Smartphones and the Issues

An Age Limit?

• London Times Times 27 May 2015
  
  This weekend I watched a group of teenagers playing Amazon’s top-selling game, Cards Against Humanity. The questions the cards asked were innocuous, “My mum freaked out when she looked at my browser history and found?” The answers provided weren’t, they ranged from anal beads and fisting to revenge f***ing. Yet everyone was relaxed. Porn is mainstream for teenagers now.
  
  Last week I was at a seminar with Steve Hilton for his new book More Human when he suggested that all children under 18 should be banned from owning smartphones. The former No 10 policy guru who now lives in California suggested such phones could make them obsessed by porn.
  
  These phones are not toys, he insisted. They are dangerous for children. Almost everyone at the seminar disagreed but Hilton, who himself shuns a smartphone, insisted. He believes that smartphones are a feminist issue and the biggest threat to gender equality comes from technology.
  
  While adults reject anachronistic stereotypes of women as sex objects subordinate to men, only to be valued for their looks, teenage boys are seeing so much hard porn online that they begin to think of women as sexual playthings. Young girls feel pressurised to look perfectly groomed to gratify their fantasies.
  
  In Silicon Valley they have realised this and increasingly smartphones and tablets are considered unacceptable for children. The CEOs of successful start-ups and executives at Google also don’t let their children on computers unsupervised. Most schools in the valley now ban not only phones but any screen time before the age of 12 and expect parents to toe the line at home. The late Steve Jobs admitted his children didn’t have an iPad or iPhone. Jonathan Ive, the British Apple designer, sets strict limits for his children. Pierre Laurent, who left Microsoft for his own gene-testing start-up, has banned his children from surfing online before the age of 12.
  
  This view is spreading across America. The American Academy of Paediatrics has issued guidelines which discourage any screen time for the first two years and then no more than an hour a day, with no screens in the bedroom. In Britain there is no official view.
  
  The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence advised limiting children’s screen time but only to help maintain a healthy weight. Yet British children are more likely to have a smartphone than Americans. While 73 per cent of US secondary school pupils have mobile phones, 90.3 per cent do in this country, and 67 per cent of these are smartphones.
  
  This means they can download whatever they want on the bus, in the street and in their bedrooms, often sharing it with friends. More than half of 12 to-15-year-olds surveyed recently said they used their phone to view sexually explicit material. Some 45 per cent of young men said they thought it was educational while young women felt it put pressure on them to look and behave in a certain way.
  
  Martin Daubney, former editor of Loaded magazine, has looked into the effects of online porn on the young. He talked to a panel of middle-class 14-year-olds. They were asked to write down the sexual terms they were familiar with. Daubney says he had never heard of several, including a “nugget”, a girl with no arms or legs who has sex in a porn video. The first word on every boy and girl’s list was anal — they had all watched it. Most of the acts the children debated depicted submissive women being abused in some way.
  
  Sexism in this country appears to be on the rise and it’s hard not to conclude that online porn is fuelling it. I talked to two headmasters, one from a private single-sex school and one from a mixed state academy. They both said that while the boys at their school weren’t racist or homophobic, they are increasingly sexist, often making comments about girls that are both derogatory and sexually demeaning.
  
  Meanwhile, the girls feel increasing pressure not just to be pretty but “fit”, not for sport but for sex. Their selfies and Instagram posts are full of them pouting and posing.
  
  This everyday sexism at school is continuing on to university campuses, where one in seven women, according to a 2010 NUS survey, have suffered serious sexual violence and 37 per cent have faced “inappropriate touching and groping”.
  
  Many schools are now banning smartphones. Fewer than 5 per cent had outlawed phones in 2001 but by last year this had risen to 90 per cent. In schools that banned phones there was an average 6.4 per cent rise in grades at 16, according to research by the London School of Economics, and better relationships between the sexes.
  
  But it’s harder for parents. They don’t want their child to be the only one with a Nokia brick. Children don’t need smartphones for their education or safety but if they don’t have one they will be excluded from Instagram and Snapchat.
  
  One solution is parental blocks, but these often don’t work. The EU hasn’t helped by proposing to make it illegal for mobile phone and internet firms automatically to block obscene material.
  
  A ban on the use of smartphones under 16 would make it simpler for parents, but it feels too draconian. Instead, we should make sure that our children understand that porn is a fantasy world and ensure that as much of their time as possible is spent offline, in real life, with respectful relationships.