a manner which would make it impossible to remove. Rather amusingly, in some cases, commentators were calling, once they had graphically disclosed the nature of the game, for others not to disseminate information—which would seem unlikely given the hysterical nature of their own descriptions! The game was given more credence as a result of the sorts of people who were tweeting about it, reflecting Cohen’s formula about transparency and opacity. People could search for the Blue Whale Challenge, but having “experts” explain what it actually means gave more credibility to the phenomenon that could have been easily dismissed as nonsense. For example, a tweet from a Police Community Support Officer in Devon and Cornwall police was frequently used as evidence that the game existed. After all, if it was not real why would a public official be tweeting about it, especially when he was graphically describing how young people “win” the game by taking their own life.

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Furthermore, media stories were used by the public to express their own views on this threat to children and what should be done about it (and also, as is common in these cases, cast judgements on the parents of victims). Again many posters went to great lengths to describe the nature of the (fictitious) fame in great detail in order to be able to confirm their outrage that something like this existed (it didn’t) while also casting judgement on the nature of young people (who “are obsessed with their phones” or “addicted to social media”) who might engage with this (entirely fake) game. And the opacity of the concern is further clarified by the sharing of official information from public bodies on social media. In particular, a letter from schools citing Hertfordshire Police was shared across social media and also used by mainstream media: Dear Parent/Carer We have been advised by Hertfordshire Constabulary to send the following information to parents regarding a dangerous online game called the Blue Whale Challenge. The Blue Whale Challenge is an internet-based game that has resulted in many deaths in several countries; Russia has attributed over 130 deaths to this. The challenge is believed to be spreading across Europe; Belgian and French police officially warned parents and teenagers after three cases were reported in Belgium this week. The administrator/curator of the challenge picks on vulnerable children and adults and gives them 50 challenges over a period of weeks that culminates in suicide (challenge number 50)… ..Thames Valley Police have had three suicides recently that are believed lined to this and some London boroughs have identified youths who were within the 50 challenges. The majority of the challenges involve self -harm followed by sending a picture to the curator as proof. A tell-tale sign is challenge number 11 carve a whale on your hand with a razor and send a photo to the curator. If a child is identified within these challenges please get advice immediately, contract the school, the police, or Children’s service.

With such a compelling body of “evidence”, it was no wonder that the Blue Whale Challenge become so strongly linked to the public consciousness. Regardless of the fact there was no evidence, just a storm of repeat statistics and descriptions from a few original sources. Nevertheless, Blue

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Fig. 3.1 Google Trends data for “Blue Whale Challenge” searched for in the UK (Data source Google Trends https://www.google.com/trends)

Whale Challenge became prevalent in searches in 2017, as illustrated with Google Trends (Fig. 3.1). We can see that there was interest in the Blue Whale Challenge when the social media storm was blowing in 2017, with spikes correlating with media and social media posting. The spike at the end of February 2019 will be returned to later in this chapter. However, perhaps the most concerning thing about the Blue What Challenge was that, quite simply, it did not exist. There are still no corroborated cases of self-harm or suicide linked to any tangible “challenge”. While there have been some prosecutions associated with the game (The Times 2017), there is still scant evidence that this was anything other than someone taking the Blue Whale story and using it to encourage children to harm. The challenge itself remains elusive, with no evidence or platform of verified evidence that any young person was following the 50 tasks. Nevertheless, the digital ghost story remains and continues to be reported on, even in academia. Indeed, Mukhra et al. (2019)’s paper, the most widely cited academic paper on the subject, concludes with: The blue whale challenge, is a deadly online craze. It prompts the victim through online dares ranging from watching a scary movie at midnight, self -harming by making cuts using razors to committing suicides.

However, it has been clearly debunked and has no basis in reality.

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3.3

The Emergence of the Momo Challenge

While Blue Whale Challenge was something of a slow burn, building up social media coverage to create the storm over a period of time, Momo, and what we will refer to as Momo week was different. The Momo suicide challenge was, according to the rumours, a game that placed a disturbing image (actually a photograph of a sculpture of an ubume—a supernatural entity from Japanese folklore—produced by the artist Keisuke Aisawa1 in 2016) in the midst of innocuous videos watched by children. Peppa Pig, for example, was a popular target for people to add an image of the ubume sculpture, resulting in shock and upset by the viewer watching cartoon. Moreover, the media reporting, and associated online folklore, continued; the image would speak to the viewer and give them a mobile phone number for them to contact, which would then provide the victim with a series of challenges, allegedly associated with some form of self-harm or instructions to take their life. While there were some mentions of Momo in the popular press in 2018, these were swiftly dismissed as false and nothing to worry about as it was generally only reported in mainstream tabloid media, with little promotion on social media, and no voices of authority commenting at that time. Among professionals, it was the view that in the same way that “Rickrolling”2 placed a video of the pop star Rick Astley in an unexpected link or video, the Momo Challenge was simply a prank (albeit an unpleasant one) done by trolls and meme creators to generate views and hits on their content. However, from 25 February to 2 March 2019, the Momo Challenge became big news on traditional and social media, and caused a response in the primary education sector which strongly suggests that many years of online safety policy and training had little impact on responses in crisis situations. As with previous digital ghost stories, it was quickly established that there was no hard evidence of children coming to harm, and while it had unpleasant content, the Momo Challenge was branded a hoax. It was certainly apparent that there were videos on popular online video platforms such as YouTube that did have Momo images embedded and some had spoken instructions. However, there was no evidence of a suicide game, or even whether these videos were created before or after initial 1 Instagram (2016). “Between.mirrors—Mother Bird”. https://www.instagram.com/p/ BlQlfA2Biju/. 2 Wikipedia (2019). “Rickrolling”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling.

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rumours of Momo had begun. However, during Momo week, the UK certainly witnessed a moral panic hitting both social and news media, and with social media messaging by professionals and authority figures joining in the panic to give advice and opinion of this (fake) phenomenon. Stated in the media as an online “suicide game”, that was encouraging children to self-harm and take their own lives, news reports claimed the challenge had been linked to the suicides of children in Argentina, Mexico and India (The Sun 2019). Obviously, this was a very worrying premise for anyone with children. In the same way that chain letters (Bennett et al. 2003) preyed on the fears of recipients, these memes have a similar goal—while the challenge did not exist, the more people searched for images and videos where the Momo image had been inserted, the more likely it was that young people would be upset seeing it. While chain letters were traditionally propagated at a peer level, the advantage those wishing to spread a digital ghost story to collect social media presence, likes and notoriety, is that many outlets saw this as an opportunity to willingly disseminate the tale to support their online profile or being seen as a “thought leader” on social media. In whipping up the storm, many statutory agencies (especially schools) felt compelled to share these warnings, forgetting fundamental advice around checking sources, exploring evidence and reflecting upon what is seemingly being presented. We, as researchers in the online safeguarding arena, were frequently contacted by professionals with whom we work, and media stakeholders, asking our views on Momo and what we can do to stop it. Our response was always the same—this does not exist and warnings and content about digital ghost stories merely raise curiosity and drive traffic to the very content that is of concern. Fundamental safeguarding messages around online incidents have been consistent for years—provide disclosure and reporting routes for those upset, collect evidence and support them. At no point in any training we had delivered to professionals around online safeguarding had we ever said “get yourself online and start posting about it on social media” or “ask all the children in your school whether they have seen it”. Therefore, it was something of a surprise to us when we saw Momo reappeared so significantly in late February 2019, with the initial press coverage, alongside press releases by police forces, celebrities and even academics wishing to gain social media presence by raising awareness of the challenge and calling it out as harmful and in need of control.

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3.4

Momo Week---A Perfect Social Media Storm?

During Momo week, we saw a very similar pattern of behaviour to the one that existed for the Blue Whale Challenge—a perfect storm of news coverage, authority and so-called online safety organisations all wishing to become the main player in solving the crisis (which in reality didn’t exist) and social media response by many members of the public. Social media responses from the public tended to fall into a number of categories. Firstly fear, claims of authenticity and making their own embellishments to the folklore, with posters claiming their own children have already been targeted, naming and tagging others with children to make sure they are aware of the (fictitious) threat, concerns with the mental well-being of their own children after being told of Momo (in one case a parent had told their six years old about it, then was concerned the child had been having nightmares), talking about how their children’s schools had been talking to them about the threats, including graphic descriptions of young people trying to harm themselves and, again, claims of technically impossible interactions such as talking to children through YouTube videos and injecting itself into online advertisements. We also observed people interacting on social media to mobilise schools around the safeguarding threat, calling on teachers to talk to their pupils in school about the Momo threat. Secondly, there was much judgement on parents, with claims that if people relied on technology as “digital baby-sitting” they’ve only got themselves to blame when these sort of things happen, that allowing primary age children to use YouTube is tantamount to neglect, and blaming those who have provided their children with digital devices as being complicit in the abuse they receive. Thirdly, support for the professionals raising awareness of the entirely fake challenge with children, with thanks to schools who had already raised awareness of the, entirely fake, threat with children in their care, applauding schools who had shared resources about Momo and describing practice in schools where children had been spoken to, such as classroom activities and whole school assemblies. Finally, there were a few voices who were calling out Momo as a hoax and calling on people to read up on the threat before scaring children and young people with myths and ghost stories that have no basis in fact. It was clear that there was certainly some public awareness driven by media reporting, but that did not explain what happened to make Momo

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Fig. 3.2 Google Trends data for “Momo Challenge” searched for in the UK (Data source Google Trends https://www.google.com/trends)

week such a phenomenon. The general approach to building the storm was similar to the Blue Whale Challenge, but Momo week was a far larger storm. If we consider data from Google Trends on the Momo Challenge, we can see virtually no interest, and certainly no slow burn like there was for the Blue Whale Challenge (Fig. 3.2). One of the first major triggers for the spike in interest that week came the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), who produced a press release that raised serious concerns about the potential harm the Momo Challenge posed (PSNI 2019). Highlights of this press release included: Whilst no official reports have been made to Police, we are aware of the so-called ‘Momo’ challenge and are already liaising with other UK Police Services to try to identify the extent of the problem and to look for opportunities to deal with this issue. This extremely disturbing challenge conceals itself within other harmless looking games or videos played by children and when downloaded, it asks the user to communicate with ‘Momo’ via popular messaging applications such as WhatsApp. It is at this point that children are threatened that they will be cursed or their family will be hurt if they do not self -harm. I am disgusted that a so-called game is targeting our young children and I would encourage parents to know what your children are looking at and who they are talking to.

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It is interesting to reflect that while the press release begins by saying that they are not aware of the prevalence of the problem, this did not going to stop them using inflammatory language to raise concern and fear around the Momo Challenge. This press release was shared many times on social media and through online news channels. Moreover, other police forces followed suit with similar announcements. The following was shared across many school websites in the south of England (e.g. St Georges, n.d.): Dear Schools and Partners, As part of our commitment to working in partnership with schools, partners and parents , I am sending this email out expeditiously to ensure you are aware of an internet ‘suicide-influencing game’ which has come to my attention called The MOMO Challenge which encourages children to harm themselves and is reported to be linked to several deaths around the world and is now appearing across the UK. Below is a brief summary of what the MOMO Challenge is and we ask that you share this information among your colleague and parent networks. With no intention to be condescending, given the horrendous nature of the MOMO challenge, I feel it necessary to advise professionals and parents to seriously consider any decision to raise awareness of it to children and young people as a means to safeguard them, unless necessary; as we know, with all good intentions, drawing attention to it may result in them gravitating towards it. Mirroring the ‘Blue Whale’ suicide-game of 2017, The MOMO Challenge is targeted at children and young people through social media by people presenting as MOMO, a terrifying looking doll. The doll encourages them to add a contact on messaging service WhatsApp from an unknown number, once contact is made, children are subsequently bombarded with terrifying images and messages reportedly ranging from threats and dares which encourage them to self -harm and even commit suicide.

While these releases might have come from a place of good intentions, does raising awareness, and naming, something of which there is no

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evidence outside or poorly evidenced media reports, deliver on those good intentions? The second one, in particular, does an excellent job of references, two online ghost story hoaxes in the same message. Clearly, there was no attempt to fact check any of this information; it was using similar language and discourse to those on social media talking about it—it was inflammatory and, clearly, would cause concern to those who read it, particularly those who would not fact check either. These releases, coming from sources of authority, legitimised the reporting from the more tabloid end of news outlets and contributed to the growing social media storm where parents, concerned about their children’s safety, then propagated further. Another factor in awareness raising that was different in relation to the Momo Challenge was the willingness of some self-proclaimed online safety organisations to talk about how to tackle the Momo Challenge (which, we need to bear in mind, didn’t exist), and provide resources for schools in how it might be tackled, which were then shared by concerned individuals on social media as well as school and informal education settings (e.g. sports clubs). This drove the Momo Challenge further into the public consciousness (while still not actually existing). Indeed, one such organisation was challenged on one of their social media pages and felt the need to justify their approach, by agreeing that, while the Momo Challenge was fake, they felt due to media and social media coverage it was their responsibility, as safeguarding professionals, to raise awareness of the (fake) threat and promote resources they had made available to help those who work with, or have, children. However, they also went on to claim empirical work where children had “experienced” Momo on YouTube (rather than more accurately reporting that they have spoken to children who have seen the ubume images appearing in innocuous videos online) and while they were at pains to demonstrate how they had not linked to unfounded claims of suicides in remote locations, they did little to state what one would have thought was obvious for safeguarding companies, and that was that giving publicity to a fake story only fuels its existence. We also saw academics using social media claims that perhaps would not stand up to detailed scrutiny, but adding credibility to the panic and decry those who were claiming it was fake, with one suggesting that a successful prosecution tenuously linked to the Blue Whale Challenge (where an individual was found guilty of inciting a minor to commit suicide) was evidence that the Momo Challenge must be true as well.

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However, perhaps the most powerful trigger for the massive social media storm that beset Momo week was one that did not really feature in the Blue Whale Challenge and explain to some extent why this was different—a major profile celebrity, and several less global stars, saw it as their duty as parents (one would hope not simply to drive likes and traffic to their profiles) to take to social media to comment on the (non-existent) challenge. According to CBS News (2019) on 26 February 2019, Kim Kardashian West (at the time of writing with 164 million followers) shared a screen grab of a post from a follower that started that the Momo Challenge had infected YouTube and YouTube Kids, and was instructing children to kill themselves, switch on cookers when everyone in the household was sleeping and threatening to kill any child who disclosed the challenge to their parents. The poster went on to describe how the challenge was sufficiently intelligent to only appear to children when parents were not in the room. Over the top of the screen grab, Ms Kardashian West had added the text “@YouTube, Please help!!”. Following this post, and the subsequent media reporting online and offline, other celebrities, such as UK TV presenter Stacey Solomon, joined in. Ms Solomon subsequently used Twitter to call on YouTube and Fortnite to “sort out” Momo on their platforms. In summary, the timeline of Momo week ran: • 25 February 2019: PSNI send press release about their concerns around Momo. • 26 February 2019: An organisation who sell online safety services to schools posts a “guide to Momo” to help “thousands of concerns schools and parents” on social media channels. • 26 February 2019: Kim Kardashian West posts about Momo on her Instagram page calling for YouTube to help. • 27 February 2019: Other celebrities start commenting regarding their concerns about Momo on social media. • Across this period, the media also contributed greatly to social media discourse regarding Momo.

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The events above facilitated a perfect social media storm that caused a true moral panic. To its credit, YouTube responded in a measured way, not rising to the hysteria (Google 2019): Many of you have shared your concerns with us over the past few days about the Momo Challenge-we’ve been paying close attention to these reports. After much review, we’ve seen no recent evidence of videos promoting the Momo Challenge on YouTube.

3.5

Organisational Responses

Towards the end of Momo week thankfully more responsible media reporting (Waterson 2019), measured social media voices and communication by many safeguarding professionals (ourselves included) caused the panic to die down and interest in Momo waned quickly, as can be seen by the Google Trends data in Fig. 3.1. However, this book considers organisational responses to social media storms, and our work allowed us to consider the response, in particular, that primary schools played during the storm and the impact that had. While we acknowledge that most people engaged in the social media storm not because they wished to fire up the moral panic, but because they believed it was the responsible thing to do, with children’s well-being at the heart of their actions, this is not to say that reactive posting and knee-jerk practice in schools did not have a negative impact on those we should be safeguarding. As mentioned above, one thing we have learned from Momo week is that regardless of statutory duties on schools to receive safeguarding training (see UK Department for Education 2019), it is clear that such training is not always enacted. We knew of a number of cases where primary schools decided to conduct an assembly to ensure children were aware of Momo and told not search for it, because it was upsetting. Children were also asked about Momo and whether they had seen it, and asked to disclose if their peers mentioned Momo in the playground. All of which, obviously, resulted in children with no awareness of Momo going to search for it and therefore being exposed to an image that, while not part of an organised game that encouraged children to selfharm, was, of itself, quite an upsetting image for a primary-aged child to see. We were told by many professionals that Momo must exist because otherwise why would people be tweeting about it, and in an example of digital Chinese whispers, mirrored in some of the social media comment

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samples we have shown, professionals in primary schools would tell us that while there wasn’t anyone in their school who had seen it, they had received word of another school where they had been cases of children self-harming as a result. There was never any hard evidence to back this up, but the faith in social media gossip and rumour was palpable. One thing clearly apparent from Momo week is that a critical approach to digital literacy among professionals is somewhat lacking, and there is evidence to suggest that there has been a negative impact on these professions’ care. As well as observable instances, we can also draw upon a number of quantitative data sources to demonstrate primary school response to the Momo moral panic. We have already shown Google Trends for Blue Whale Challenge and Momo Challenge in the UK. If we focus on searches close to Momo week, we can see the impact of the panic on searches. What is also interesting to note is that the search popularity for Blue Whale Challenge over this period is also virtually identical—illustrating once more than media coverage of Momo, referring to it as a suicide game and recalling the Blue Whale Challenge as another example drives people to search for these things (Fig. 3.3):

Fig. 3.3 Google Trends data for “Blue Whale Challenge” and “Momo Challenge” searched for in the UK (Data source Google Trends https://www.goo gle.com/trends)

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To focus more specifically on primary school impact, we can draw data from a survey (https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/ypinternet) we run with the online safety charity SWGfL (https://www.swgfl.org.uk/) that has been used to collect information on young people’s use of digital technology over the last three years. The survey is broad ranging, related to young people’s use of technology, their concerns and their approaches to being safe. The question that is of interest to this inquiry is: • Question 9 “If you have been upset by something you’ve seen online, would you like to explain what this was?”3 By exploring the responses to question 9, we can determine whether Momo is something that young people disclose as something they have seen as upsetting. In analysing the data, we can divide responses collected before Momo week and those composed after. For the period of time prior to Momo week (from 1 January 2016 to 24 February 2019), there were: • 9525 responses to the survey with 0 mentions of Momo by young people disclosing things they had seen they had been upset by online. From the period of time from 1 March 2019 (there were no surveys taken during Momo week itself) to 1 March 2020, there were: • 741 responses to the survey with 41 mentions of Momo by young people disclosing things they had seen they had been upset by online. All of the young people who disclose Momo as something upsetting they had seen online were of primary school age. Further evidence around what raising awareness of the source of moron panic has on the school setting as a while can be drawn from search data that was shared with us by an Internet Service Provider used by schools. Search data from RM, who provide filtering and monitoring services for schools, allowed us to explore specific search terms collected across 2681 schools. The data provided showed Momo-related search

3 This follows the question “Have you ever seen anything upsetting online?”

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Fig. 3.4 Search frequency for Momo-related terms in RM-filtered schools over previous year

terms intercepted by school filtering and monitoring systems, both over the last year and also focusing on Momo week. Figure 3.4 shows the Momo-related searches4 that have taken place across the last year, up to and including Momo week. This figure very clearly shows the huge spike in searches for Momo once awareness had been raised around the phenomenon. Note also the far smaller response to searches that took place in 2018 when the tabloid media were reporting on the story without the support of authority figures, online safety organisations and celebrities. Figure 3.5 shows the searches specifically on Momo week and strongly correlated between awareness raising and search interest in schools. We should bear in mind that as these searches took place in schools, we cannot categorically state that all of these searches would have been carried out by children. However, given that this data was collected through monitoring services, they would have taken place on standard school hardware, not staff-specific machines (who would be subject to a different monitoring policy).

4 The most popular Momo-related search strings were: “momo”, “momo challenge”, “momo game”, “momo challenge pic”, “what is momo”, “momo London”, “peppa pig momo”, “momo peppa pig”, “momo youtube”.

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Fig. 3.5 Search frequency for Momo-related terms in RM-filtered schools for “Momo week”

Overall, during Momo week, Momo-related topics were searched for 34,464 times, the week before it was searched for 76 times. This was a 45,000% increase in searches for Momo during Momo week. Clearly, awareness raising of a non-existent phenomenon has an impact. We should stress that these searches took place in both secondary and primary schools. However, we know that 21,541 searches took place in secondary schools, meaning that 13,823 searches could have taken place in primary schools. It is clear from this data that the primary school response, rather than being measured and evidence-based, was one of knee-jerk reaction and panic, leading to many more young people in their care looking for Momo and, in some cases, getting upset as a result.

3.6

Implications

Returning to Cohen’s formulae for moral panics, we can see how Momo week was a perfect fit. 1. While Momo was new, the fears of unknown threat to children from the “dark side” of the Internet have existed for as long as people

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have been able to go online. And before this, there is a long history of digital folk tales around this like the threat posed by video games. 2. Momo was damaging, in that the image was upsetting, but the unseen threat came from the self-harm exacted by the victim upon themselves. 3. Momo was transparent in that any search would result in the image being seen, and there were many digital channels talking about it; however, the opacity of the actual challenge (given that it did not exist so could not be found) required detailed explanation from socalled experts—who in this case were readily queuing up to espouse their knowledge of the subject. We can also see that the social media storm around Momo week clearly had an impact on the collective psyche and how, in a rush to do the right thing, professionals need to make sure they do not lose sight of criticality in their interpretation of information. Online safety training centres, as with most safeguarding, need to ensure contextualisation and a measured response even when it might be challenging for schools to conduct effective risk assessment in the centre of a storm where parents are demanding the school “does something” to keep their children safe from these (fictitious) threats. However, it is crucial that for those with safeguarding responsibilities that sources are checked and authenticity established ahead of a rush to generate social media presence which can then potentially snowball and generate an awareness of a false threat, with potentially harmful consequences for the young people we purport to protect. This is also a lesson to be learned in the evidence associated with these stories. Momo is not the first digital ghost story that has claimed suicides in far off locations. There is need to reflect on why these, apparently global, phenomena seem to impact in remote locations first. The mythology of including remote locations makes the phenomenon more exotic, but equally more difficult to check in terms of validity. From those wishing to promote these digital ghost stories, it is no coincidence that the stories of suicides tend to be in developing countries, where coroners’ reports or death certificates might not be available and would certainly be difficult to access. In the case of the Blue Whale story, a single image on the Internet claiming that a self-harm scar looks like a whale was used to legitimise something that was nothing more than a rumour. In the case of Momo, the validation by authority figures and celebrities with

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huge numbers of followers made it real. We need calm and proportionate responses—we can show, with evidence, how these digital ghost stories emerge, and we need to develop training that talks objectively about these approaches, rather than waiting for the next to emerge, as it certainly will. Stakeholders did not search for evidence in a critical manner, but instead looked for similar stories to support the perspective that they wished to present. While there may be concerns regarding the digital literacy of children and young people, what Momo weeks clearly show is that this is equally needed for professionals.

References Bennett, C. H., Ming, L., & Bin, M. (2003). Chain letters & evolutionary histories. Scientific American, 288(60), 76–81. CBS News. (2019). Kim Kardashian warns parents of “Momo Challenge” but YouTube says it sees no evidence. Available online from https://www.cbsnews. com/news/kim-kardashian-warns-parents-of-momo-challenge-youtube-takeaction/. Chess, S., & Newsom, E. (2014). Folklore, horror stories, and the Slender Man: The development of an Internet mythology. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, S. (2002). Folk devils and moral panics (3rd ed.). London: Routledge. Daily Mail. (2017). Facebook game linked to 130 teen deaths in Russia is heading to the UK. Available online from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article4446556/Police-warn-Blue-Whale-suicide-game-heading-UK.html. Daily Mail. (2018). The rise of ‘Momo’: TERRIFYING doll-like character used in controversial ‘suicide games’ spreads fear online as social media users crown the viral figure the ‘Slenderman of 2018’. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/ article-6045163/ictional-character-named-Momo-overtaking-internet-scaryviral-challenge.html. Google. (2019). Our response to the Momo Challenge & Character. Available online from https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/1917881?hl=en. Jomes, A. (2018). Doki Doki Literature Club! Surpasses two million. Download available online from https://www.pcgamesn.com/doki-doki-literature-club/ doki-doki-literature-club-player-numbers. Jones, A. (2014). The girls who tried to kill for Slender Man. Available online from https://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/22/girls-who-tried-killslender-man-264218.html. Kocurek, C. A. (2012). The agony and the exidy: A history of video game violence and the legacy of Death Race. Game Studies, 12(1). Mukhra, R., Baryah, N., Krishan, K., & Kanchan, T. (2019). ‘Blue Whale Challenge’: A game or crime? Science and Engineering Ethics, 25(1), 285–291.

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PSNI. (2019). PSNI statement regarding Momo Challenge. Available online from https://www.psni.police.uk/news/Latest-News/250219-psni-sta tement-regarding-momo-challenge/. St George’s Catholic College. (n.d.). Online activity alert—MOMO Challenge. https://www.stgcc.co.uk/news/?pid=3&nid=1&storyid=30. The Sun. (2018). SUICIDE WARNING what is the Doki Doki Literature Club and why have schools issued a warning to parents over the DDLC online game? Available online from https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6630711/doki-dokiliterature-club-police-school-warning-suicide/. The Sun. (2019). Suicide warning: What is the Momo Challenge, is there a UK number and how many deaths has it been linked to? Available online from https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6926762/what-momo-suicide-gamewhatsapp-deaths-uk-hoax/. The Times. (2017). Russian postman lured teenagers into his Blue Whale internet suicide game. Available online from https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rus sian-postman-lured-teenagers-into-his-blue-whale-internet-suicide-game-sqw lv07cd. UK Department for Education. (2019). Keeping children safe in education— Statutory guidance for schools and colleges. Available online from https://ass ets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/835733/Keeping_children_safe_in_education_2019.pdf. Waterson, J. (2019). Viral ‘Momo Challenge’ is a malicious hoax, say charities. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/ 28/viral-momo-challenge-is-a-malicious-hoax-say-charities.

CHAPTER 4

Teen Sexting: The Challenge for Secondary Schools—Where a Society Decides Criminalising Children Is Perhaps Not the Best Safeguarding Approach

Abstract Teen sexting—the exchange of indecent images by minors—has been a tabloid staple and a safeguarding concern for well over ten years. While there are some very real concerns regarding the non-consensual sharing of images beyond the intended recipient and abuse received by victims as a result, a lot of safeguarding guidance and public opinion centres on the fact that if young people engage in these activities they are breaking the law. The law, however, is a piece of legislation that made it onto the statute books in 1978 as a means to protect young people from exploitation by adults in the production of child abuse materials (referred to as pornography at the time). In this case study, the social media storm phenomenon is explored not as a single violent reaction, but instead a number of different, smaller, storms, the show opinion shifting over time away from “stop them doing it, it’s illegal” to “we don’t agree with minors being criminalised for this” which resulted in real change in the criminal justice process, supposedly to avoid criminalisation from happening and allowing secondary schools to deal with sexting incidents among their pupils in a more pragmatic manner. However, recent data collected from Freedom of Information requests would show that, rather than reducing crime recording among teen sexting, the measures putting in place—outcome 21 recording—have resulted in far more young people potentially having incidents in their youth coming back to haunt them in adult life. © The Author(s) 2020 A. Phippen and E. Bond, Organisational Responses to Social Media Storms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49977-8_4

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Keywords Teen sexting · Outcome 21 · Legislation · Media influence · Social media squalls

4.1

Background

In this chapter, we move to an issue that has beset secondary schools, and been the subject of much social media comment, over many years— teen sexting. As a most basic definition, teen sexting is the exchange, via mobile devices, of self-produced indecent images among peers who are minors. Or, to use the definition by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (2019): Sexting is when someone shares sexual, naked or semi-naked images or videos of themselves or others, or sends sexually explicit messages.

Teen sexting is viewed very much as a modern digital social phenomenon, as the exchange of images of this sort (particularly self-produced) was problematic prior to the availability of pocket-sized devices with the capabilities to both take pictures and also transmit them. However, a fundamental problem with teen sexting is that it is, from a punitive perspective, clearly against the law, as defined in Section 1 of the Protection of Children Act 1978 (UK Government 1978): it is an offence for a person— (a) to take, or permit to be taken [or to make], any indecent photograph [or pseudo-photograph] of a child…; or (b) to distribute or show such indecent photographs [or pseudo-photographs]; or (c) to have in his possession such indecent photographs [or pseudo-photographs], with a view to their being distributed or shown by himself or others; or (d) to publish or cause to be published any advertisement likely to be understood as conveying that the advertiser distributes or shows such indecent photographs [or pseudo-photographs], or intends to do so.

This legislation very clearly demands charge when applied to a minor selfproducing an indecent image. If we consider Foucault’s (1975) views of the role of the police, he recognises their role as part of the punitive, rather than restorative, process—they collect evidence, they enforce the law, and they facilitate the punishment considered appropriate by society.

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However, given the year that the law reached ascent, it could not have been in the minds of the legislators that the subject of the image, the taker of the image and the distributor of the image could all be the same person. If we actually explore motivation for the legislation it arose from the UK obscenity campaigner, Mary Whitehouse (Thompson 2012), whose lobbying resulted in a Private Member’s Bill by the Bexley Member of Parliament Cyril Townsend, whose obituary by former MP Tam Dalyell (2013), specifically stated the intention of the legislation as: He was prescient in his worries about child pornography and the sexual exploitation of children and in 1978 secured the passage into law of a private member’s bill on the Protection of Children.

The nature of the debate around the bill was that children required legislation to ensure they were not exploited by adults wishing to exploit them for sexual and financial gain. This is the sole motivation for the introduction of this legislation, and it was effective up to the point that a minor could have sufficient technology at their disposal to self-produce images. However, in the digital world, we have a legislative tension between on the one hand protecting the victim and on the other hand addressing the illegality of the generation and sharing. If a minor chooses to self-produce an image and send it to another minor, are they a victim of exploitation or one being abused in the production of pornography? Clearly, there are some scenarios when there might be coercion or threat in the minor making the image or video of themselves, but the law still calls for the producer of the image (the minor) to be prosecuted due to the wording of the legislation. And, with this piece of legislation, with the caveat of updates via: • s45 2003 Sexual Offences Act (UK Government 2003)—extending PCA offence from under 16 to 18; • s67 2015 Serious Crime Act (UK Government 2015)—extending legislation to include sexual communication with a child. The act of production and distribution of an indecent image of a minor has remained fundamentally connected with the 1978 legislation.

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4.2

The New Normal?

Again, this is a topic in which we have much professional experience, having both researched the area for many years (e.g. Phippen 2009; Bond 2010, 2014) and worked in partnership with schools who tackled the issues faced as a result of the exchange of images or, more specifically, when images are shared non-consensually and beyond the intended recipient. Secondary schools are very much in the front line of addressing the impact of teen sexting, whether it is the initial act, or the fallout from abuse of a victim, and dealing with someone who sends an image to someone neither requesting or expecting it. Perhaps one of the least understood, or appreciated, aspects of teen sexting is that a great deal of it goes on in relationships among minors, who treat each other with mutual respect, and there is no native impact (Bond 2010). Or, to draw from an authentic youth voice in Phippen and Phippen (2018: 4): While in the majority of circles, teen sexting is viewed as problematic, this is not really the case. If it occurs between two consenting individuals, there is no real issue and no harm is being caused, despite what many parents and media outlets think.

Therefore, we should stress that the issues secondary schools face lie in supporting young people in scenarios where consent and respect have not been observed, and impact can be severe. Indeed, the original work over a decade ago was borne out of discussion with secondary schools who had experienced in tackling the abuse of minors who had produced images and sent them to others, who had often shared them further. However, at the time, the visibility of sexting in popular culture was not as high as it is now, and there was a lot of opposition to consider this as a common issue that schools tackle. The one thing policymakers generally look for before making decisions is evidence. However, quantifying teen sexting is notoriously complex. In the 2009 research, we reported that 40% of young people aged 14–16 know peers who have engaged in sexting. Other research at a similar time in the US conducted by the Pew Research Centre (Lenhart 2009) found that 4% of cell phone-owning teens said they had sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of themselves to someone else via text messaging and 15% of cell-owning teens aged 12–17 said they had received sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of someone they know via text messaging. Across Europe,

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the EU Kids Online study (Livingstone et al. 2011) found that 15% of 11- to 16-year-olds surveyed had received peer-to-peer sexual messages or images of people naked or having sex, and 3% said they have sent or posted such messages. A fundamental challenge for researchers wishing to measure the prevalence of sexting lie in the ethical challenges in researching illegal activities. If young people have been told then sexting, or “sending nudes”, is illegal, it is unlikely that they will respond honestly to a survey where they posed the question “Do you send nudes?”. Perhaps more effective academic interventions lie in understanding the discourse around the acts and complexity of behaviours (Albury et al. 2013; Ringrose et al. 2012)—to develop a deeper understanding of the phenomenon and further highlight cultural failings in supporting young people who might be experiencing abuse or upset in some manner. As Lee and Crofts (2015) state: our knowledge of the practices and perspectives of young people is still relatively limited. (455)

This is borne out in the sexting field if we consider a disappointing fact— we were approached by secondary schools in 2008/2009 to help them tackle sexting issues as a result of legislative overbalance and a lack of national policy to help them navigate the complexity of supporting victims of abuse as a result of sexting, while being cognisant of the fact that safeguarding training they had received, and advice from police liaison, had made it clear that any young person engaging in such behaviour is breaking the law. At the time of writing (early 2020), we still receive these requests and still get asked what the legal position is, how they can stop young people from doing this, and how can they manage the pressures from parents, police and young people themselves in resolving issues without criminalising victims of abuse. The depressing reality, particularly disheartening for two academics who have worked for policy and legislative change for over ten years, is schools that are still, on the whole, left to resolve these issues themselves. Policy initiatives and criminal and legal frameworks remain uninfluenced by academic work, and indeed calls from educators and even young people themselves, preferring instead to drive the prohibitive narrative. The results, as highlighted by Bond (2016), with young people are simultaneously being victimised and criminalised by inadequate legal frameworks and outdated understandings.

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In using a large legislative tool, designed to tackle an entirely different social problem, to tackle the act of sexting, rather than understanding that the impact resulting from bullying, harassment or abuse (Albury and Crawford 2012) can be severe, and the act of self-generation might include coercion and control, a legal framework should also be mindful that sexting is, for many young people, part of self-identity and everyday experiences (Bond 2014; Phippen 2016). Just as risk is socially and culturally constructed (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991), responses to sexting need to also recognise young people as willing participants who can, on the whole, enjoy the experiences. However, this jars with adultist perspectives on online safety which are generally prohibitive in nature and, as expressed by Heins (2001: 107) ‘the protectionist approach, with its assumption of harm to minors from exposure to explicit sexual information and ideas, is not only intellectually and politically flawed, it is ultimately counterproductive’. However, in general, these protectionist approaches remain and are viewed critically by young people (Phippen and Phippen 2018: 5). This is an issue for several comments and resources made by supposed industry experts, all seem rather out of touch, assuming young people are completely unaware and would believe almost anything they see on the Internet, were it not for the resources provided to them. This discrediting of young people’s critical thinking and knowledge leads to many finding digital safety education patronising, which consequently encourages them to ignore the information, with young people often finding more use in advice from their peers. Clearly, there is a need for change in focus as young people rail against adultist approaches to “education” where prohibitive messages are disregarded and knowledge is developed from peers, rather than trusted adults.

4.3

Teen Sexting and Social Media Squalls

However, the focus of this text lies in social media storms and how they impact upon organisation in the education sector. And social media storms have certainly had a role to play in teen sexting and to some extent facilitated cultural and legislative change. While storms in the area of teen sexting tend not to share similar properties to that of Little Teds, which are driven by upset and a focus on a hate figure, and Momo, when a massive social media moral panic resulted in a focused, violent storm.

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In this case, we tend to see smaller, media-driven, more sporadic storms. In general, they will be driven by an article in a (tabloid) newspaper, which will illicit shares and comment online. If we consider the Google Trends for “teen sexting” in the UK, we see a very different picture compared to the other case studies in this book. Teen sexting is something with a constant media interest (it has two factors that are of regular interest to the tabloid media in particular—online abuse and sexualised children), with spikes occurring around specific media stories or campaigns. We focus on a number of the spikes depicted in Fig. 4.1: • In 2012, when media interest in teen sexting became prevalent; • In 2014, when media attitudes were adapting to the criminalisation of minors for sexting; • In 2015, when an incident of an unsolicited image was dispatched and redistributed in a school in the North West of England that resulted in crime records for all actors involved. Nevertheless, when considered as a collective, we can see similar themes emerge and, as we will show in this chapter, they can illicit cultural and legislative modification, so no less impactful for having a lesser value on

Fig. 4.1 Google Trends for teen sexting in the UK (Data source Google Trends, https://www.google.com/trends)

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the virtual Beaufort scale. Perhaps, instead, we should refer to the storms around teen sexting as a group of social media squalls, rather than a storm per se. While policy focus and legal frameworks have remained prohibitive and, arguably, not fit for purpose, we have, over the last few years, observed something of a change in media discourse. As we have commented above, in 2008/2009 teen sexting was something on an unknown phenomenon for mainstream media and the public consciousness. Conversely, as stories of teen sexting began to become more mainstream, mainly as a result of tabloid reporting on the topic, we experienced something of a change in focus with public attitude. In our own experiences, early reporting of teen sexting was generally accusatory in nature and resulted in moral outrage by many. For example, a tabloid article which covered some of our own work (Martin 2012), research that made it clear that teen sexting was not an epidemic, but something many young people were exposed to involuntarily as a result of images being shared further than the intended recipient, via social media and group chat (Phippen 2012), resulted in the somewhat contradictory headline of “Sex texts epidemic: Experts warn sharing explicit photos is corrupting children”, followed by an article whose discourse was very much shock and outrage at the behaviour of these young people. Unsurprisingly, social media comment, in general via the commenting functionality on the reporting tabloid’s website, shares the moral outrage and judgement on young people, with concerns that sending indecent images is not something they would do themselves, and there was “something wrong” with people who did. Moreover, there was much judgement on “this generation”, implying they were behaving in an immoral way that would not be the case with older people, and others decrying the loss of innocence. In one case, a contributor felt that any one young person who engaged in these behaviours should be referred to a child psychologist. However, there were also comments that were far more judgemental and show perhaps a change in attitude, acknowledging the fact that young people become sexually aware in their teenaged years and perhaps the wider cultural obsession with sex is somewhat to blame. Moreover, others commented about the need for better sex education so that young people could engage in such practices “safely”, and in one case a teenager made the point that he has been with his girlfriend for five years and this was a normal part of their relationship, and he didn’t see anything wrong with it.

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Nevertheless, when exploring these social media squalls that contributed to real change, we can start to see when the reporting moved away from moral outrage at the behaviour of teens to reflect on whether the law was appropriate, and particularly when children ended up being criminalised for engaging in teen sexting, the outrage was tempered away from moral judgement and more on whether the law was fit for purpose and whether criminalisation was an effective means to help young people who might become victims of abuse, and even if we should accept this is simply young people emulating adult behaviour. In observing this change, and the impact, we will focus on two stories that illicit a great deal of social media response and, arguably, resulted in a change in the law (or, more specifically a change in criminal justice process) that purported to help young people and allow secondary schools to address the impact of teen sexting, rather than agonising over the legality while knowing full well the legislation was not fit for purpose. As part of our sample, a story from 2014 (Tozer and Duell 2014), with the headline “Schoolgirl cautioned for sending topless selfie to boyfriend as police warn sexting could leave children with criminal record”. Even with the headline, we can see that the rhetoric had changed—it was less outraged and raised awareness of the legal position related to sexting. The report centred on a teenage girl who consensually sent a topless image of herself to her boyfriend. The story went on to collect comment from police and “experts” about the need for education and the grave implications of acting in such a way, but the tone was concern rather than judgement. The small social media storm that arose as a result of this story was, unsurprisingly less judgement, although still have some views on the morality of the actors in the story, again reflecting on their own moralities and claiming that because they would not do such a thing, they could not understand why anyone else would. And another saying is that if their child was to do something like this, they would call the police themselves. And there was also acceptance that “it’s the law” and there was some value in applying it in this way, regardless of the suitability of the legislation. We saw commentators stating that young people need to understand why we have laws, and the consequences that arise from breaking them. However, those with a legal perspective, we clear that while a warning was appropriate, being entered onto the sex offenders’ register was excessive. However, there was far more comment regarding the appropriateness of the law and criticism of the police and state for criminalising a child

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in this way. There were some commentators who were quick to show the discrepancy between the age of majority (18) and the age of consent (16), and how this is bound to lead to confusion for young people, and how a law developed for protecting minors should not be used to punish them. There was also some discussion regarding the need for a difference in consequence between exchange among peers and an adult coercing a minor into sending images. Some equally felt this was an example of excessive police powers and a lack of pragmatic application of the law. And also many calls for more effective education around these issues, from both minors themselves and also adults. There was a view that the confused legal picture was something that needed to be discussed in schools, but also differentiation made between the exchange of images in a consensual relationship and the further sharing of images done without consent. Again many parents came forward to say that discussions with their own (teenaged) children had resulted in them being shocked that such behaviour could result in arrest because firstly it was prevalent among peers and secondly they’d never received any education around the legalities of what they were doing. The evolving media discourse resulted in a change in perspective from the social media storms that erupted following these stories. The focus moved from the young people themselves to start to question the validity of the law and whether there was any social value in criminalising minors for acts that were perfectly legal for adults.

4.4

A Turning Point?

Arguably, the turning point in public opinion, as reflected in the social media storms that followed, was the story of a 14-year-old boy, who sent an unsolicited nude image to a girl in his school (Ward 2015). The young man received a caution under the Protection of Children Act 1978 which was recorded as a criminal report after the school was made aware of the incident after the recipient shared the image further. The recipient also received a caution and crime report. The media coverage, which was blanket across the UK, went on to explain that as a result of the crime report, should either minor be subject to a Disclosure and Barring Service check (a criminal record check used in general when someone applies for a job working with children), there was a chance the record, which showed the crime was making and distributing an indecent image of a minor, might be recalled. In the reporting of the story in one tabloid (Martin

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2015), the police position and the problems with the law were clearly highlighted in quoting Olivia Pinkney, the Chief Constable of Hampshire Constabulary, making it clear that she was concerned with police involvement with these incidents: School should be a place where children can push boundaries and make mistakes and they don’t have to involve the police. But if the child, their parent or carer want the school to speak to the police, then they will record that.

Even though there was clarity in the discourse around the fact that, in her view, schools could deal with these issues without police involvement, she said: If you tell the police about a crime, we have to record it. That is what the public expects.

The resultant social media storm reflected a change in public opinion that was evolving over time. There was far less acceptance of the law and moral judgement on the young people although still hyperbole, with one contributor bemoaning the collapse of civilisation and the emergence of a society wishing to emulate Huxley’s Brave New World. However, for the majority of commentary, the focus was instead on being less judgemental on young people, for example stating that if adults, in the case of some celebrities, had become successful as a result, in part, of indecent images, why wouldn’t we expect young people to engage in similar practices? There was also acknowledgement of a failure for teenagers to appreciate risk, and how physical development and hormonal change can result in them not thinking things through before acting. A few respondents felt that if they were still a teenager they would have certainly behaved in the same way. Furthermore, there were more calls for more effective sex and relationships education, to help them understand more broadly issues of risk, consent and respect. One respondent raised a question around how young people are going to know what it “right” and “wrong” if the relationships education they receive never provides them with an opportunity to discuss these issues. However, the focus of most discontent was with the law and the excessive reaction to criminalise children for engaging in behaviours like this.

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Again there were criticisms that the law was out of date, was not being applied pragmatically and was devaluing proper child protection issues given the focus on criminalising minors for self-producing images. As well as discontent with the law, again, many respondents felt that the police were behaving in an excessive manner which reflected the skewed priorities, and some concern about how excessive surveillance and control of young people would lead to a great public acceptance of monitoring and a bleeding into adult life. In among all of this discourse and confusion, schools were still expected to address the very real impacts of abuse arising from sexting, unsolicited nudes being sent to peers and the non-consensual sharing of these images. Progress was made on the periphery of the law in the criminal justice system as they best could, with the Crown Prosecution Service providing guidance (Taylor 2016) that stated: The age and maturity of suspects should be given significant weight, particularly if they are under the age of 18. Children may not appreciate the potential harm and seriousness of their communications and a prosecution is rarely likely to be in the public interest.

However, there was still an expectation on schools to disclose crimes if they believed them to have been committed, and, of course, police would then be duty bound to record them. Official government guidance for schools of sexting (UKCCIS 2016: 12) perhaps muddied the waters further, making mention of the legislation, the lack of clarity with definitions of decency and the need to avoid the criminalisation of young people. However, the guidance also struggled with clarity itself, passages such as: If a young person has shared imagery consensually, such as when in a romantic relationship, or as a joke, and there is no intended malice, it is usually appropriate for the school to manage the incident directly. In contrast, any incidents with aggravating factors, for example, a young person sharing someone else’s imagery without consent and with malicious intent, should generally be referred to police and/or children’s social care. If you have any doubts about whether to involve other agencies, you should make a referral to the police.

Placing the onus on schools to make a judgement on the level of malice and consensual aspect, this document is used by the UK Department for

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Education as official guidance on how schools should deal with sexting and, we know, used extensively by schools as their “go to” document when dealing with sexting incidents. The paragraph seems like a let off for someone who might argue that while they did share an image, that did not do it to cause offence, something we will be returning to in our exploration of legislation and policy around the concept of distress. What happens, in this context, when the victim is upset as a result of the shared image but the sharer of the image says they did it as a joke? And, once more, the guidance fails to appreciate the complexity of teen sexting, skating around the cumbersome and inappropriate application of the law while accepting that it should still be applied.

4.5

Organisational Response

The social media storms, and the causal media coverage, undoubtedly raised public concerns around the criminalisation of children and this, along with fears over the increasing numbers of children being criminalised by legislation designed to protect them, gave rise to a breakthrough when the College of Policing issuing new guidance in 2016 allowing a sexting incident involving a young person to be reported and recorded without criminal charges begin brought and the child having a crime report being logged that would result in the young person having a criminal record (it was assumed). According to the College of Policing (2016: 4) ‘HOCR requires each crime to be allocated an outcome from a menu of predefined codes’. In January 2016, the Home Office launched outcome 21 which states: Further investigation, resulting from the crime report, which could provide evidence sufficient to support formal action being taken against the suspect is not in the public interest – police decision.

This outcome code was introduced to allow the police to record a crime as having happened but for no formal criminal justice action to be taken as it is not considered to be in the public interest to do so. This was viewed by many in the field, ourselves included, as a positive move forward, which would give clarity to schools in addressing these issues and give them confidence that they could disclose “crimes” without risk of criminalising the minor. While the law still remained, tinkering in

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the criminal justice system meant that the risks associated with disclosing harm as a result of engaging in teen sexting were lessened. Clearly, this change in approach worked. An exploration of Data from the Ministry of Justice (2018) on juveniles entering the criminal justice system as a result of charges under Section 1 of the Protection of Children Act (related to Home Office crime code 86/2 see UK Government 2019) doubled between 2007 and 2016 (see Fig. 4.2). However, since the introduction of outcome 21 recording in 2016, charge statistics have reduced significantly. While it is difficult to draw detail from this sort of data, we did have a clear indication that minors being charged under Section 1 of the Protection of Children Act 1978 had declined. With this in mind, we undertook a research study undertaken in 2018/2019 from police forces across the UK under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (Bond and Phippen 2019), to determine the volume of arrest and use of outcome 21 recording since the introduction of the new guidance. Specifically, we asked for: • The number of arrests related to Home Office code 86/2 where the suspect was under the age of 18;

Fig. 4.2 Charge and caution statistics for minors arrested under Home Office code 86/2 (Data source Ministry of Justice 2018)

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• The number of arrests related to Home Office code 86/2 where the suspect was under the age of 14; • The number of crimes related to Home Office code 86/2 recorded as outcome 21 where the suspect was under 18; • The number of crimes related to Home Office code 86/2 recorded as outcome 21 where the suspect was under 14. Breaking down responses per force, we can see great variety in both arrest under s1 PCA 1978 and the application of outcome 21 recording, with some forces using this recording in far great quantities than arrests, particularly for those younger “offenders” (Table 4.1). What is clear from the results most clearly was that the guidance and use of legislation were not being applied in a uniform manner across the country. More specifically: • Children and young people are still being arrested under this legislation. • There are some forces who have arrested minors under the age of 14. • Outcome 21 recording is being applied by most forces, in greatly varying volumes. • The number of outcome 21 recordings, in more cases, far exceeds the number of arrests (in some cases there is a tenfold difference). And the responses to the FOI requests would demonstrate while charges may be reducing, outcome 21 is being applied in far higher numbers. This is of concern, given the view that outcome 21 was viewed as a way of recording a crime without criminalising the young person, and therefore, schools could be more relaxed about involving police in sexting incidents. However, while this may be viewed as positive for young people, we should remain mindful that while it is viewed as a “non-conviction”, the wording of the police guidance states: The discretion on whether to disclose non-conviction information rests with each chief constable managing the process.

In other words, should a minor with an outcome 21 recording be in a position in later life that a DBS check (or whatever the future criminal

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Table 4.1 Breakdown of arrests and outcome 21 recording for minors across police forces Arrests 14–17 Avon and Somerset Constabulary Bedfordshire Police Cambridgeshire Constabulary Cheshire Constabulary Cleveland Police Derbyshire Constabulary Devon and Cornwall Police Dorset Police Durham Constabulary Gloucestershire Constabulary Greater Manchester Police Gwent Police Hampshire Constabulary Hertfordshire Constabulary Kent Police Leicestershire Police Lincolnshire Police Merseyside Police Metropolitan Police Service Norfolk Constabulary North Yorkshire Police South Yorkshire Police Staffordshire Police Suffolk Constabulary Sussex Police

Arrests