The complaints made by influencer Felca Bress, in a video published last week, brought into focus the risks that social networks pose to children and adolescents and how there is no regulation on the use of images of minors in these virtual spaces. The scenes exposed by Felca shocked and provoked reactions from the National Congress, the Presidency of the Republic, and various sectors of society.
Experts interviewed by Agência Brasil advise parents, mothers, and guardians on how to protect children and adolescents in virtual environments. In addition, they emphasize the role of schools, social assistance, and other public facilities in defending the rights of this segment of the population.
Age rating
According to the writer, speaker, and activist for the eradication of sexual and online violence, Sheylli Caleffi, it is necessary to know and respect the age rating of the platforms. The Instagram, for example, is not recommended for minors under 16 years old. The Tiktok and WhatsApp should not be used by minors under 13 years old.
Guardians must ensure that the ages informed are correct, since the platforms themselves do not request any type of verification. In addition, they must check the settings to prevent anyone from accessing the profiles of those under 18 and to stop them from receiving messages from unknown people.
“When you decide to give your children access to digital environments, you also need to look at the configuration of what you chose to give access to,” she says.
“The ideal is a private account if there is any image of a child. And, obviously, adolescents, when they reach the age to start having accounts, must have their accounts private too, so that only people selected by them can access the content.”
According to research from the Regional Center for Studies on the Development of the Information Society (Cetic.br), 93% of the Brazilian population aged 9 to 17 are internet users, representing 24.5 million people. The TIC Kid Online survey also shows that 83% of these adolescents have their own profiles on social networks. In addition, 30% reported having contact with someone online whom they did not know in person.
Care when posting photos
Even if children do not have accounts on digital platforms, Caleffi warns that family members themselves can put them at risk when posting photos or videos of them on their own profiles.
“They are not social networks, they are commerce networks. Everything there is to sell. We have to lose this naive idea that social network is a photo album,” she says.
“Something that is cool, even sacred for many people, is eroticized by other people. So you have to imagine that when you place an image in a place visited by billions of people and by many, many criminals, that can be easily taken out of context,” she added.
This must be taken into consideration by anyone who decides to publicize a child’s image. “When publicizing content with children and adolescents, first you have to ensure that you are the legal guardian of that child. If I am a grandmother, I am not the legal guardian of that child. If I am an uncle, I am not the legal guardian. If I am the teacher, I am not either,” she advises.
For Caleffi, “no one, outside the legal guardians of the child, can decide if that child will have any image exposed in these commercial environments that are the digital platforms,” she emphasizes.
In the activist’s view, any account that has images of children or adolescents, even if it is an adult publicizing their child’s photos, must be private. This will ensure that only authorized people can access the contents.
Adultization inside and outside networks
Felca’s complaints also highlighted the role of networks in the so-called adultization of children, that is, children and adolescents placed in adult contexts. According to Caleffi, this occurs on networks and also outside them and can cause enormous psychological damage.
“Many things adultize the child and can make early sexualization seem common. Very bold clothes for the age, children using makeup, using elements that are for adults. Many young children are putting on makeup, we have problems with children aged 9, 10 years doing diets. Children aged 4 dissatisfied with their own body. Where is she seeing this?” she questions.
Beyond exposure on the internet, moderation by guardians over what is accessed is essential to avoid contact with content that may be harmful to development.
“Parents can also, in addition to having a very frank conversation with children about what the dangers are, what the risks are, agree to check what they are doing in the WhatsApp group, who they are talking to. They can also download a parental mediation app,” she recommends.
According to Caleffi, this type of app allows, for example, guardians to control the time children and adolescents spend in front of the screen, track their location, and produce reports on what they are accessing on electronic devices.
Beyond families
Associate professor in the Psychology Department at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) Vládia Jucá highlights that, beyond the role of families, the care for children and adolescents is the responsibility of the public authorities and society in general, as provided for by law in the Child and Adolescent Statute (ECA).
“We have a set of sectors and facilities that, articulated, make up the Assistance and Protection Network for Children and Adolescents. This network both has a protective function and acts before the child and adolescent encounter a risk situation, and can also be activated when they are already in a risk situation,” emphasizes Jucá, who is one of the authors of the Guide for Articulation between Schools and the Child and Adolescent Protection Network.
This network involves schools – where children spend a large part of their time –, health facilities, social assistance, Justice, Public Prosecutor’s Office, among others. All of them must act together to ensure the protection of children and adolescents. That is, if the school identifies that the child is going through some problem, social assistance must be ready to follow the case, as well as Justice, if necessary.
She explains that assistance networks must act where children and adolescents are, where they study, where they play, where they circulate, and this includes action on the internet. “Including helping families, in the sense of enabling families to understand what this virtual space is, which is often used by families as a space of ‘look how beautiful my child is, right? Look how wise my child is,’ as if it were a portrait album. Without an exact notion that it falls into the public domain and that these images can be used in the most diverse ways,” she says.
Listening spaces
According to the professor, in addition to regulating the activities of digital platforms, technology companies, and social networks themselves, the country needs to strengthen assistance networks and public facilities, which often face lack of infrastructure and shortage of professionals.
“We still need to advance, and this is urgent, with this regulation of networks, big techs, platforms. But not disregard, nor lose sight of, that education has an important place, health has an important place, and all these facilities where children and adolescents circulate, are listened to, where we talk to them, all these spaces are spaces for building this comprehensive protection,” she says.
She also emphasizes that, in all these environments, it is necessary to listen attentively to children and adolescents, even to identify if they are going through any problem, any violence situation.
“I work a lot with adolescents. And one thing that adolescents say a lot is how little they are listened to.”
Reporting
To report situations of abuse or exploitation of children and adolescents, in addition to other human rights violations, call 100 from landlines or cell phones. Disque 100 is a free telephone service, available 24 hours a day.
Source: Agência Brasil