E-safety education: Young people, surveillance and responsibility
| Published date | 01 July 2012 |
| Author | David Barnard-Wills |
| Date | 01 July 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895811432957 |
| Subject Matter | Themed Section: Surveillance, technology and the everyday |
Criminology & Criminal Justice
12(3) 239 –255
E-safety education: Young
© The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895811432957
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responsibility
David Barnard-Wills
Cranfield University, UK
Abstract
This article presents the findings of an analysis of ‘e-safety’ education material currently made
available to UK schools, and currently being delivered to children and young people between
the ages of five and 18. E-safety refers to the way that young people are taught about risks
online, how they can protect themselves, and to whom they should report worrying activity.
The article is grounded in a political understanding of education as a political strategy, and one
that is conducted by multiple actors, including policing agencies. The article therefore relates
e-safety education to a broader politics of surveillance, crime prevention and governmental
rationalities and techniques. Formal education does not determine, but likely influences the
perceptions of young people towards the digitally mediated environment – including roles of
authority, appropriate behavioural norms and risk perception (currently dominated by the threat
of child sexual abuse). The most commonly used and disseminated e-safety education material is
that produced by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. This article examines the
role of a policing agency in delivering education, one that also functions as an agent of digitally
mediated surveillance in its law enforcement functions. Education is an explicit strategy of political
actors involved in the politics of digitally mediated surveillance.
Keywords
education, internet, policing, privacy, surveillance
Introduction
This article presents findings of an analysis of ‘e-safety’ education material currently
available to UK schools, and delivered to children and young people between the ages of
Corresponding author:
David Barnard-Wills, Department of Informatics and Systems Engineering, Cranfield University, Shrivenham,
Swindon, SN6 8LA, UK
Email: d.barnardwills@cranfield.ac.uk
240
Criminology & Criminal Justice 12(3)
five and 18. E-safety refers to the way young people are taught about risks online, how
they can protect themselves and to whom they should report worrying activity. Education
is understood as one of a range of explicit strategies enacted by actors in the politics of
digitally mediated surveillance. The article therefore relates e-safety education to a
broader politics of surveillance, crime prevention and governmental rationalities and
techniques. The main focus of the article is on the role of a particular policing agency in
delivering online safety education. This organization, the Child Exploitation and Online
Protection Centre (CEOP), is also an agent of digitally mediated surveillance in its law
enforcement functions. It is hoped that an understanding of the role of the police in
technology education will make a contribution to criminological accounts of the police
as knowledge-actors. Formed in 2006, CEOP is a cross-agency department of the Serious
Organized Crime Agency (SOCA). CEOP combines police officers with staff seconded
from charities such as the NSPCC, and support in kind from a range of strategic partners
that includes Visa Europe and Microsoft. This makes CEOP a particular example of
networked and pluralistic policing with respect to online environments (Johnston and
Sheering, 2003; Loader, 2000; Wall, 2010a).
The discourse of e-safety education provides a particular representation of the online
environment and information technology. This prioritizes certain threats and actors over
others, and presents a very minimal account of privacy as protecting oneself from sexual
predators. The debate and the educational material available are currently dominated by
the threat of child sexual abuse. It is harm- and loss-based, and risks missing opportuni-
ties and limiting the capacity for structural change.
Children are a population who are constructed as both potential victims and potential
offenders in online settings. They are at risk from exposure to inappropriate media and
from hostile actors. However they seek to circumvent restrictions on their behaviour,
and can be responsible for harmful behaviour to each other in the form of cyber-bullying.
This renders them likely to be also construed as legitimate targets for surveillance and
intervention by a variety of adult actors who prioritize certain educational responses to
certain narrowly perceived threats. Young people are a population whose activities must
be known by adults in order to protect them, but also because the population contains
potential offenders – ‘cyber-bullies’. At the same time, the naive or intentional visibility
of children is seen as a significant source of risk. This occurs in an increasingly surveil-
led educational environment as schools become sites of technologically mediated sur-
veillance (Hope, 2005; Monahan and Torres, 2010; Steeves and Jones, 2010; Taylor,
2010). This should all be considered against a background public understanding of the
internet as criminogenic (Wall, 2010b). The focus of this article is primarily the role that
the issue of predation, rather than bullying, plays in this discourse.
This article examines in turn the policy background for e-safety, issues of surveil-
lance and privacy, e-safety as reassurance policing and how this education material
functions to attribute responsibility to various actors and provide accounts of appropri-
ate behaviour. This is contextualized as part of a politics of knowledge and conduct, and
the article concludes with a discussion of ways to expand e-safety education and reduce
its constitutive distortions. How young people are taught to stay safe online and under-
stand a range of online threats, actors, technologies and concepts may affect how they
relate to the online environment both now and in their future lives. This impacts upon
Barnard-Wills
241
online privacy, consent and digitally mediated surveillance. Formal education likely
influences the perceptions of young people towards the politics of the digitally mediated
environment – including roles of authority, appropriate behavioural norms and risk
perception. Education, alongside persuasion and seduction are key modalities of non-
coercive government (Miller and Rose, 2008: 209). Subjects of rule become active in
their own government, while institutions seek to create individuals capable of governing
themselves, capable of making decisions about their self-conduct in reference to particu-
lar norms, vocabularies and warnings (Miller and Rose, 2008: 205). The police role
in education might be thought of in terms of governing through crime (Simon, 2007).
Online crime, particularly sexual offences against children, becomes the dominant
modality for technology education, legitimating the role of a police agency intervening
in education, and reframing education through forms of knowledge associated with
crime control. This is received by educators and parents, who it purports to help perform
socially lauded roles. Although he does not engage with e-safety, the family is identified
by Simon as a particularly strong anchor for governing through crime. The predominant
role of the young person is as potential victim, who is to be equipped and guided to
security-consciousness. This move seems particularly powerful in moments of novelty
where no existing actor has a history of securing the online environment.
Methodology
This study uses a discourse analysis methodology drawing upon the work of Fairclough
(2003) and Glynos and Howarth (2007). Knowledge of the social world is constructed
through language, and language in political and social texts reflects both explicit choices
and deeper structures not easily accessible to those entangled in them. This methodology
focuses upon the way that the social world of online safety education and young people’s
use of online technology is constructed and represented in texts. ‘Texts’ encompasses any
‘readable’ material and can include video and audio. This analysis therefore incorporates
elements of a visual analysis where appropriate, and acknowledges the power of images
and their potential emotional effect. Such an approach can be difficult in ‘disciplines of
words’ (Banks, 2005: 3) and requires readings of both internal and external narratives.
Texts are products of human action and are entangled in social relations. Multiple read-
ings of texts are always possible, and the task is not to produce a single authoritative
reading, but rather to construct a plausible reading based upon the text and the wider
social context, woven together with appropriate theoretical frameworks. A discourse
analysis approach to education material attempts to identify both the dominant encodings
and therefore the intended message, including the representation of the social world that
surrounds and permeates that message (Hall, 2006). It cannot determine all possible
decoding by audiences, intended or otherwise. An examination of reception is left to fur-
ther qualitative research into the experience of using this education material.
The textual sample was constructed through a search of the available e-safety educa-
tion material and interviews with e-safety practitioners. These interviews identified the
Child Exploitation and Online...
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