Member

The second is danger from themselves. I keep going back and forth on this, because I really wanted to use the opportunity of the online safety campaign to bring young people’s voices to the fore. Many young people in my online safety forum said that they really wanted a place online where they could speak to their friends, but with no weirdos. That spoke to me; I thought they were absolutely right. We have to get rid of stranger danger online. We must also acknowledge that children’s brains are developing before they are 16 or 17, and that some develop earlier and some later. We have an arbitrary age—17—at which people can drive a car as an acknowledgment that at 17, our risk appetite and ability to analyse risk will be more mature than at 13, 14, 15 or 16.