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The Independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes aims to deeply understand the causes of white working class educational underachievement and provide clear, evidence-based, practical solutions for schools, policymakers and the wider education community.

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The Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes

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White working-class children failed by education system, says inquiry (Jun2 2026)

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White working-class children ‘failed by schools system’

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The inquiry spoke to thousands of young people and their parents, as well as hundreds of teachers.

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In depth. Neoliberalism in child care.

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Why illegal children’s homes are being paid up to £2m per child by councils

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A ban was meant to bring an end to the practice - but councils continue to fund illegal placements.

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George Monbiot's views on how neoliberalism can be seen manifested in children's homes.

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There’s a new asset class being traded between corporations. It’s called children in care.

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Neoliberal children's homes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why illegal children’s homes are being paid up to £2m per child by councils

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A ban was meant to bring an end to the practice - but councils continue to fund illegal placements.

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Review in UK about banning social media for u16s.

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UK social media ban for under 16s consultation begins

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Discussions over what measures to implement to protect children’s wellbeing will last for three months.

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Musk unhappy at Spanish government's decision to monitor, limit and even ban social media in Spain.

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Elon Musk calls Spanish PM a ‘tyrant’ over plan to ban under-16s from social media and curb hateful content

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Pedro Sánchez says urgent action needed to protect children from ‘digital wild west’, drawing anger from owner of X

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Spain bans social media for under 16s

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Spain announces plans to ban social media for under-16s

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Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez says the move will protect children from the “digital Wild West”.

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CPRMB | Research & Policy for Men and Boys in the U.K.

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The U.K.'s primary research group identifying barriers facing men and boys. Evidence-based policy research across education, work, and community wellbeing.

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Christmas show cancelled

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An Inverness primary school has cancelled its Christmas show after being targeted with "racist and abusive messages" online.

Cauldeen Primary School had planned to stage a festive musical that included a scene and a song about refugee children caught up in the Syrian conflict.

Highland Council said the show has now been axed after the school received "negative feedback on social media", which included "racist and abusive messages".

Police Scotland said it is investigating a report of threatening and abusive communications online.

A force spokesperson added: "Enquiries are ongoing."

The production was based on Gimme, Gimme, Gimme! - a play created by Edgy Productions, which produces musicals, songs and assemblies for schools and youth theatres.

The plot - written and published in 2016 - tells the story of three of Santa's helpers struggling to keep up with the demands of modern children amid a new high-tech set-up at the North Pole.

The story features a single scene and song about refugees caught up in the Syrian conflict and encamped on the Syria-Turkey border.

A Highland Council spokesperson said: "Following negative feedback on social media, including racist and abusive messages - some of which were directed at the school and staff - the school has made the wellbeing of staff and pupils its main priority.

"Instead of a Christmas show, classes will enjoy other festive learning activities in school."

The local authority said under devolved school management, decisions like this are an "operational matter" for the primary school.

Andrew Oxspring, director of Edgy Productions, said: "As educationalists ourselves, we were shocked and saddened to hear that the school and staff were targeted with abuse.

"This is particularly worrying as the abuse was in response to a Christmas musical production, the themes of which are tolerance, friendship and peace, which mirror the wider Christian message."
Read more from Sky News:
Complaints after school teacher 'told pupils Santa isn't real'
The incident comes amid a row over the UK government's plans to house about 300 male asylum seekers at Cameron Barracks, an army barracks in the city.

Protesters against the proposals and counter-demonstrators in support of the move have taken to the streets to voice their views.

Mr Oxspring said: "If some people have mistakenly inferred that this children's production has any content about the migrant situation which has sparked debate in the UK some nine years later, then their reaction is misplaced.

"Furthermore, the fact that this reaction has been racist and directed at the school is something we find deplorable.

"With regards to the school being accused of indoctrination, this is equally deplorable. It is not indoctrination to teach in schools that cold, hungry children caught up in foreign conflicts should be deserving of nothing but sympathy and help.

"This is what the scene and associated song address in our original publication of 2016."

Mr Oxspring said his firm had "no comment" to make on the current situation in regards to migration, small boat crossings or asylum seekers.

He added: "We have not, nor will ever, publish material to be performed by children that deals with such divisive and sensitive subjects."

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Inverness primary school cancels Christmas show after 'racist abuse'

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Cauldeen Primary School had planned to stage a festive musical that included a scene and a song about refugees caught up in the Syrian conflict.

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Nearly half of sexually active young people in UK have experienced strangulation, study shows

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Survey reveals crisis of distress, consent issues and physical harm caused by strangulation during sex

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Secondary schools in England to tackle ‘incel’ culture and teach positive role models

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Government says new guidance will challenge ‘manosphere’ myths as DfE reports epidemic-scale misogyny

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We are just machines

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Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh says AI has made us dumbed down machines

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Author Irvine Welsh has written a sequel called Men in Love, because the world is “so full of hate”.

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By all accounts, Sabrina Carpenter is in control.

The 26-year-old singer, who signed a record deal with Disney at 12 and became a star in her teens, worked through 10 years and five albums before Espresso, a cheeky and dementedly catchy single from her album Short n' Sweet, became the song of summer 2024. She writes or co-writes all of her songs with a signature imprint - saucy, clever, unabashedly horny and in on the joke of being both attracted to and disappointed by men. ("Did you say you're finished? Didn't know we started," she teases in new single Manchild.) A recent Rolling Stone cover profile espoused her intelligence, craftiness and deadpan humor. (Asked which famous ex Manchild is about, she answered, "It's about your dad.") She's taking the now-unusual step of releasing a new album only a year after her breakout for no more reason than she has ideas, feels creative, and wants to - "my brain is sharp, let's write", she told Rolling Stone.

But though Carpenter is evidently in the driver's seat, the music video for Manchild finds her as a passenger, eye-rolling at a series of incompetent men on a surreal hitchhiking jaunt through the desert. Besides humorously imagining the manchild's shortcomings as vehicles, poking fun at some traditional movie pinups and relishing enjoyably strange images, the video continues Carpenter's star-making playfulness with the idea of being a sexy, submissive vixen, Betty Boop for gen Z. The single came accompanied by cover art for her upcoming album, Man's Best Friend, in which the pint-sized Carpenter, clad in a black minidress, appears on her knees, pawing for the attention of an anonymous man in a suit, his hand loosely gripping her blonde bombshell hair.

Unsurprisingly, the internet hasn't reacted well. Carpenter, a sharp student of pop music, is clearly working in the Madonna tradition of sexual provocation for provocation's sake, poking fun at tropes and people's prudishness with an alluring frankness. But online, one would have you believe that she's set back the cause of feminism by a good 10 years. On Reddit, on her Instagram, on the dregs of the rightwing rage-bait website formerly known as Twitter, users - overwhelmingly women - have accused Carpenter of caving to the male gaze, promoting regressive attitudes, not understanding satire and even threatening women's safety at large. "Insanely misogynistic imagery", wrote one Instagram user, echoing the sentiments of the entire r/popculture subreddit. "Sabrina this is not the slay you think it is ..." wrote another.

On TikTok, the image has folded easily into one-woman explainers on how the cover is actually the opposite of empowering, or how the furore encapsulates the context-less, ahistorical, flattened discourse that is everything wrong with modern society, etc. (For what it's worth, there's also a semi-convincing theory that Carpenter will eventually reveal a larger image in which she also plays the man in the suit.) A women's aid group for victims of domestic abuse in Glasgow went as far as calling it, absurdly, "a throwback to tired tropes that reduce women to pets, props, and possessions and promote an element of violence and control".

In short, the discomfort is palpable, if predictable. Though female sexuality is de rigueur in pop music, we are still not used to seeing pop stars in control of their own sexuality, let alone framing themselves as the submissive. Carpenter on all fours rubs against the prevailing rhetoric of female sexual empowerment - "be on top", "have sex like a man", "call the shots". Fuck, not be fucked. Dominance as the only acceptable mode, submission for sexual pleasure as inherent weakness. To be submissive and strong at once is to break some brains, the idiosyncrasies and confidence of one woman's sexual performance inflaming the chronic poster's allergy to fun, as well as the internet's incentive for black-and-white thinking.

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Carpenter, unapologetically girly and often bedecked in lace lingerie, knows exactly what she's doing. With only an album cover and one song to go by, it's still too soon to see the full scope of her tongue-in-cheek satire, but the outline of riffing and reclaiming male fantasies is clear. The Rolling Stone shoot - floral, pastoral, fairy-esque - invokes the imagery of tradwives, the third rail of female empowerment discourse online. Such women sell a fantasy of chicken eggs, meals from scratch, barefoot and pregnant and always in service of the man. They also sell sex, albeit quietly, as baby-making machines for the head of the family. Carpenter in gingham lingerie, posing with a deer in the woods surrounded by flowers, makes the subtext literal: this is a male fantasy for men who do not like women's independence, and she is owning it.

The thing missing from all this commentary is a sense of fun, which Carpenter appears to be having in spades. Like Addison Rae, a fellow recent breakout who frequently performs in a bra and underwear, Carpenter's pop performance relishes the messiness, sexual exploration and growth of one's mid-20s via refreshingly catchy tunes. Rae's brown-eyed, Louisiana girl-next-door perkiness, athletic dancing and pure pop instincts recall a young Britney Spears - except, crucially, she is 24, and has been pursuing mega-fame on her own terms for years on TikTok. Both she and Carpenter exist at the young adult nexus of self-awareness and youthful abandon, their frank sexuality both cheeky and serious.

It's worth noting that how Carpenter and Rae's look influences the conversation. Both are conventionally gorgeous, styled as pinups but not busty, obviously Hollywood but still seemingly natural. The Man's Best Friend image would read differently if Carpenter adhered more to the prevailing trends of body modification. If, in other words, she looked like a Kardashian, transforming her body and looks into a male-brained ideal of a female cyborg. With each passing day, I am personally less and less interested in perceived artistic "authenticity" - supposedly confessional lyrics, lore, celebrities pandering that they're just like you - and more and more drawn in by authenticity of form, real or perceived. In a sea of snatched faces, plumped lips and freakishly hourglass bodies, it feels refreshing to see pop stars who are still idealized but within normal human proportions. When it comes to the amorphous cause of women, I'm much more concerned with the paradigm shift toward celebrities flaunting their plastic surgery - human bodies metamorphosed through procedures and substances at exorbitant cost, like the Pygmalion myth in reverse - than Carpenter on her knees.

But she'd probably say I'm overthinking it. This is pop music, after all - sex sells, and whether people are buying her shtick or not, we're still talking about her album.

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Is the Sabrina Carpenter album art really that offensive?

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The internet has been divided over the suggestive cover of the pop princess's new album, but it's possible some might be missing the point

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Clothes discarded by UK consumers and shipped to Ghana have been found in a huge rubbish dump in protected wetlands, an investigation has found.

Reporters for Unearthed working with Greenpeace Africa found garments from Next in the dump and other sites, and items from George at Asda and Marks & Spencer washed up nearby.

The dumps are in an internationally recognised wetland that is home to three species of sea turtle. Local people complain that their fishing nets, waterways and beaches are clogged with synthetic fast-fashion garments exported to Ghana from the UK and the rest of Europe.

In a third dump on the banks of the river leading to the conservation site, Unearthed reporters found garments from M&S, Zara, H&M and Primark.

The fashion labels acknowledged that the industry faces challenges in processing textile waste. M&S, George and Primark said they ran take-back schemes intended to help address the issue. H&M, Zara and George said they would support an extended producer responsibility (EPR) framework to hold labels accountable for their products' end-of-life impact.

The global fast-fashion overspill has overwhelmed Ghana's capital, Accra, with tangled clothes carpeting city beaches and lining canals.

New dump sites are springing up beyond urban areas and in conservation areas that are vital for wildlife, the investigation found. Reporters also found textile waste, including UK labels, tangled in vegetation, half-buried in sand, and in waste washed up at a beach resort where a manager said he burned piles of clothes every week.

At the heart of Ghana's used clothing trade is Kantamanto, one of the world's biggest secondhand clothes markets. It receives more than 1,000 tonnes of clothes every week, but one trader said the quality was worse than it used to be. "In the past, we had good clothes to sell to take care of our families, but these days the used clothes we find in the bales are not fit for resale," said Mercy Asantewa. "They are poorly made and are already falling apart when we open the bales."

There is only one engineered dump site in the region, and another is being built. The head of Accra's waste management department, Solomon Noi, calculates that 100 tonnes of garments leave the market daily as waste. The city is able to collect and process just 30 tonnes.

Clothes from UK brands found discarded in Ghana wetland dumps - video

"The remaining 70 tonnes end up in waste dumps, drains, lagoons, wetlands and the sea and other environmentally sensitive places," he said.

UK consumers discard about 1.5m tonnes of used textiles every year. Many do not get recycled. About 730,000 tonnes a year are incinerated or go into landfills. Of the 650,000 tonnes sent to be reused and recycled, 420,000 - more than two-thirds - are exported. Ghana receives more than any other country.

A group of Ghanaian traders visited Brussels in 2023 and argued that the EU should introduce EPR legislation to hold fashion companies accountable for the end-of-life impact of their products. The UK's Textile Recyclers Association has asked the government to consider something similar.

Ghana's Densu delta is designated a site of international importance under the intergovernmental Ramsar convention on wetlands. Endangered leatherback and green turtles lay their eggs there, and the mudflats also support rare roseate terns, which migrate from the UK, and curlew sandpipers.

Unearthed's reporters found two recently opened dump sites in the wetland's protected area and a third dump upstream on the banks of the Densu.

Properly engineered landfills include a lined bottom, a system for collecting and treating leachate, groundwater monitoring, gas extraction and a cap system. Drone footage of the Akkaway dump, the newest site, shows a large area of the wetlands where the vegetation had been removed. Piles of waste sit on bare earth, close to lagoons and streams, with no lining or other visible pollution mitigation systems.

An official from the local government, the Weija Gbawe municipal assembly, told a reporter that it was in charge of the Akkaway dump and supervised the work there. Siting a new dump site in protected wetlands, however, appears to violate Ghana's environmental policy and landfill guidelines, and the country's obligations under the Ramsar convention.

The assembly did not respond to a formal request for comment.

People who depend on the wetlands for their livelihoods said they were worried about the impact of the pollution. Seth Tetteh, 31, has lived near the delta for seven years. "It's only since three years ago that they started dumping the borla [the waste] further upstream. So when you start fishing and cast your net, it brings in fish, clothes and other things, so ... the fishermen ... find it very tedious," he said.

"Before, you could drink [the river water]. But now, when you go, you can't drink it. The water is a bit black."

Residents near the upstream dump, called Weija Ashbread, told reporters that before the site existed, the area was mostly wild. . There were "alligators, bush cats ... all kinds of birds and rabbits too", said Ibrahim Sadiq, 19, a student who lives nearby. Now when it rains "there are so many mosquitoes and the smell, it's very bad".

An M&S spokesperson said the company did not send excess clothing to any other country or landfill, but offered customers

"options to give their clothes another life with our recently launched repair service by Sojo, and with our in-store take-back recycling schemes with partners such as Oxfam for clothing and Handle for beauty products, as part of our plan A to reduce our impact on the planet".

A spokesperson for George, Asda's clothing brand, said there had been no increase in the volume of textiles produced or the number of annual fashion seasons it put out over the past 10 years, and that they had more than 800 recycling banks and a take-back scheme.

"We have a zero-waste policy, which applies to our total business," the spokesperson said. "We would be supportive of exploring a textile EPR, providing any fees generated are used to improve the recycling infrastructure in the UK."

A statement from Primark said: "We don't authorise any of the clothing collected through our customer textile takeback scheme or any of our unsold stock to be sent to Ghana or anywhere else in Africa ... We know that no single company can solve the issue of textile waste alone. Real progress will only come if the industry comes together. "

H&M acknowledged that the industry faced challenges such as a lack of end-of-life solutions and fully scaled recycling solutions for discarded textiles. A spokesperson said: "While this is an industry-wide challenge, we acknowledge our role in contributing to the problem, notably when our products reach markets with inadequate or no waste management or recycling infrastructures."

A spokesperson for Zara's parent company, Inditex, said Zara would support an EPR policy mandated by the government: "We believe that advancing toward common legislation in this field will establish a unified framework that sets the same rules for all players. We understand that the separate collection of textile waste is the foundation of a circular model. That is why we not only promote new textile recycling technologies but also develop the necessary capabilities to make them feasible."

Next did not respond to a request for comment.

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Discarded clothes from UK brands dumped in protected Ghana wetlands

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Garments thrown out by consumers from Next, George, M&S and others found in or near conservation areas

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BBC News - Pornhub pulls out of France over age verification law
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yelvlnzveo

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Google, X and Facebook Are Modern-Day Tobacco Companies | Scientific American

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Google, X and Facebook Are Modern-Day Tobacco Companies | Scientific American

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Google, X and Facebook Are Modern-Day Tobacco Companies

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Just as tobacco companies knew they were poisoning people, today’s social media titans knowingly poison our politics, peddling lies and stoking angry divides for profit

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Lost Boys - The Centre for Social Justice

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Lost Boys - The Centre for Social Justice

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Skip to content

Boys and young men are in crisis. Whilst the last hundred years have been marked by great leaps forward in outcomes and rights for women, in this generation it is boys who are being left behind. And by some margin.

From the day they start primary school, to the day they leave higher education, the progress of boys lags behind girls. The proportion of young men failing to move from education into employment or training has been steadily growing for thirty years. Since the pandemic alone, the number of males aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) has increased by a staggering 40 per cent compared to just seven per cent or females. For those young men who are in work, the much-vaunted gender pay gap has been reversed. Young men are now out-earned by their female peers, including among the university educated.

The growing divergence in boys' and girls' outcomes does not only apply to education and employment. We are also seeing a growing divide in the social and political attitudes of the sexes. In Britain, as in countries across the developed world, young men are increasingly drawn to conservative, traditionalist or right-wing political movements, whilst young women become ever more liberal and left-progressive. In an increasingly online existence, boys and girls no longer walk the same path from childhood to adulthood, with their interests, values and aims in life increasingly incompatible with each other. As Britain grapples with an epidemic of family breakdown, millions of boys are deprived of any positive model of manhood.

For boys and young men in Britain-especially those who are poor-the picture is an increasingly bleak one. And, where the divergence is particularly apparent, we also highlight different outcomes across certain ethnic groups. Over the coming months, the CSJ will be looking for solutions to this growing problem. This report aims to paint a stark picture of what is happening in six significant areas of life. It makes the urgent case that action is needed.

This report will not cover every issue facing young men and boys, but it is a start.

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Boys and young men are in crisis. Whilst the last hundred years have been marked by great leaps forward in outcomes and rights for women, in this generation it is boys who are being left behind.

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Creating a safer world: the challenge of regulating online pornography - GOV.UK

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Creating a safer world: the challenge of regulating online pornography - GOV.UK

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Assessment of the legislation, regulation and enforcement of pornography and recommendations for government and regulatory bodies.

Request an accessible format.

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need a version of this document in a more accessible format, please email alt.formats@dsit.gov.uk. Please tell us what format you need. It will help us if you say what assistive technology you use.

The Independent Pornography Review is an assessment of the legislation, regulation and enforcement of pornography. The review provides recommendations for government, regulatory bodies, and the sector to ensure that harmful impacts of pornography are addressed.

To strengthen the evidence base and inform the final recommendations, the review held a call for evidence in early 2024.

This report includes mentions of content that some readers may find distressing and disturbing. This includes references to sexual violence, child sexual abuse material, as well as offensive and explicit language. Content warnings have been included ahead of relevant chapters, but please be aware that this report may be difficult to read at times.

Government response

Read the letter to Baroness Bertin in response to the Bertin report on the Independent Pornography Review.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Creating a safer world: the challenge of regulating online pornography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Assessment of the legislation, regulation and enforcement of pornography and recommendations for government and regulatory bodies.

# data[].attributes.headline
Smartphone use and mental health: going beyond school restriction policies - The Lancet Regional Health – Europe

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Smartphone use and mental health: going beyond school restriction policies - The Lancet Regional Health – Europe

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Smartphone use and mental health: going beyond school restriction policies

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Smartphone and social media use are plausibly associated with poorer mental health
outcomes among adolescents, with likely mechanisms including: increased access to
cyberbullying and views supportive of eating disorders, suicide, and self-harm1; impaired
cognitive functions2; unhealthy social comparisons3; and displacement of healthy behaviours
(sleep, exercise, in-person social interactions).4 However, the epidemiological evidence
for a causal association is weak,5,6 as most studies are ecological and/or cross-sectional,
showing correlation rather than causation and not adjusting for potential confounders.

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Tech & Teens: the impact of digital technology on wellbeing | Global Kids Online

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Tech & Teens: the impact of digital technology on wellbeing | Global Kids Online

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tech & Teens: the impact of digital technology on wellbeing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From 2020 to 2025, researchers from IRTIS at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic conducted a series of in-depth studies exploring how smartphones, social networks, and online gaming influence ado

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London School of Economics and Political Science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
London School of Economics and Political Science

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Probe after adult content viewed on school iPads - BBC News

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Probe after adult content viewed on school iPads - BBC News

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Probe after adult content viewed on school iPads

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City of Edinburgh Council says it is working on new ways to block children seeing inappropriate content.

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Woman who slept with 100 men in a day, and promoted it to her online audience, puts out a competition to have a follower sleep with her. He turns up with, his girlfriend, to collect his prize...

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
Man wins a competition to bang Lily Phillips and brings his girlfriend along 😭😭😭

https://t.co/3l5Ykbx2P9

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Man wins a competition to bang Lily Phillips and brings his girlfriend along 😭😭😭

https://t.co/3l5Ykbx2P9

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Man wins a competition to bang Lily Phillips and brings his girlfriend along 😭😭😭pic.twitter.com/3l5Ykbx2P9
— Stephen R Power (@racingblogger) November 11, 2024

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Man wins a competition to bang Lily Phillips and brings his girlfriend along 😭😭😭

https://t.co/3l5Ykbx2P9

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Man wins a competition to bang Lily Phillips and brings his girlfriend along 😭😭😭

https://t.co/3l5Ykbx2P9

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Man wins a competition to bang Lily Phillips and brings his girlfriend along 😭😭😭

https://t.co/3l5Ykbx2P9

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
London School of Economics and Political Science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
London School of Economics and Political Science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Research database- page listing a selection of high quality sources

# data[].attributes.headline
The False Promise of Device-Based Education

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The False Promise of Device-Based Education

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The False Promise of Device-Based Education

# data[].attributes.body
BBC News - Stephen Fry: Musk and Zuckerberg have 'polluted culture'
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ceq5q3jlnz3o

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Social media: Why algorithms show violence to boys - BBC News

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Social media: Why algorithms show violence to boys - BBC News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Social media: Why algorithms show violence to boys

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An insider tells the BBC why teenage boys are being targeted with extreme content.

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BBC News - EE tells parents: don't give under-11s smartphones
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gvpy3yz1yo

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‘My state pension was £880 – and my rent was £1,000’: how a 70-year-old man became homeless in Britain

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Tony Sinclair had worked all his life – but still found himself sleeping rough. Then even his tent was taken away from him

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‘Opinion - Dr Lou Mycroft’ from ‘Teaching Scotland Issue 100’ by GTC Scotland

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When I was a teacher educator at Northern College in Yorkshire, we worked from the values out.

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‘Becoming – Teacher identity’ from ‘Teaching Scotland Issue 100’ by GTC Scotland

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Challenging homophobic attitudes – from research to practice

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Functional connectivity changes in the brain of adolescents with internet addiction: A systematic literature review of imaging studies | PLOS Mental Health

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Functional connectivity changes in the brain of adolescents with internet addiction: A systematic literature review of imaging studies | PLOS Mental Health

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Functional connectivity changes in the brain of adolescents with internet addiction: A systematic literature review of imaging studies

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Internet usage has seen a stark global rise over the last few decades, particularly among adolescents and young people, who have also been diagnosed increasingly with internet addiction (IA). IA impacts several neural networks that influence an adolescent’s behaviour and development. This article issued a literature review on the resting-state and task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies to inspect the consequences of IA on the functional connectivity (FC) in the adolescent brain and its subsequent effects on their behaviour and development. A systematic search was conducted from two databases, PubMed and PsycINFO, to select eligible articles according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Eligibility criteria was especially stringent regarding the adolescent age range (10–19) and formal diagnosis of IA. Bias and quality of individual studies were evaluated. The fMRI results from 12 articles demonstrated that the effects of IA were seen throughout multiple neural networks: a mix of increases/decreases in FC in the default mode network; an overall decrease in FC in the executive control network; and no clear increase or decrease in FC within the salience network and reward pathway. The FC changes led to addictive behaviour and tendencies in adolescents. The subsequent behavioural changes are associated with the mechanisms relating to the areas of cognitive control, reward valuation, motor coordination, and the developing adolescent brain. Our results presented the FC alterations in numerous brain regions of adolescents with IA leading to the behavioural and developmental changes. Research on this topic had a low frequency with adolescent samples and were primarily produced in Asian countries. Future research studies of comparing results from Western adolescent samples provide more insight on therapeutic intervention.

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The toxic trope of 'benefit scroungers' - UnHerd

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The toxic trope of 'benefit scroungers' - UnHerd

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The quickest way for a weak government to score cheap points with a sceptical electorate is to announce a load of stuff it's going to "crack down" on. And so, in the past year we've had crackdowns on single-use vapes, laughing gas and even certain breeds of dogs. Only the other week, plans were brought forward to ban smoking outright for anyone born after 2009.

Such headline-catching measures are attractive to an embattled administration because they are relatively easy to legislate for, cost very little, and create a fleeting sense of forward momentum which temporarily cloaks a distinct absence of big ideas. Over the years, the topics of discussion have tended to change according to fashion, but one has remained constant in every election year: the crackdown on benefit scroungers.

The UK spends 12.9% of GDP on social benefits, according to the latest data, which puts us in fifth place in the G7. Between 2023 and 2024, the Government is forecast to spend £276.8 billion on the social security system, with 55% of that figure going to pensioners. And yet, while the number of people on out-of-work benefits has risen, particularly after the pandemic, the scale of public irritation doesn't seem to correlate with the actual significance of the problem: the net loss to the DWP for benefit fraud or error was £7.3 billion in 2023. By contrast, the Government's own figures show that money laundering costs the UK £100 billion a year, while wider financial fraud has been estimated to sit at around £219 billion a year.

Strangely, though, few politicians are banging on about the hundreds of billions lost every year to tax avoidance, evasion and highly organised financial crime. Instead, both Jeremy Hunt and Rachel Reeves are desperate to reassure us all that they are getting tough on the work-shy and the idle. They are going after low-level scammers and old people who can't fill out forms properly. This highly successful political tactic never seems to get old, regardless of how untethered from reality it is. This is as true of the "shirkers and skivers" rhetoric as it is of the welfare reforms we've seen over the past three decades, whereby ill-placed public resentments about social security have been deliberately stoked.

In 1996, with a general election looming, then-Tory prime minister John Major pioneered the benefit-scrounger dog whistle when he announced new "stiffer penalties" for the work-shy and vowed that "those who don't want to work are exposed". Labour pushed back against the language, but, as they did with almost everything Major's Conservative Party stood for at the time, went on to adopt similar reforms after their landslide victory in 1997. Not only that, but they ratcheted up the scrounger rhetoric to levels Margaret Thatcher could only dream of.

Benefit cuts to single mothers and refugees, "name and shame" orders designed to deter anti-social behaviour, and bizarre plans to kick council tenants out of their homes for being unemployed are not often associated with New Labour. Nor are claims that certain ethnic groups "lacked discipline", clampdowns targeting " foreigners who come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits", or fantastical claims that translating basic public service information for those arriving in the country from abroad meant they would "not have the incentive to learn English". These things are not associated with Blair in the popular memory - but that doesn't change the fact they happened during his tenure.

In order to advance the rather thorny issue of welfare reform, the general public had to be conditioned to believe that the enemy in their midst was not exploitative employers, careerist politicians, or an economic model that guaranteed all prosperity was absorbed by those at the top. No, the great fear was the lazy stoner through the wall, and the single mother across the street, getting pregnant for an easy life on the dole.

This narrative may suit the politician, but the root of today's problem lies in the UK's sluggish growth pattern, which resulted in a low-wage labour market and threadbare public services. In these conditions of precarity, following a pandemic and during a cost-of-living crisis, more people become ill and, in the absence of a functioning health service, stay ill for longer. And the longer they are out of work, the harder it is to get back in the game. Meanwhile, for those who are able to find a job, the sort of work people now tend to move into is part-time, poorly paid and with no career progression - requiring in-work benefits to supplement. That's why brags from the Government about record levels of employment ring hollow; full employment means nothing when you have to stop by a food bank on the way home from work.

"Full employment means nothing when you have to stop by a food bank on the way home from work."

A responsible and honest political class might set out to correct such misplaced assumptions, perhaps by pointing out that there are billions saved in unclaimed benefits every year. Yet instead, they become the basis upon which subsequent rafts of ill-judged, short-sighted and meanspirited reforms are progressed. This is all the more galling when you consider that this war is waged by largely middle-class, university-educated careerists. Indeed, the class disparity at the heart of British democracy, where working-class voices are largely absent, means there are fewer people to present a counterpoint to the nasty consensus. Today, just 8% of Labour MPs hail from working-class backgrounds.

One might naturally assume this trend is a by-product of 10 years of Tory government - but in truth, it began with a party that exists, supposedly, to protect the working class. "Before Tony Blair came to power there was only a modest difference in working-class and careerists positions on welfare reform", wrote Tom O'Grady in Comparative Political Studies in 2018. "But our research finds that during his premiership, the influence of working-class MPs dropped while there was a rise in the influence of careerist politicians." O'Grady found that MPs from working-class backgrounds had "a stronger ideological attachment to welfare provision because it benefits working-class voters", whereas among their middle-class counterparts, "greater concerns for electoral success and career advancement meant they were more likely to support welfare reforms". The findings suggest that the large shift from working-class MPs to career politicians in the British Labour Party led to an erosion of representation of working-class voters' interests. "Put bluntly," he said, "careerist MPs are much more likely to blow with the political winds."

Chancellor-in-waiting Rachel Reeves - the latest proponent of blood-curdling rhetoric on shirkers and skivers - was born the year Thatcher came to power. She's one of a generation of rising stars with no political memory of a time when working-class people had more than a tokenistic role to play in the democratic process. And she parrots the tired Blairite rhetoric about scroungers, while cosplaying as the Iron Lady 2.0 for middle-England voters. It's worth noting that Reeves has, since 10 December 2019, declared donations, earnings, gifts and other benefits worth more than £650,000. Indeed, the value of Reeves's registered interests puts her in the top 2% of all MPs. Since the start of the current parliament, only 11 MPs have taken in more than money her. Fancy that.

So, after all these years of reform, where are the results? Well, here's the thing: they have had almost no positive impact. Indeed, all the evidence shows that poverty has only worsened, and that excess deaths have increased.

The rise in food poverty, in particular, is significant. Figures from the Trussell Trust show that between March 2017 and March 2018, 1,332,952 emergency food supplies were distributed to people across the UK. Nationally, low income was the main reason for referral and accounted for nearly 30% of food bank use. The role of welfare reform was crucial here, with benefit delays accounting for 24% of referrals while benefit changes were cited by 18% - 42% in total. The correlation between Universal Credit and food bank use becomes more pronounced when you map its roll-out, between 2013 and 2018, directly onto the areas which experienced the sharpest rises in food poverty. This reveals an average increase of 52% in food bank usage in the 12 months following the roll-out in each area, compared to 13% outside of those zones.

Food poverty is just one facet of the social crisis driven by welfare reform. A spate of related suicides has been reported in recent years, including some people even leaving suicide notes referring to the DWP. In 2020, the National Audit Office noted that the DWP had investigated 69 suicides related to benefits claims in the previous six years, while disability campaigners claim the true figure is far higher. Meanwhile, despite the fact that cuts in benefits have hit women disproportionately, the DWP's brutal compliance regime compounds the suffering of the most vulnerable women in a manner which could charitably be described as sinister. The techniques often deployed - coercion, aggression, overbearing surveillance, gaslighting and financial intimidation - either deliberately or through sheer incompetence often mirror those of present or former abusers.

And in return? The sad truth is that welfare reform in the UK is driven by ideology and has never had any evidential basis. There's even less evidence for the effectiveness of welfare reforms at getting people back to work. The Welfare Conditionality project, running from 2013-2018, conducted analysis on both the impact of welfare reforms as well as the practices that underpin them. Concerning the lifestyle-choice homeless, the report found that benefit sanctions caused "considerable distress and push some extremely vulnerable people out of the social security safety net altogether". For those disabled people living the high life, the report found that the Work Capability Assessment - in which people with disabilities must prove they are unfit for certain types of employment - is "intrusive, insensitively administered and regularly leads to inappropriate outcomes in respect of disabled people's capabilities to undertake, or prepare for, paid employment".

Where job seekers are concerned, welfare conditionality "did not prompt behaviour change" and claimants felt there was "a lack of clarity or warning that their behaviour was sanctionable, that work coaches were too quick to resort to the use of a sanction, and that sanctions were disproportionate to the alleged transgression". For the lone parents, it found that "insufficient account is taken of caring responsibilities when claimant commitments are devised", and that many were sanctioned as a result of "unreasonable expectations, DWP administrative errors, or failures of comprehension rather than deliberate non-compliance". Across the board, the persistent threat of sanctions caused "extreme anxiety, even when not enacted".

Here we can see how the UK's favoured economic model of neoliberalism demands that those who cannot succeed in an economy rigged against them must be held personally responsible for their failure - or commanded to blame someone less fortunate than them to account for their predicament. In the UK, this cultural mechanism is expressed in electoral rhetoric which evokes images of "shirkers", "skivers" and "scroungers" who luxuriate in mould-ridden council homes filled with extravagant items such as televisions, phones and refrigerators, all day long, on the good honest taxpayer's dime.

While it is certainly true that any system open to enough people will be abused to some extent, and that benefit fraud does occur, the fact remains that the "benefit scrounger" narrative so readily spouted by politicians is a rhetorical device designed, in the case of the Tories, to cynically stoke irrational resentment about welfare dependency - or in the case of Labour, to cravenly placate it for an electoral advantage.

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The quickest way for a weak government to score cheap points with a sceptical electorate is to announce a load of stuff it's going to "crack down" on. And so, in the past year we've had crackdowns on single-use vapes, laughing gas and even certain breeds of dogs.

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Ofcom: Almost a quarter of kids aged 5-7 have smartphones - BBC News

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Ofcom: Almost a quarter of kids aged 5-7 have smartphones - BBC News

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Chris Vallance & Philippa WainTechnology reporters

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Ofcom: Almost a quarter of kids aged 5-7 have smartphones

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The regulator calls the data a “wake up call”, and says parents and industry need to do more.

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Author Jon Haidt has a solution for social media addiction

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Author Jon Haidt has a solution for social media addiction

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In his new book, Jonathan Haidt argues social media has damaged Generation Z. Getty Images/iStockphoto

"Suppose that when your first child turned ten, a visionary billionaire whom you've never met chose her to join the first permanent human settlement on Mars ... Would you let her go?"

"Of course not," writes Jonathan Haidt.

But the social psychologist argues in his upcoming book, " The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness," that parents have made a similar bargain with Big Tech - by sending children to a virtual planet for untold hours every day.

Haidt, a NYU Stern professor of ethical leadership, writes that the past decade has seen "the radical transformation of childhood into something inhuman: a phone-​based existence."

In fact, as he points out, teen girls are spending an average 20 hours a week - effectively a part-time job - on social media.

It's bred the most depressed and anxious generation in history, studies show.

Haidt, whose book is out March 26, argues that smartphones and social media have contributed to a "great rewiring" of childhood - causing sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation, addiction and spiritual degradation.

The result, he says, is the most depressed and anxious generation in history. But boys and girls have been hit differently.

"Social media really does a number on girls," Haidt told The Post. "It takes all the worst parts of middle school - social comparison, focusing on your looks, insecurity - and multiplies them by ten."

His meta-analysis of studies looking at social media's impact on young people revealed a link between heavy social media usage and poor mental health outcomes among girls.

When it comes to boys, however, there's less of a one-to-one link.

"For boys, the story is less clear. There's no one smoking gun," Haidt explained. "They've just experienced a progressive withdrawal from the real world, where boys have historically exerted effort."

He points to porn and video games as major contributors: "The trend is really accelerating as the virtual world becomes so magnificently enticing and attractive."

Haidt is the father of a 14-year-old daughter and a 17-year-old son.

"We still have the same problem that all parents have, which is just trying to say stop spending so much time on your screens," he said. "There is still a constant, a chronic tug of war over usage."

Although he gave his son a phone in fourth grade and daughter one in sixth grade, because they walked to school in New York City, he wishes he'd given them flip phones rather than smartphones in retrospect.

But Haidt said both his children have benefited from a family rule of no social media until 16. He recommends other parents do the same - and hold off on smartphones until high school.

"We have to delay the phones but also give them engaging activities in the real world," he said. "[Parents] have under-protected children online but we've also overprotected them in the real world. And we need to address both halves.

"Kids need to be anchored in the real world with real relationships, real responsibilities, real love. Virtual activities don't substitute," he added.

As a professor, Haidt said Gen Z has been receptive to his message - and eager for change.

"They see the problems of their phone-based childhoods. They see that it's a huge waste of their time," he told The Post. "But when I ask them why they don't get off TikTok and Instagram, they say they can't because everyone else is on them."

He sees it as part of a larger collective action problem - one in which individuals want to make a change but fail to do so because the group isn't - that's leaving us paralyzed, and glued to our screens.

"We're trapped in a collective action problem that we haven't been able to solve, even though most people hate what's going on."

"The Anxious Generation" is teeming with solutions - and entire chapters on what families, schools, educators and big tech companies can do to bring childhood back to Earth.

"We can solve this problem most of the way within a year if we just work collectively," he told The Post. "These are collective action problems, and we can solve them with collective action, even if we don't get help from our lawmakers."

His proposed solutions include staving off smartphones and social media until the teen years, banning phones during the school day, and promoting unsupervised childhood play.

That, he says, is the shortcut to short-circuiting our collective action problem: "Each parent who takes action makes it easier for other parents in the community to do the same. Each school that goes truly phone-​free liberates all of its students to be more present with each other."

And Haidt believes parents are ready for change.

"It's like I'm pushing on open doors," he told The Post. "Everyone is fed up with what phones are doing to their children and their lives. Wherever I go, whoever I talk to, they want to help, and they want to read the book."

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Kids' phone-based existence is 'inhuman' - and 10 times worse than any middle-school horrors: author

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Jonathan Haidt, author of the buzzy new book "The Anxious Generation," says social media has "rewired childhood" to the point of danger - and made girls' lives much wo...

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Second article about Jonathan Haidt's new book

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Second article about Jonathan Haidt's new book

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Jonathan Haidt's new book, The Anxious Generation, makes the case against devices for children-even if they desperately want them.

I did not know this at the time, but apparently my children were part of a generation of guinea pigs. "It's as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children," Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

Haidt convincingly uses data to argue that a sharp uptick in depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide among young people is directly tied to the wide distribution of smartphones. He points to surveys that have been asking teenagers for decades questions about mental health, such as: "Life often seems meaningless" or "A lot of times I feel lonely." Survey results remained pretty consistent, and some numbers were even improving, before they took a sharp, negative turn somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

The solution, Haidt says, is "easy." In this episode of Radio Atlantic, he advocates that parents don't give middle schoolers smartphones so they can reclaim the old way of socializing, that social-media platforms raise the minimum age for use to 16, and that schools ban cellphones during the day, among other straightforward solutions. The picture, however, looks a lot less clear when you talk with an actual young person. In this episode, I spoke with my child Jacob, and we juxtapose theory with lived experience. You'll hear a mother (me) wrestle in real time with the consequences of parenting decisions as Haidt makes the case that we should collectively agree to rescue our kids from this experiment.
Listen to the conversation here: Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: What's up? What are you up to?

Jacob Rosin: Not much. I just got home. I'm going to do my laundry soon and then pack.

Hanna Rosin: Oh, right. You're leaving Sunday.

Jacob Rosin: Hm.

Hanna Rosin: Yeah. What's "hm"?
[Typing]
Hanna Rosin: What are you typing?
[Typing]
Jacob Rosin: I'm just chatting with friends.

Hanna Rosin: Wait, you're chatting with friends while we're doing this interview?

Jacob Rosin: I do this all the time. Don't worry about it.

Hanna Rosin: So you're going to chat with friends throughout this interview?

Jacob Rosin: Have we started the interview yet?

Hanna Rosin: No, we haven't.

Jacob Rosin: Okay.
[Typing]
Hanna Rosin: Oh my God. Tell me when you're ready.

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hanna Rosin. And that is my 20-year-old child, Jacob.

Jacob Rosin: I'm ready.
[Music]
Jacob Rosin: Wait-how long will this take? Sorry.
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: This is basically how it goes with me and Jacob. I always think it's just me and them talking. And I'm always surprised to learn there's someone else in the room. The feeling is like when you're at a party and you're talking to someone, and their eyes are scanning for someone more interesting.

Hanna Rosin: Okay, so what would you say that most of our fights are about?

Jacob Rosin: I mean, I don't know how to get more specific than phone usage, but I think it also might be phone usage while also not paying attention to something important.

Hanna Rosin: Right, phone usage and then-

Jacob Rosin: Is this a leading question?

Hanna Rosin: No, I am genuinely trying to figure out how close my perception is to your perception.

Jacob Rosin: Okay.

Hanna Rosin: What would you say is my position, or maybe your parents' position, and what is your position in this fight?

Jacob Rosin: I mean, I think most of the time when I'm on my phone, my friends are in the phone, and the idea is that there's a real world out there that I should be paying attention to because it is more immediate, and I can't really come back to it in the same way, I guess.

Hanna Rosin: I see. So you recognize that there's a world in your phone, there's a world outside-

Jacob Rosin: That is probably more important to me.

Hanna Rosin: What's more important to you?

Jacob Rosin: The world on the phone.

Hanna Rosin: And I'm irritated because I think the world outside should be more important to you. Is that a fair summary?

Jacob Rosin: Maybe, yes.

Hanna Rosin: There's this expression that this MIT professor who writes about stuff has: "We are forever elsewhere." Do you think that's true? Does that bother you?

Jacob Rosin: Does it bother me? No. That's just how I am. I just do that. I think about other stuff.

Hanna Rosin: Does it feel distracting? Or like your mind-
[Typing]
Hanna Rosin: Are you online again?

Jacob Rosin: That was only a brief exchange. I'll close Discord. Hold on.

Hanna Rosin: I'm not sure Jacob is typical, although given what the latest research is showing about how phones intrude into kids' lives, they might not be that atypical.

Jacob is autistic and did not glide easily into middle- and high-school social dynamics. It was always just much easier for them to have fun with friends online.

But I have been pretty typical as a parent, trying to figure out what to enforce around phones. Jacob and their siblings were part of the guinea-pig generation, the first kids to get smartphones during puberty. And we, the parents, knew nothing. We had no wisdom to go by. We just watched as they dove in deeper and deeper and had no idea if this was excellent and fresh and creative, or totally ruinous.
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: When did you first get your cell phone?

Jacob Rosin: I remember waking up to look at my phone and look at the results of the 2016 election, so it was at least before then.

Hanna Rosin: Yeah, okay. How would you say it changed your-

Jacob Rosin: Over time, it absolutely made me feel more connected with social media and particularly Discord.

Hanna Rosin: Can you say more about that?

Jacob Rosin: I did not really feel like I had any real friends before that point, even though I allegedly did.

Hanna Rosin: Did you feel like you started to compare yourself to other people or anything like that?

Jacob Rosin: I've been doing that since I was born, baby.

Hanna Rosin: What does that mean? What do you mean?

Jacob Rosin: I don't know if the internet ever brought that habit. I think it's just a habit. Maybe it started to be negative when metrics got involved.

Hanna Rosin: What do you mean?

Jacob Rosin: Well, if I do something funny, that I think is funny, on Twitter.com and only get one like for it, or it's whatever-you know what I mean.

Hanna Rosin: Right. Like in school, it's vague: who likes you, who sits next to you, or whatever. But then on social media, it's really specific.

Jacob Rosin: In school, I'm not even paying attention to that stuff.

Hanna Rosin: Mm-hmm. But on social media, you are.

Jacob Rosin: Yeah.

Hanna Rosin: In 2017, about a year after Jacob got their first phone, The Atlantic published the story, "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?"

Destroyed. That is a big word. I don't know many parents who look at their kid and think, You're destroyed. But now, in 2024, the question of "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" is less of a question and more of a: Yeah, actually, they probably did.

Jonathan Haidt: All right, is Hannah on already?

Hanna Rosin: Hey, it's me. Hi, it's Hanna. I'm sorry-it's "Hanna Rosin." It could be "Hannah Rozin," but it's not.

Haidt: Yeah, I know. And I'm Jon Haidt. It's often "Jon Hate."

Hanna Rosin: So I talked to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

Hanna Rosin: Oh, Jon Haidt. I've been calling you "Jon Hate."

Haidt: As half the world does.

Hanna Rosin: Haidt has a new book called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Like a lot of parents, I keep up with the research. And for the sake of household peace, I would like to dismiss all this stuff about teens and smartphones as alarmist. But Haidt's book compiles some pretty compelling data.

Hanna Rosin: The way I understand your research over the last 10 to15 years is you have been trying to counter the argument of alarmism with extremely specific data. I mean that is how I understand the point of this book.

Haidt: Exactly. Sometimes it is correct to be alarmed and, as a professor and social scientist, I want to make damn sure that if I'm going to tell people they should be alarmed, I better be right and I better be able to back it up.

Hanna Rosin: One of the big things that Haidt looked at was data from a national survey called, Monitoring the Future. It's a wide-ranging survey that dates back to the '70s, and it asks eighth, 10th, and 12th graders a bunch of questions-everything from what they think of the government to their attitudes toward drug and alcohol use.

But what Haidt was most interested in were questions tracking mental health. In the survey, students are given statements and then agree or disagree with them on a scale of 1 to 5.

Haidt: On Monitoring the Future, there's some really sad items about meaninglessness, hopelessness, like: I often feel that my life is meaningless or I feel that my life has no purpose.

Hanna Rosin: Or I'm feeling lonely and socially isolated at school. I mean, they're in a language that is relatable. That's why I wanted to talk about them. It's sentences that a teenager could relate to.

Haidt: That's right. So if you plot with the year on the x-axis going back to the '90s or sometimes the '70s, and then you plot a bunch of lines, then what you see is the numbers-the lines-bounce around. A number of them, they really do go down a bit. Down is good. Down is like, I don't agree with that. I don't feel depressed.

Hanna Rosin: Fewer people say that, or fewer people agree with those depressing statements.

Haidt: That's right. And this is also a period when suicide rates are dropping. Gen X had the highest suicide rates in history. For whatever reason, the Millennials are actually doing better than Gen X, and that's very clear when you look at the '90s and the 2000s. So you get flat lines, or you get lines sloping down. And if you cut off your data collection after 2010, no hint of a problem.

Now, in 2010, teens are just beginning to get iPhones. But what's remarkable to me is that the mental-health data doesn't get worse slowly. The mental-health data is fine in the 2000s. And then all of a sudden-right around 2012-2013-everything falls off a cliff.

Hanna Rosin: I just want to track the timeline, because these are such short periods that people are thinking in their head, Okay, what happened then? What happened then? So 2012 is the wide acceptance of cell phones? Because it's not when smartphones came around.

Haidt: The iPhone comes out in 2007, but it's just amazing in that it's a digital Swiss Army knife, and there were no apps other than the ones that came with it. And then the next year we get the app store, and then we get notifications.

So it's not until 2010-2011 that you have this thing in your pocket, which is not a digital Swiss Army knife that you pull out when you need something. It is now a portal that millions-millions-of companies now can use to get to you, as a child. Without your parents' permission or knowledge, they can get to you. They can send you notifications. They can try to get you to stop your homework and: Come-look at what someone just said about you.

So it's in the 2010s that the phone becomes a master rather than a servant. 2010 is also when Instagram is available for public use. 2010 is also when the front-facing camera is put on. Also, high-speed internet: By 2012-2013, most people do have high-speed internet.

So the point is: Between 2010-when phones weren't toxic, people weren't on Instagram, most people didn't have high-speed data-2010 things were fine. By 2015, everything's different.
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: For example, what happens if you're a kid and you make a mistake? Haidt admits that childhood wasn't perfect before the invention of the smartphone-obviously the smartphone didn't invent bullying-but now the act of growing up, and everything that comes with it, is on display for thousands and possibly millions to see, including your mistakes.

Haidt: There's a huge difference between practicing all these things on a small stage-not a stage. Let's say in a small group where mistakes are not very costly. So you say something stupid, and then your friend is mad at you, and then maybe she gives you the cold shoulder. Maybe she even starts a rumor about you. So that's the way it always was. That's very painful, but it's still relatively low stakes.

What happens when now it's on a stage, where if you say anything wrong or you anger anyone, she can find an ugly photo of you-maybe she can find a nude photo that you swapped with some boy-and now she can put it out there for the world to see, and thousands of people comment on it. It might even get into the newspapers or something like that.

This is a level of shame and humiliation that no teenager can stand, and this, I think, is one of the reasons why the suicide rate is up. Because when you are being publicly shamed on a big stage, life is a living hell and death is an escape.

Hanna Rosin: But we don't actually know how many suicides are related to social-media shaming, just to be clear.

Haidt: No, no, that's right because thankfully suicide is still very, very rare. But what we can say is that it's up for all groups of teenagers. It's way, way up for preteen girls. They have very low rates to begin with, but their rates have tripled since before 2010. So it's way up. And even if it's anecdotal-that is, even if because so few kids killed themselves. But you know, we saw all those parents at the Senate hearings.

Hanna Rosin: Parents who are against Meta because-

Haidt: Because their kids are dead, yeah. They saw it happen. They can see what happened. The kid was, you know, was bullied, shamed, sextorted. She was on webpages promoting self-harm and suicide. Are they all wrong? I don't think so.
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: After the break, Haidt offers some solutions for what we should do-we the schools, we the government, and we the parents-about the smartphone problem.

After which, I ask Jacob if they wish they'd never had a cell phone.
[Break]
Hanna Rosin: It's the early 2010s, and according to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, this is around the time that teen mental health starts tanking. Haidt believes that the uptick in depression, anxiety, and self-harm in young people-it all got really bad when the first teenage girl moved her life online: She downloaded Instagram, posted on Tumblr, and started checking obsessively for comments and likes.

Haidt: And some of her friends did, too, so that now their consciousness, their focus was hours a day on their phones and was happening in the virtual world. That's when the problems start. That's the great rewiring of childhood. You get much less eye contact, social contact. It all goes through the screen.

Hanna Rosin: Okay, so the key factor here that shifted is real-time socialization: eye contact, social cues, laughter, navigating the real-time reactions of people. That's what you're saying is the key difference? It's being real time in person with your peers.

Haidt: Yes, there are about 15 different causal pathways. There are many ways that the phone-based life is harming boys and girls, but if I had to pick one, that would be the one.

You know, here I am. I'm a 60-year-old man talking about, you know, Kids these days. You'd think that I'm wrong, right? You'd think, What do I know? You'd think that with all the talk about, you know, Let's raise the age to 16. Let's not let kids have smartphones 'til 14-these are the things I say-you'd think that somewhere on planet Earth, there would be a young person who would write an essay saying, This is wrong. I can't find that person. I found one essay from a woman in Canada that kind of defended it. That's it.

Hanna Rosin: Wait-just one question. There are plenty of teenagers who would say, The phone opened up whole new worlds to me that were not available to me before.

Haidt: Sure, for individuals, they might say that about themselves, but find me any kind of movement or even any individual who is arguing, No, grownups, you don't understand. Don't take away our social media. Don't stop 11-year-olds from being on it. Middle-school kids should have access. I can't find that now.

Maybe there's a TikTok video somewhere where they do that. But each generation, you know, if you try to raise the drinking age, at some point, I bet somebody wrote something saying, No, don't raise the drinking age. So my point is: Don't just listen to the correlational data. Don't just listen to the experimental data, which we haven't even talked about. Don't just listen to the parents. Don't just listen to the teachers, all of whom are speaking with almost one voice: This is messing up our kids.

Talk to the kids. And what you find is, while many will say that they enjoy the social connections on Instagram or TikTok-they'll say they enjoy it-but they don't say, And it's good for us overall.

Hanna Rosin: To me, it's a little complicated. I have a child who would say they were addicted but also would say that online is where they found their friends and where they found people who shared their interests, and that's something they couldn't do in real life. And I find it hard to very simply say it's all terrible, because I also see the ways in which it's rewired childhood in a way that I can't personally access, because I don't have a lot of friends that I just know online, but in a way that's also real.

Haidt: That's right. It greatly increases the quantity of social interactions. That's true. And it greatly decreases their quality. But here's the thing: If you were right-that it's opening up all these possible social relationships, that it's doing all this good-if you were right, then loneliness should have gone down in the 2010s, and it didn't. It goes up like a hockey stick.

Hanna Rosin: Right. And I suppose you could have some kids for whom that's true, but the vast majority of kids are not true.

Haidt: Yep, exactly.

Hanna Rosin: So the last section I want to talk about is solutions.

Haidt: Yes.

Hanna Rosin: I think part of the reason that people resist your argument or want to think of it as alarmist is because the solution seems completely out of reach. If I'm a teenager-

Haidt: No, it's easy.

Hanna Rosin: ( Laughs.) It's not easy. I mean, if I'm a teenager, I'm listening to this, I'm thinking, This is culture. This is the world we live in. These companies are bigger than I am. The social culture is bigger than I am. The emotional culture is bigger than I am. There aren't any particular government regulations on any of this. All my friends are here. So for you to tell me, "Okay, go back and play in the woods," it's like: with who and when? That just seems like a nonstarter.

Haidt: Okay. Hanna, I have been involved since college in many efforts to bring about social change. I ran a gun-control group in Connecticut in the '80s. That was hard. To change people's minds is really hard.

You know what's easy? Walking into a situation where most people want to change, they don't like what's happening, they just need a coordination device, they just need an escape path out of a collective-action problem. And then I can come along, and I can say, Here's your path. Let's just do it. Let's do it at the same time. And then it's easy. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but compared to other kinds of social change, this one we can solve in the next year or two.

So here's how we do it: The reason why so many of us give our kids a smartphone in sixth grade is because she comes to us and says, Dad, everyone else has a smartphone. I'm being left out. That's a collective-action problem. So what I'm proposing in the book is four norms, and it won't solve it entirely, but it'll roll it back most of the way. Four norms.

The first norm: No smartphone until high school. Let's clear this all out of middle school. Middle-school kids desperately need a more old-fashioned childhood, where they have a few close friends, and they talk and they gossip and they do other things face-to-face.

Hanna Rosin: So this is a parental culture. You can't legislate that.

Haidt: No, that's right.

Hanna Rosin: You're saying change your parental culture.

Haidt: Yep, that's right. So that's the first one. The second norm: No social media 'til 16. These platforms are just completely inappropriate. Kids should not be growing up on a stage.

Hanna Rosin: Have you tried that experiment?

Haidt: Yeah. Well, yes. I told my kids no social media in middle school, and my son finally opened his own Instagram account without telling me in 10th grade. But he'd proven himself so responsible. And he was on the track team, which is great, and so they needed to communicate, and he was already at that time, whatever, 14, 15. So I said, Okay. That's okay. But for my daughter, I've said absolutely not-no to Instagram or to Snapchat.

Hanna Rosin: Until what age?

Haidt: Well, for now, I've said 16, and I'm hopeful that this norm-so I have to publicize the book really quickly. She's now 14, so I better get this norm changed next year so that she'll be able to put up with it. But anyway-

Hanna Rosin: And do you know that she's not? I mean, the "anyway" is the difficult part. I feel like once you get into the weeds, this is what happens. You will forbid a kid. They can start an Instagram account under any name that you would have no idea about.

Haidt: She watches TikTok on a web browser. She doesn't have it on her phone, but we don't need perfect here. What we need is to break the norm. We need to break the pattern where, in every free moment, the phone comes out, and TikTok and Instagram go up. That's what we have to stop.

Third norm is phone-free schools. There is nothing good that comes from kids having the greatest distraction device ever built in their pockets during class.

And then the fourth norm is more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. If you're going to take away the phone-based childhood, if you're going to greatly cut back on screen usage, we can't just let them look at the wall. We can't just say, Well, go read a book. Go learn to make canoes, or something. We have to give them back each other. That's what they really want. That's where they thrive, is when they can play and hang out with other kids without adults telling them what to do.

So those are the four norms: No smartphone 'til high school. No social media 'til 16. Phone-free schools. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.
[Typing]
Hanna Rosin: So the reason I'm asking all these questions is because there is this book coming out, called The Anxious Generation. And its argument is that-this is what he writes: "It's as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children." And the argument is that rates of depression, mental-health issues, all kinds of things just skyrocketed. You know, kids became less able to-

Jacob Rosin: I mean, have you paid attention to the world lately?

Hanna Rosin: What do you mean?

Jacob Rosin: Everything sucks. I don't think that social media is the cause of that, but social media definitely made people more aware of that. And it was going to start happening no matter what we did about it. I don't know about the phones.

Hanna Rosin: And do you think that-I look back and think, Should we have put more restrictions? We tried one time, and it was, you know, warfare, but should we have tried harder?

Jacob Rosin: Well, what kind of restrictions do you mean by that?

Hanna Rosin: Forced you to not have your phone at night, you know, put your-

Jacob Rosin: Realistically, yeah, that probably would have helped at some point, but it's too late now.

Hanna Rosin: Oh God, I feel so bad. So how do you think your life would have been different if you didn't have a phone?

Jacob Rosin: I think I would have been a lot unhappier, generally.

Hanna Rosin: A lot un happier.

Jacob Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Hanna Rosin: Yeah. The story that it sounds like you tell about your life and social media is: I got my phone. It gave me a pathway to socializing and social connection. That pathway is addictive, but it's less lonely because at least I had a pathway to socializing.

Jacob Rosin: Pretty much.

Hanna Rosin: Can I propose an alternative story, and you just tell me what you think?

Jacob Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Hanna Rosin: What if there's a story that you never got a cell phone? You were lonely and, at some point, you just would have had to socialize?

Jacob Rosin: I don't think that's true. I do not think I would have been pushed into it by necessity.

Hanna Rosin: Because that's what always-like, as a parent, honestly, that's what haunts me a little bit. I remember when you came back from camp. Remember that camp that you hated?

Jacob Rosin: Yeah.

Hanna Rosin: I remember picking you up from that camp. Where was it? In North Carolina or something?

Jacob Rosin: Yeah.

Hanna Rosin: Anyway, so we picked you up from that camp, and that camp did not allow phones, so you didn't have your phone for a month.

Jacob Rosin: Yes, I did not.

Hanna Rosin: And you definitely wrote letters of misery from camp-like, summer camp, I-hate-this-place kind of letters. But you were so chatty when we picked you up because you had not had your phone for a month. And I know you hated that place, but I think about that all the time. Like, What if we had just done some experiment of Jacob can't have a phone for a long time? Would you have been forced to socialize more?

Jacob Rosin: I don't know how much I would actually follow through. But I might. I don't know.

Hanna Rosin: You don't know?

Jacob Rosin: There's no way to find out now.

Hanna Rosin: I mean, my purpose in talking to you is: There is this book. It's written by grownups. It's written by grownups who grew up after the internet age about teenagers. And I'm torn because part of me thinks, like, I ruined Jacob's life by not taking their phone away more. And part of me thinks, These grownups don't understand kids, and there's something we're all missing about this experience.

Jacob Rosin: I would not at all say you ruined my life by doing that. I actually feel like I only got to live my life because of my phone.

Hanna Rosin: Oh.

Jacob Rosin: And yeah, that probably sounds a little depressing, but I think there might be an assumption among people who say stuff like this that everyone who's on the phone is using it to replace real human interaction. I totally disagree with that. Everything on the phone is real human interaction. Well, most things. There are things that are not.

Hanna Rosin: And how typical do you think your experience is?

Jacob Rosin: Very not typical.

Hanna Rosin: Oh, very not typical. Okay. But you don't think I ruined your life then?

Jacob Rosin: No. No.

Hanna Rosin: Thank you. Thank you for saying that.
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: What are you gonna do just now, get back online?

Jacob Rosin: Honestly, yeah. I probably will.

Hanna Rosin: Okay. Okay, that's fine.

Jacob Rosin: I'll stop the recording. Actually, maybe I'll just go watch videos. I don't know.

Hanna Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Andrea Valdez, fact-checked by Sam Fentress, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Parents who are listening: Please share with us creative strategies you've come up with to limit cellphone use without causing domestic warfare. I'll give you mine: When Jacob was younger, instead of saying, say, Half an hour of screen time, Jacob, I would ask them when they thought they would be done with their video game or conversation. So it might be like 36 minutes or 27 minutes, and that way, they could finish out the game or the conversation, and the endpoint would feel more natural to them. If you have one, send it to radioatlantic@theatlantic.com, and we will share our favorites.

Kids who are listening: If you have creative ideas, please share them, too.

Thank you, Jacob, for playing along. I'm Hanna Rosin. And thank the rest of you for listening.

Hanna Rosin: Okay. All right. Great. All right, love you. I'll talk to you later.

Jacob Rosin: Bye.

Hanna Rosin: Bye.

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Jonathan Haidt's new book, The Anxious Generation , makes the case against devices for children-even if they desperately want them.

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Essentials guarantee in destitute Britain

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Essentials guarantee in destitute Britain

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Charles Dickens learned about poverty in the least desirable way, by being poor. It gave the author a lifetime interest in the pain it causes. The return of " character" as a critical determinant of poverty to public debate is something that would be familiar to Dickens. He would no doubt deplore its use, especially as a way of dodging the facts. About 1.8m households in the UK are today classified as destitute, meaning they are unable to afford essentials including food, shelter and heating. Yet as Gordon Brown wrote in this newspaper last week, a "wall of silence" surrounds this crisis and limits public discussion. Full awareness of the suffering it entails is lacking.

The situation in Mr Brown's home town of Kirkcaldy is the worst he has ever seen. In some of its neighbourhoods, 70% of children are living in poverty, leading him to describe the UK as haunted by a level of deprivation "we thought had been consigned to history". A large volume of research supports this claim. Increasing numbers of children lack their own beds, rough sleeping in cities including London is up sharply, and malnutrition has increased across the country. Last week, a study showed that the austerity policies of the early 2010s were associated with an increase in age-related frailty, particularly in the oldest people - meaning that their health deteriorated more rapidly.

Traditionally one-nation Conservatives as well as social liberals have objected to a widening gulf between rich and poor. This has been viewed, rightly, as damaging to the whole of society. In challenging the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, to order a review of universal credit in his March budget, Mr Brown's message could not be clearer: just as there needs to be a basic standard of living, there should be a basic standard of government. Tackling poverty this extreme, he said, "shouldn't be a question of ideology, but a question of decency".

Mr Brown is a strong advocate for the role of civil society, and is actively involved in local charities. But while in the short term such initiatives are vital, for example, in supplying beds and sanitary items as well as food to those who can't afford to buy them, philanthropy can only ever be part of the solution. While the pandemic and international energy costs have made matters worse, policy choices by successive Conservative governments are to blame for the collapsing living standards of the poorest households. The repeated refusal to increase benefits in line with inflation, combined with measures including the two-child cap which reduce the amount that can be claimed by bigger families, have made the task of making ends meet impossible.

The "essentials guarantee" proposed by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and others would enshrine in law the right to a minimum level of benefits sufficient to cover essentials, with calculations overseen by an independent body. This is an easy-to-understand means of reinstating what used to be thought of as a social safety net, and polling shows that the public supports it in principle. In recent times, authors including Kerry Hudson and Elizabeth Strout have written eloquently about the debilitating shame that often accompanies chronic poverty. The nature and extent of poverty in the UK in 2024 should shame those who ignore it - not those who are suffering it.

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The Guardian view on ending destitution: an essentials guarantee is needed | Editorial

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Editorial: The extent of poverty in the UK is shameful and so is the silence surrounding it. Gordon Brown's challenge to ministers is timely

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Tory MP says most struggling children in his area are ‘products of crap parents’

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Bury North MP James Daly makes remark while outlining what New Conservatives group stands for

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Marissa Meizz was out to dinner with a friend when her phone started vibrating. It was an unusually frenzied buzz, unresponsive to the silence button - a flood of texts from friends, acquaintances and even an "offline" aunt all linking to a TikTok video titled "Send this to Marissa in NYC".

She froze. Then she started watching.

"I hate to stick my nose where it doesn't belong," said the uploader, @Drewbdoobdoo, smiling gleefully. "But if your name is Marissa, listen up." Drew recounted overhearing a group of girlfriends within earshot of his perch in a New York City park. They were chatting about how they had purposely chosen a weekend to throw a birthday party when their friend Marissa was out of town - a clear violation of the friend code. "I need to tell you that the weekend you're away is not the only time they could do their birthday party," Drew said. "TikTok, help me find Marissa."

Meizz knew instantly: "This is about me." She was devastated.

Similar videos - in which uploaders eavesdrop on strangers and report the "tea" to their TikTok audiences, sometimes offering identifying features of all those involved - have become a curious trend on the app. Dozens of these videos are popping up under various hashtags, airing out the dirty laundry of unsuspecting parties: baby daddies with secret families, fiancés who cheated while on their bachelor trips, and friend groups complaining behind the back of an unwitting member.

The blowback is often humiliating for the person who's being talked about.

After Meizz went on TikTok to respond to Drew, revealing that he had been talking about her, she became known as "this girl from the video", she said. "People would recognize me on the street and be like, 'Oh, you're the girl with no friends.'"

In another video, Kelsey Kotzur, a lifestyle influencer, landed in the hot seat for sharing gossip she overheard at a London restaurant with her 160,000 TikTok followers.In a three-minute clip, she described what the gossipers looked like, where they were brunching, and the excruciating details of their complaints about their supposed friend - they hated her wedding, her dress, and having to participate in the event at all. The worst part: they were her bridesmaids.

"If I were that friend and I knew that these girls were talking about me like this, I would throw myself into traffic," Kotzur said in the clip. Yet she proceeded: "If you just got married, and your color scheme was blush, and you have two blonde friends with short bobs, and you have a brunette friend, don't be friends with them any more." The video has been viewed over 3m times.

In this era of gossip surveillance, not only are TikTokers policing the social lives of those around them, but they're often doing it at the expense of the very person they are supposedly saving.

Gossip can hurt - and help

Gossip, its function and villainy, has been dissected by moralists for ages. The psychologist Dr Audrey Tang explains that gossip is a powerful form of social bonding. "Gossip recognizes the feeling of being in the in-group," she said. "And if we've contributed to the conversation, we've even got that hit of dopamine. We're bonding, and oxytocin" - the natural hormone that emits loving feelings - "is being released."

Gossip recognizes the feeling of being in the in-group

Dr Audrey Tang

Though salacious on its surface, scandal-driven gossip can also "point out things that break social codes", said Dr Andrea McDonnell, a professor of communication at Providence College and author of A Gossip Politic."These videos are a manifestation of one of the things that gossip has always done, which is to police bad behavior."

We saw this in the 2010s with "Twitter, do your thing", shorthand urging users to hunt, expose and punish wrongdoers caught on video. These threads were dedicated to the comeuppance of racists, abusers and criminals. But now, years later, outing gossip perpetrators in the sacred space of the brunch table may be pushing the boundaries of ethical gossip.

"People need a place to vent," Tang said. "It may feel unpalatable and it may be harsh, but sometimes you need to release emotion so that you can go back to being a good friend."

Ultimately, Meizz is glad that the video was posted and had a positive, albeit strange, effect on her life. Nearly three years later, she has new friends, a buzzing community and a career in content creation. She even founded a social group, No More Lonely Friends. When she joined me in a park for an interview, she was eager to get back to her friends at the dive bar where they watch football every Sunday - a far cry from her days as the "girl with no friends".

She acknowledges that her social triumph is undoubtedly an unusual outcome. Still, as aberrant as it may be, it seems to have set the rationale for this trend - that sharing privileged information in front of millions of viewers will benefit the person being talked about, even if it utterly humiliates them in the process.

Meizz's experience seems to have set the rationale for the trend. Illustration: Guardian Design/Getty Images

When Kotzur's video inspired uproar on behalf of the bride, she defended herself in a follow up video, explaining that she knows Meizz personally and saw how this kind of information could positively affect one's life.

But some academics who defend gossip's many virtues are doubtful that there is any value beyond views and clicks. Two videos by Kellie Yancy, another TikTok influencer, received a combined 20m views before she took them down. "Whoever Sarah is, your friends over there talking about you," Yancy said in one clip. "She said you dress sleazy." Yancy then turned the phone to face the brunching table next to her. "Hold on, I'm about to show you exactly who talking about you, Sarah." (Kotzur and Yancy did not respond to requests for comment.)

"I'm having a hard time understanding how [this trend] could be called well-intentioned, if they're going to be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people," said the ethicist Dr Emrys Westacott.

Meizz also warned against revealing identifying details, which "can ruin lives in a deeper way". With the details Yancy included in her video, there was enough information for keyboard sleuths to piece together Sarah's identity and find her social media profiles. "Maybe that Sarah girl would have, like, [hurt herself]," Meizz said, her eyes widening. "People aren't thinking about that when they post it."

In a now deleted TikTok Live video, Yancy said that Sarah had contacted her, requesting that she take down the original video because it was affecting her job. Sarah also told Yancy that she was uncomfortable with the online hate that was being directed at those who were talking about her.

Meizz has been asked to expose her friends from Drew's video. But "I don't need them to get death threats," she said.

What does ethical gossip look like?

Experts who study gossip believe that there are ways to ethically share it. In the popular podcast Normal Gossip, on which the host, Kelsey McKinney, shares gossip that listeners submit about "friends of friends", the anonymized accounts really just become a story - a story that happens to be true. In contrast, the videos reporting on bad-mouthing passersby are focused on "inherently non-public conversations that people are engaging in", said the technology journalist Taylor Lorenz, author of Extremely Online.

McDonnell agreed. "For the average person going out to dinner, we generally expect that we have a right to privacy," she said. "Social media has brought us to a place where anybody can be paparazzi."

The 21st century has not been kind to the personal lives of celebrities, royalty, or politicians, with print media and online sites publishing the unverified scuttlebutt of those whose lives interest us most. We watched as champagne-chugging socialites were crucified on gossip rags like TMZ and Perez Hilton in the early aughts, while nowadays, gossip accounts like Deuxmoi obsess over behind-the-scenes celebrity drama one step removed from our own.

"The line between A-lister, influencer and [someone] posting on TikTok is ever thinning," McDonnell said. "And so talking about and reporting on other people that we interact with in everyday life as though they were celebrities becomes internalized." There's also often power in privileged information and knowing something first. In journalism, it might be "the scoop", and at the brunch table it may be "the tea".

Reporting on people we interact with in everyday life as though they were celebrities becomes internalized

Dr Andrea McDonnell

"What's a little disturbing about [this trend] is that it takes great pride and pleasure in presenting this information," McDonnell said, "and that seems to supersede the feeling of sadness about how that would affect the person who's directly implicated."

Kotzur's claim that she'd walk into traffic if she were the target of the very gossip she was amplifying shows she's "anticipating the harm of the comments" - but she "publicizes them anyway. And as watchers of this type of content, we are voyeurs of that imagined harm," McDonnell said. It can be "borderline cruel", she added.

TikTok's hunger for gossip surveillance is about indulging our human desire to uncover secrets about other people's lives. But often these videos disregard the subject's basic right to consent and privacy, in an attempt to get likes and virtue-signal to followers.

"It's not a [public service], it's toxic. I don't even think of it as gossip as much as it is surveillance state shit," Lorenz said. "It lets people feel like they're engaging in drama that's low stakes, but there are really consequences."

In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

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'It's not a public service, it's toxic': welcome to the world of gossip surveillance

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TikTokers are sharing strangers' conversations, hoping to expose gossipers to the very people they're talking about. Is the humiliation worth it?

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Institute for Educational & Social Equity – Capacity Development, Research, Institutional Support

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Institute for Educational & Social Equity – Capacity Development, Research, Institutional Support

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Institute for Educational & Social Equity

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Become an Institute Member

Member benefits includes:

Access to our Monthly Newsletter

Online access to our "Equity in Education & Society" journal (SAGE)

Invitation to our annual Fellows' Roundtable (Available only to members)

7.5% discounted rate at our "Equity in Education & Society" conferences

5% discounted rate on any of our training programmes and/or workshops

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Institute for Educational & Social Equity

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Institute for Educational & Social Equity is a specialist Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Institute. We are the only independent Tertiary level institution of its kind in the UK. We are a Google for Education institution, and a member of the UK Register of Learning Providers - Registration number: 10092202 Our services are available to any organisation or...

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Bedsit Britain: 160,000 people in England crammed into unlicensed housing

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Exclusive: Analysis suggests there are 32,000 hidden, often overcrowded large houses in multiple occupation

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BBC News - Omegle shut down: Video chat website closed after abuse claims
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67364634

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Thousands of babies and toddlers are being admitted to hospital in England each year with lung conditions probably linked to damp and mould-ridden homes, a senior doctor has warned.

Dr Andy Knox, an associate medical director for the NHS, said squalid housing was having a "profoundly negative impact on the nation's health" and worsening the crisis in the NHS.

"It is becoming a really major health issue for us as a nation, and we need legislation that is going to properly deal with this," he said.

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said the state of Britain's housing was "now a crucial issue for child health" and called on ministers to launch a clear way for parents to report poor air quality in rented and social housing.

The stark warnings come as the Guardian launches a series focusing on Britain's growing private rental sector. One in five UK households now live in private rented homes, with costs for tenants rising despite worsening conditions and squalor. Damp is five times more common in private rentals than in owner-occupied homes.

Government figures suggest that more than 520,000 rented properties in England have hazards that pose "a serious and immediate risk to a person's health and safety" - a large proportion of these being cold, damp and mould.

However, industry experts say the true scale of the problem is likely to be far greater due to systemic problems with the housing system and chronic under-reporting by tenants who fear eviction.

Nearly 31,000 children aged four and under are admitted to hospitals in England each year with conditions linked to the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which is known to be caused or exacerbated by damp and mould. NHS figures show that nearly 80% of these - or 24,485 babies and toddlers - develop acute bronchiolitis needing hospital treatment. Some studies suggest between 20-40% of children who have bronchiolitis in their early years go on to develop asthma.

Knox, who leads on population health for the NHS in Lancashire and South Cumbria, said the impact of damp and mould had been an issue for years but was "definitely getting worse".

Damp is five times more common in private rentals than in owner-occupied homes Photograph: Andrei310/Getty Images/iStockphoto

He said: "Poor quality housing is having a profound effect on children's health and leading to significantly raised admission sources for longer periods." He added that it was costing the economy millions of pounds a year in time taken off work, and contributing to strain on the NHS.

"Around 31,000 children are admitted to hospital each year with RSV related conditions. Evidence from other countries with comparable housing conditions to the UK would suggest that around 20% of these are likely directly linked to damp or mould-ridden homes.

"This is a substantial number and is putting extra strain on the NHS every winter. It particularly affects areas like ours where the housing available in our most disadvantaged areas has been poorly [kept] by landlords, leaving children at risk."

Experts have warned that children living in damp homes are up to three times more likely to have breathing problems.

A study published in the British Medical Journal in 2019 concluded that 19% of acute respiratory admissions for children under two in New Zealand would be prevented if all housing was free from damp and mould.

The link between poor quality housing and ill health has become more prominent since the Covid pandemic and the inquest last year into the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak, who died as a direct result of black mould in the flat he lived in.

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However, the scale of the challenge is not well understood due to a lack of nationwide data.

Tenants living in private rented properties are known to under-report problems because they fear receiving a no-fault eviction - a practice due to be made illegal - or having their rent raised, which can have the same effect as an eviction.

Local authorities, which are responsible for overseeing the private rented sector, say their environmental health and housing teams are chronically under-resourced so the majority of complaints do not result in any formal action.

Senior doctors have suggested that the NHS should start routinely asking about patients' living conditions when they present with a respiratory condition, in the same way people are asked to give their smoking history or ethnicity.

Dr Camilla Kingdon, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said the body was encouraging paediatricians to ask about housing when reviewing children with lung issues, but she called on the government to do more to improve standards.

"The UK has some of the very worst housing stock in Europe and evidence shows a rising number of families are living in poor quality accommodation, with detrimental impacts on children's health. Cold and damp housing conditions lead to increased risk of asthma, respiratory infections, slower cognitive development, and mental health problems in children. We must remember that our housing crisis is also a health crisis."

She added: "We call on the UK government to establish a process for people in rented and social housing to report indoor air quality problems and to help with necessary improvements. It is essential that all children and young people have a base standard of living that promotes health and wellbeing."

A spokesperson for the housing department said: "Everyone deserves to live in a safe and decent home. That's why the government is determined to crack down on rogue landlords who cause misery to their tenants and put their health and safety at risk.

"We are delivering a fairer private rented sector for tenants and landlords through the Renters Reform Bill, which includes creating a new ombudsman to resolve issues quicker and empower tenants to challenge poor practice."

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Thousands of babies and toddlers falling sick from damp homes in Britain, NHS doctor warns

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Nearly 31,000 children aged four or under admitted to hospital each year in England due to respiratory virus, with 80% developing acute bronchiolitis

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A generation of young people are not learning about the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict because schools are afraid of being accused of bias, according to teachers in England.

Fewer than 2% of GCSE history students in England studied a module on the Middle East in 2020, and experts estimate that only 27 schools in England currently teach it. The Observer has learned that some schools are blocking attempts to introduce the subject, in spite of active interest from pupils, due to the amount of "heat" the topic draws and worries about "bad publicity".

Pearson, now the only publisher providing school resources on the subject, has twice had to withdraw its textbooks in recent years, first after Jewish organisations claimed the books favoured Palestine, and then when the revised editions met accusations of bias towards Israel.

A history teacher at a Muslim majority school in the south-east of England, speaking on condition of anonymity, said she was "heartbroken" that her school had ruled the topic emotive and complex to teach at GCSE. They also warned her that debating the issues could lead to Muslim pupils making antisemitic comments: a warning which she described as "unfair, dangerous and insulting".

"As a historian it really hurts me," she said. "We can teach children about evidence for both sides and both narratives and I know kids are capable of seeing humanity in each. We can't keep hiding behind this idea that it's complex."

She insisted her pupils were really curious about the beginning of the conflict. "It feels so current, and it matters to them in a way that Henry VIII and his wives just don't," she said.

Steve Archer, deputy head of a secondary school in the north-west with a large intake of Muslim pupils as well as a small number of Jewish ones, said colleagues were "feeling the pressure" of fielding questions about the conflict.

He gave an example of a recent PE lesson after Rishi Sunak made a speech in solidarity with Israel. "One girl asked the teacher: 'Is Rishi Sunak the prime minister? He's not my prime minister.' That's a hard thing for a PE teacher to suddenly deal with."

Archer said refusing to give students a safe space to talk about the issues would be disruptive in a community like theirs, where they "generate a huge amount of heat". His school teaches the history of the Middle East to foster more understanding and discussion.

He said the the conflict was affecting his pupils deeply. "I'll see the simple drawing of a Palestinian flag on a child's hand, for example," he said. "Does that mean that child is expressing support for Hamas? I doubt it very much. More likely they are expressing solidarity with Palestinians."

As well as teaching different versions of how the conflict started in his own history lessons, Archer encourages other teachers to stress that violence leads to more violence, and "the victims of today become the fighters of tomorrow".

Michael Davies, who set up the charity Parallel Histories to provide resources for schools to teach about the conflict. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

History teacher Michael Davies set up the charity Parallel Histories to provide resources for schools like Archer's to teach about the conflict - and others such as Northern Ireland - by putting two contradictory historical narratives alongside each other and allowing students to form their own judgments. Downloads of the Middle East resources rose more than 500% in October compared with the previous month, but Davies understands that many schools are fearful.

"Classroom teachers are scared of being accused of bias and headteachers are scared of the bad publicity that could be generated from such an accusation," he said.

He was adamant that the topic could not be kept out of schools. "The school demonstrations during the last Gaza war proved that, and caught many heads flat-footed," he said.

Dr Chris Pyle, head of Lancaster Royal grammar school, said one reason teachers were frightened of talking about the Middle East was that they were not taught about it at school themselves. "Teachers don't feel like experts on these sensitive issues," he said. "There is a chain of lack of knowledge going down the generations."

Davies first tested out his dual-narrative approach while working at Lancaster Royal, and Pyle recalls a "powerful" school trip Davies led to Jerusalem, the West Bank and a refugee camp to hear stories on both sides of the divide. More recently sixth formers have debated the issues with pupils from a nearby Jewish faith school.

Dr Chris Pyle, head of Lancaster Royal grammar school. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

He said: "I think our history students are suddenly realising that right now this is the most important story in the world and they want to understand it. They are properly engaged."

Shellie Webster, who teaches the topic at Christ the King College, a Christian secondary school on the Isle of Wight, agreed. "I tell my students that this isn't history, it's happening today, and if we don't learn from our past and our histories we won't move forward as a society or a world."

Solutions Not Sides [SNS], an education charity that encourages children to discuss both sides of the conflict and then try to come up with peaceful solutions, is offering free online teacher advice sessions to try to tackle the fear of saying the wrong thing. Sharon Booth, the charity's founder, said: "I think the pressure has to be taken off teachers to have the correct answers to this conflict."

Her team had been "inundated" with requests to run workshops in which young Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders talk about their experiences. "As we walk into the room sometimes we have students expressing hatred or trying to communicate that they don't want to hear us - that can be anti-Israeli or anti-Palestinian," Booth explained. But she added: "Listening to actual people's stories has a big impact."

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Schools in England block lessons on Middle East over fears of bias claims

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Teachers say pupils losing out on learning about history of Israel-Palestine conflict due to worries about 'bad publicity'

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Why Do Young Americans Support Hamas? Look at TikTok.

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The app is digital fentanyl made by China. And it is brainwashing our youth against the country and our allies, argues Rep. Mike Gallagher.

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Under cover of a shoplifting panic, the Tories are pushing through a shocking expansion of facial recognition | Akiko Hart

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This widespread use in shops would be a sudden and dramatic increase of government and police surveillance powers , writes Akiko Hart from Liberty

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No, Education Minister, we don’t have enough evidence to support banning mobile phones in schools – Parenting for a Digital Future

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No, Education Minister, we don’t have enough evidence to support banning mobile phones in schools – Parenting for a Digital Future

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The claim that students' use of mobile phones at school is connected with lower academic performance has consistently featured in the popular debate around school mobile phone bans and has been used to justify blanket prohibitions. In this blog, Marilyn Campbell and Amanda Third discuss the existing evidence and argue that, despite the claims, we actually don't have sufficient data to back the policy.
South Australia recently announced a mobile phone ban in primary schools. Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan endorsed the ban, saying: "Data shows a correlation between the uptake of mobile phones by young people and a downturn in student performance." The federal government put "mobile phones on the agenda" in a September 2019 meeting with the Education Council. The minister then quoted research from Canadian Assistant Professor Louis-Philippe Beland, that he:

[...] found the positive effect of banning mobile phones was equivalent to an additional hour a week in school, or increasing the school year by five days.

He went on to say the research: "also found the positive effect was even greater for low-achieving students, with a mobile phone ban the equivalent of an additional two hours a week, or ten school days a year." The study the minister is referring to was published in 2016 about schools in the United Kingdom. The authors - Beland and Murphy - showed a correlation between students' exam scores and their schools' mobile phone policies. This claim has been used to justify blanket bans, both in Australia - such as the one in NSW public primary schools and all Victorian state primary and secondary schools - and overseas.
What the science actually says
The best kind of policy is grounded in evidence. But not all evidence is created equal and, when cited out of context, can obscure rather than illuminate the path forward. Unfortunately, the ways evidence has been mobilised in the school mobile phone ban debate in Australia has turned children's digital practices - and potentially their digital futures - into a political football.

Beland and Murphy's study surveyed 91 high schools in four English cities about their mobile phone policies. It then matched those schools' mobile phone policies with students' standardised test scores to estimate the effect of mobile phone bans on student performance. The study reported that, when schools instituted a ban, student test scores improved by 6.41% of a standard deviation - which is an effect size of 0.06. Let's unpack what this means.
A small 'effect size'
First, the "data" did not show that students' "uptake" of mobile phones related to a "downturn" in their performance. Rather, it showed restrictive school mobile phone policies related to an upturn in student performance. These are different things. Second, an improvement in student performance of 6.41% of a standard deviation is actually an effect size of 0.06 - though it has been reported as a 6% improvement. Effect sizes of 0.24 are considered small, 0.50 is moderate and 0.75 is large. So, an effect size of 0.06 is insignificant.

Students in the lowest quintile (fifth) of prior achievement gained slightly more in test scores when mobile phone bans were in place: 0.14% of a standard deviation, which is still very small. School bans neither positively nor negatively affected the test performance of students in the top quintile.

As for bans granting the equivalent of ten days of extra class time for low-achieving students quoted by the minister, this number doesn't seem to be in the study. In a Conversation article by Murphy and Beland about their study, they write:

We found the impact of banning phones for these [low-achieving] students equivalent to an additional hour a week in school, or to increasing the school year by five days.

But even in this case, the data was collected from 2001 to 2011 in the United Kingdom. So the specific number of days of extra class time don't directly apply to the Australian context.
Correlation is not causation
Third, although media coverage correctly reported the study found a correlation, many people mistake correlation for causation. Cheese consumption strongly correlates to death by bedsheet entanglement, but we wouldn't say cheese causes such deaths. The correlation between mobile phone bans and student performance could be caused by other variables simultaneously impacting the school environment and student performance.

However, Beland and Murphy conducted a series of correlations, which does strengthen their findings. Although the limitation remains and the authors acknowledge it, when they write: "We may be concerned that student sorting by observable or unobservable characteristics may be driving this estimate".
The results haven't been replicated
Lastly, good science means repeating studies and finding similar results. Two other studies replicated Beland and Murphy's research design. A Norwegian study found no significant effect of mobile phone bans on academic results. However, when they divided the sample into public and private schools, they did ﬁnd private schools experienced a somewhat positive effect of a mobile phone ban on academic performance.

This points to the fact school culture could make a difference to whether or not bans improve student performance. Or, put differently, blanket bans may not serve the best interests of all schools and their students. And a study in Sweden found school mobile phone bans had zero impact on student performance. The authors said:

In Sweden, we find no impact of mobile phone bans on student performance and can reject even small-sized gains.

The main problem, though, is not the limitations of Beland and Murphy's specific study. The real issue is the dearth of evidence to drive decision making about students' use of mobile phones at school. Until this vacuum is addressed, we cannot know for certain mobile phone bans in schools are a good idea. And it remains possible current policies are compromising students' best interests, both now and into the future.
Notes This text was originally published on The Conversation blog and has been re-posted with permission and small edits. This post gives the views of the authors and does not represent the position of the LSE Parenting for a Digital Future blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Featured image: photo by Max Fischer on Pexels
About the author

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No, Education Minister, we don't have enough evidence to support banning mobile phones in schools

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The claim that students' use of mobile phones at school is connected with lower academic performance has consistently featured in the popular debate around school mobile phone bans and has been use...

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This year’s State of the Nation report looks in detail at whether work is working for people in Scotland.

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Revealed: UK government keeping files on education critics’ social media activity https://t.co/12dZtSOH4C

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Revealed: UK government keeping files on education critics’ social media activity

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An Observer investigation finds DfE tried to cancel conference with ‘unsuitable’ speakers – and experts who criticised state education policy had files kept on online posts

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Revealed: UK government keeping files on education critics’ social media activity https://t.co/12dZtSOH4C

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Revealed: UK government keeping files on education critics’ social media activity https://t.co/12dZtSOH4C
— The Guardian (@guardian) September 30, 2023

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Revealed: UK government keeping files on education critics’ social media activity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.entities.urls[].description
An Observer investigation finds DfE tried to cancel conference with ‘unsuitable’ speakers – and experts who criticised state education policy had files kept on online posts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Revealed: UK government keeping files on education critics’ social media activity https://t.co/12dZtSOH4C

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Revealed: UK government keeping files on education critics’ social media activity https://t.co/12dZtSOH4C

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Revealed: UK government keeping files on education critics’ social media activity https://t.co/12dZtSOH4C

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.entities.urls[].title
Revealed: UK government keeping files on education critics’ social media activity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.entities.urls[].description
An Observer investigation finds DfE tried to cancel conference with ‘unsuitable’ speakers – and experts who criticised state education policy had files kept on online posts

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We've detected that JavaScript is disabled in this browser. Please enable JavaScript or switch to a supported browser to continue using twitter.com. You can see a list of supported browsers in our Help Center.
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Sky News on Twitter: "BREAKING: Online Safety Bill to become law in crackdown on harmful social media contenthttps://t.co/3o9gVVd2vd / Twitter"

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BREAKING: Online Safety Bill to become law in crackdown on harmful social media contenthttps://t.co/3o9gVVd2vd

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BREAKING: Online Safety Bill to become law in crackdown on harmful social media contenthttps://t.co/3o9gVVd2vd
— Sky News (@SkyNews) September 19, 2023

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TikTok fined €345m for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

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Irish data regulator says platform put 13- to 17-year-old users’ accounts on default public setting, among other breaches

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Sexual development and behaviour in children | NSPCC Learning

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Sexual development and behaviour in children | NSPCC Learning

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Introduction

It's important that everyone who works with children and young people has a good understanding of how children develop sexually. This can help you recognise which sexual behaviours are developmentally typical and identify if a child is displaying behaviour that is problematic or harmful.

We've put together some information about the stages of typical sexual development and behaviour for different age groups. We've included examples of behaviour that is common and uncommon, and information about what to do if you are worried that a child is displaying problematic or harmful sexual behaviour.

Stages of child sexual development

All children go through phases of sexual development. Just like every other part of growing up, some children mature sooner or later than others. For example, some children may have developmental delays whilst others may reach puberty early.

In general, typical sexual behaviour should be:

playful and curious, not aggressive or angry (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013)

displayed towards children of a similar age, stage of development and physical size, who know each other well (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), 2009)

voluntary and consensual (NCTSN, 2009).

Typical sexual behaviour should not cause physical or emotional harm to anybody involved (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013).

The tabs to the left contain some examples of typical sexual behaviour for different ages.

Healthy and unhealthy relationships

Learn how to recognise the signs that a young person is in an unhealthy relationship and what action you can take to help them.

Under 5-years-old

Under 5-years-old

At this stage, it's common to notice natural exploratory behaviour emerging when children feel safe and comfortable. This includes:

having no inhibitions about nudity (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

touching their own private parts (NCTSN, 2009; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault & Family Violence (SECASA), 2017; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

showing curiosity about other people's private parts or naked bodies (Healthy Children, 2019; NCTSN, 2009; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2020; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

talking about bodily functions, using words like 'poo' and 'wee' (NCTSN, 2009, Virtual Lab School, 2021)

consensually role playing with their peers, exploring different relationships or roles such as 'playing house', 'playing mummies and daddies' or 'playing doctor' (Government of Canada, 2012; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; Virtual Lab School, 2021).

Very young children can have erections, beginning from birth (Virtual Lab School, 2021).

It is uncommon for younger children to discuss specific sexual acts, use explicit sexual language or have adult-like sexual contact with other people (Stop It Now, 2007).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Find out how to recognise and respond if a child is displaying problematic or harmful sexual behaviour

5- to 9-year-olds

5- to 9-year-olds

As children get a little older, it's common to see them displaying behaviour like:

becoming more modest and asking for privacy (Government of Canada, 2012; SECASA, 2017; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

asking questions about sex and relationships, such as what sex is, where babies come from and same-sex relationships (Government of Canada, 2012; NCTSN, 2009; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

consensually exploring relationships with peers, for example mimicking adult relationships by holding hands with a 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend' or giving them a kiss on the cheek (NCTSN, 2009; SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007).

As children become more aware of social norms and 'rules' around sexualised behaviour, it's common for them to test boundaries. This might include using 'naughty' words they've heard from other people (NCTSN, 2009).

It's uncommon for children aged 5-8 to have adult-like sexual interactions, discuss specific sexual acts or self-stimulate in public (Stop It Now, 2007).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Learn more about problematic or harmful sexual behaviour and what to do if a child is displaying it

9- to 13-year-olds

9- to 13-year-olds

During these ages, children begin to get more curious about sex and relationships. They may start to be attracted to other people. Examples of typical sexual behaviour during this stage are:

having or wanting to have a romantic relationship with peers (of the same or different gender) (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

using sexual language, making jokes about sex or discussing sexual acts with peers (SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

wanting more privacy (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; NCTSN, 2009; SECASA, 2017; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

looking for information about sex in books, online or in the media (this might lead to accidentally finding sexual pictures or videos) (Government of Canada, 2012; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; NCTSN, 2009; Stop It Now, 2007; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

masturbating in private (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; NCTSN, 2009; SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020; Virtual Lab School, 2021).

It's uncommon for children in this age group to display sexual behaviour in a public place, or regularly display adult-like sexual behaviour such as having oral or genital contact or intercourse (Stop It Now, 2007; 2020).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Discover how to identify problematic or harmful sexual behaviour and what you should do in response

13- to 17-year-olds

13- to 17-year-olds

During adolescence, sexual behaviour becomes more private and young people begin to explore their sexual identity. You might notice them:

experimenting sexually and consensually with the same age group (SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020)

looking for information about sex and sexual relationships (Stop It Now, 2007; 2020)

masturbating in private (SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020).

The age of consent to engage in sexual activity in the UK is 16-years-old. However, the law is there to protect children from abuse or exploitation. It is not designed to unnecessary criminalise children.

It is uncommon for adolescents to masturbate in public, or display sexual attraction towards a much younger child (Stop It Now, 2007; 2020).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Find out how to identify if a child is displaying problematic or harmful sexual behaviour
Schools, colleges and other education settings play an important role in teaching children and young people about healthy relationships.
> Find out more about how your school or organisation can prevent HSB and peer-on-peer sexual abuse

References and resources

References and resources

References

Government of Canada (2012) When children act out sexually: a guide for parents and teachers. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

Healthy Children (2019) Sexual behaviours in young children: what's normal, what's not?. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) (2009) Sexual development and behaviour in children: information for parents and caregivers (PDF). [Los Angeles]: NCTSN.

National Sexual Violence Resource Centre (2013) An overview of healthy childhood sexual development (PDF). [Alabama] National Children's Advocacy Center.

South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault & Family Violence (SECASA) (2017) Age appropriate sexual behaviours in children and young people: information for carers, professionals and the general public (PDF). East Bentleigh: SECASA.

Stop It Now (2007) Do children sexually abuse other children? Preventing sexual abuse among children and youth (PDF). Massachusetts: Stop It Now.

Stop It Now (2020) Tip sheet: age-appropriate sexual behaviour. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

Virtual Lab School (2021) Understanding normative sexual development & behaviour. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

Resources

Promoting healthy relationships

Provides tips on how you can promote healthy relationships to children of different ages or children who have special educational needs or disabilities. Aimed at the education sector but is also helpful for other sectors.
> Access our tips and guidance
Relationships and sex education (RSE) resources

We've put together a range of resources you can use to teach young people about relationships, health and sex education. Includes resources for children with special educational needs and disabilities.
> View the resources
Harmful sexual behaviour

Provides information on recognising, responding and preventing harmful sexual behaviour in children and young people.
> Learn more about harmful sexual behaviour
Recognising and responding to abuse

Outlines best practice for recognising and responding to abuse or concerns. Includes information about consent, reporting concerns, whistleblowing, mandatory reporting and more.
> Find out more
Podcast episodes

Listen to our short three-part series on responding to harmful sexual behaviour in schools, assessing sexualised behaviour and preventing harmful sexual behaviour.
> See all episodes
Training

We've produced two elearning courses for primary and secondary schools so you can develop your understanding of how to recognise and respond to concerns about harmful sexual behaviour.
> See the courses
Support for parents and carers

Many parents and carers may feel unsure about how to talk to their child or children about sex, sexuality and relationships. You can find advice to share with parents and carers on the NSPCC website.
> Read and share our advice for parents and carers
Support for children and young people

If a child or young person needs confidential help and advice direct them to Childline. Calls to 0800 1111 are free and children can also contact Childline online.

Childline provides information and advice for young people about sex and relationships.

You can also order Childline posters and wallet cards.

Introduction

It's important that everyone who works with children and young people has a good understanding of how children develop sexually. This can help you recognise which sexual behaviours are developmentally typical and identify if a child is displaying behaviour that is problematic or harmful.

We've put together some information about the stages of typical sexual development and behaviour for different age groups. We've included examples of behaviour that is common and uncommon, and information about what to do if you are worried that a child is displaying problematic or harmful sexual behaviour.

Stages of child sexual development

All children go through phases of sexual development. Just like every other part of growing up, some children mature sooner or later than others. For example, some children may have developmental delays whilst others may reach puberty early.

In general, typical sexual behaviour should be:

playful and curious, not aggressive or angry (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013)

displayed towards children of a similar age, stage of development and physical size, who know each other well (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), 2009)

voluntary and consensual (NCTSN, 2009).

Typical sexual behaviour should not cause physical or emotional harm to anybody involved (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013).

The tabs to the left contain some examples of typical sexual behaviour for different ages.

Healthy and unhealthy relationships

Learn how to recognise the signs that a young person is in an unhealthy relationship and what action you can take to help them.

Under 5-years-old

Under 5-years-old

At this stage, it's common to notice natural exploratory behaviour emerging when children feel safe and comfortable. This includes:

having no inhibitions about nudity (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

touching their own private parts (NCTSN, 2009; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault & Family Violence (SECASA), 2017; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

showing curiosity about other people's private parts or naked bodies (Healthy Children, 2019; NCTSN, 2009; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2020; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

talking about bodily functions, using words like 'poo' and 'wee' (NCTSN, 2009, Virtual Lab School, 2021)

consensually role playing with their peers, exploring different relationships or roles such as 'playing house', 'playing mummies and daddies' or 'playing doctor' (Government of Canada, 2012; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; Virtual Lab School, 2021).

Very young children can have erections, beginning from birth (Virtual Lab School, 2021).

It is uncommon for younger children to discuss specific sexual acts, use explicit sexual language or have adult-like sexual contact with other people (Stop It Now, 2007).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Find out how to recognise and respond if a child is displaying problematic or harmful sexual behaviour

5- to 9-year-olds

5- to 9-year-olds

As children get a little older, it's common to see them displaying behaviour like:

becoming more modest and asking for privacy (Government of Canada, 2012; SECASA, 2017; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

asking questions about sex and relationships, such as what sex is, where babies come from and same-sex relationships (Government of Canada, 2012; NCTSN, 2009; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

consensually exploring relationships with peers, for example mimicking adult relationships by holding hands with a 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend' or giving them a kiss on the cheek (NCTSN, 2009; SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007).

As children become more aware of social norms and 'rules' around sexualised behaviour, it's common for them to test boundaries. This might include using 'naughty' words they've heard from other people (NCTSN, 2009).

It's uncommon for children aged 5-8 to have adult-like sexual interactions, discuss specific sexual acts or self-stimulate in public (Stop It Now, 2007).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Learn more about problematic or harmful sexual behaviour and what to do if a child is displaying it

9- to 13-year-olds

9- to 13-year-olds

During these ages, children begin to get more curious about sex and relationships. They may start to be attracted to other people. Examples of typical sexual behaviour during this stage are:

having or wanting to have a romantic relationship with peers (of the same or different gender) (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

using sexual language, making jokes about sex or discussing sexual acts with peers (SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

wanting more privacy (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; NCTSN, 2009; SECASA, 2017; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

looking for information about sex in books, online or in the media (this might lead to accidentally finding sexual pictures or videos) (Government of Canada, 2012; National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; NCTSN, 2009; Stop It Now, 2007; Virtual Lab School, 2021)

masturbating in private (National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, 2013; NCTSN, 2009; SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020; Virtual Lab School, 2021).

It's uncommon for children in this age group to display sexual behaviour in a public place, or regularly display adult-like sexual behaviour such as having oral or genital contact or intercourse (Stop It Now, 2007; 2020).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Discover how to identify problematic or harmful sexual behaviour and what you should do in response

13- to 17-year-olds

13- to 17-year-olds

During adolescence, sexual behaviour becomes more private and young people begin to explore their sexual identity. You might notice them:

experimenting sexually and consensually with the same age group (SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020)

looking for information about sex and sexual relationships (Stop It Now, 2007; 2020)

masturbating in private (SECASA, 2017; Stop It Now, 2007; Stop It Now, 2020).

The age of consent to engage in sexual activity in the UK is 16-years-old. However, the law is there to protect children from abuse or exploitation. It is not designed to unnecessary criminalise children.

It is uncommon for adolescents to masturbate in public, or display sexual attraction towards a much younger child (Stop It Now, 2007; 2020).

If you're worried about a child's sexual behaviour, you should act as soon as possible.
> Find out how to identify if a child is displaying problematic or harmful sexual behaviour
Schools, colleges and other education settings play an important role in teaching children and young people about healthy relationships.
> Find out more about how your school or organisation can prevent HSB and peer-on-peer sexual abuse

References and resources

References and resources

References

Government of Canada (2012) When children act out sexually: a guide for parents and teachers. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

Healthy Children (2019) Sexual behaviours in young children: what's normal, what's not?. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) (2009) Sexual development and behaviour in children: information for parents and caregivers (PDF). [Los Angeles]: NCTSN.

National Sexual Violence Resource Centre (2013) An overview of healthy childhood sexual development (PDF). [Alabama] National Children's Advocacy Center.

South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault & Family Violence (SECASA) (2017) Age appropriate sexual behaviours in children and young people: information for carers, professionals and the general public (PDF). East Bentleigh: SECASA.

Stop It Now (2007) Do children sexually abuse other children? Preventing sexual abuse among children and youth (PDF). Massachusetts: Stop It Now.

Stop It Now (2020) Tip sheet: age-appropriate sexual behaviour. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

Virtual Lab School (2021) Understanding normative sexual development & behaviour. [Accessed 09/06/2021].

Resources

Promoting healthy relationships

Provides tips on how you can promote healthy relationships to children of different ages or children who have special educational needs or disabilities. Aimed at the education sector but is also helpful for other sectors.
> Access our tips and guidance
Relationships and sex education (RSE) resources

We've put together a range of resources you can use to teach young people about relationships, health and sex education. Includes resources for children with special educational needs and disabilities.
> View the resources
Harmful sexual behaviour

Provides information on recognising, responding and preventing harmful sexual behaviour in children and young people.
> Learn more about harmful sexual behaviour
Recognising and responding to abuse

Outlines best practice for recognising and responding to abuse or concerns. Includes information about consent, reporting concerns, whistleblowing, mandatory reporting and more.
> Find out more
Podcast episodes

Listen to our short three-part series on responding to harmful sexual behaviour in schools, assessing sexualised behaviour and preventing harmful sexual behaviour.
> See all episodes
Training

We've produced two elearning courses for primary and secondary schools so you can develop your understanding of how to recognise and respond to concerns about harmful sexual behaviour.
> See the courses
Support for parents and carers

Many parents and carers may feel unsure about how to talk to their child or children about sex, sexuality and relationships. You can find advice to share with parents and carers on the NSPCC website.
> Read and share our advice for parents and carers
Support for children and young people

If a child or young person needs confidential help and advice direct them to Childline. Calls to 0800 1111 are free and children can also contact Childline online.

Childline provides information and advice for young people about sex and relationships.

You can also order Childline posters and wallet cards.

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Sexual development and behaviour in children | NSPCC Learning

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Find out more about developmentally typical sexual development and behaviour in children and how to respond to inappropriate or harmful behaviour.

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Students’ New Surveillance State | University of Virginia School of Law

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Students’ New Surveillance State | University of Virginia School of Law

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For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, American public school students are being watched and tracked online, according to a new law review article by Danielle K. Citron, a University of Virginia School of Law professor who writes and teaches about privacy, free expression and civil rights.

Teachers, administrators and school resource offices have the tools to watch - in real time - students' searches, emails, chats, photos, calendar invites, geolocation and more, according to Citron's research. Private companies are facilitating this continuous and indiscriminate surveillance by scanning, tracking and analyzing the most intimate aspects of young people's lives - their online activities.

Her article, " Under Their Eye: The Surveilled Student," which is forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review, provides an analysis of the costs and benefits of this surveillance, identifies the underlying legal issues and provides recommended solutions. Citron, a recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant," is the Jefferson Scholars Foundation Schenck Distinguished Professor in Law and the Caddell and Chapman Professor of Law at UVA. Among a bevy of other thought-leadership positions, Citron is the co-director of the Law School's LawTech Center (along with Professor Elizabeth A. Rowe) and the vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit devoted to fighting for civil rights and liberties in the digital age.

How did the idea for this article come together?

For my first and second books, about cyberstalking and intimate privacy, I focused on the different ways cyber abuse impacts adults, although I did allude to children. I knew that I wanted to tackle the question about children's safety and privacy as a separate line of inquiry because the cost-benefit analysis and our understanding of their intimate privacy would be different. I wrote this piece as the first part of a larger book project that I'm co-authoring with Hany Farid, a computer scientist and distinguished policy wonk who's an expert on children's online safety and the father of PhotoDNA. Hany is why we have technical tools to prevent the reposting of child sexual exploitation material. We want to write a book together about children's internet safety and privacy, and I want to begin laying the legal foundation for our project.

This article will be part of a series of articles cultivating an understanding of student and youth intimate privacy as a subpart of intimate privacy. My most immediate follow-up to this article is a co-authored piece with Professor Ari Waldman concerning youth intimate privacy - how law tends to give parents control over their children's privacy and how some parents have interests that diverge from children's and undermine their children's well-being with access to their most intimate thoughts, searches and lives. This is especially true for children who are exploring their gender identity and sexual orientation. Scholars who write about gender and transgender identity say that when one's gender identity is revealed without their permission at an early age - when they're outed - it can shatter who they are at their core.

Why are students a distinct issue?

Young people need intimate privacy when they're in the process of forming their identity, which is their full-time job. Every day, young people are searching, chatting, texting, emailing, browsing, reading, and sharing on their laptops. They are using school-provided laptops to research a paper, search for information about reproductive health and research information about their sexual identity. Their thinking and innermost thoughts are expressed and recorded in their online activities. Digital technologies can be indispensable to students' self-development. Online tools can enable self-exploration, enhance the sense of human dignity, and facilitate close relationships. They can, yes, but those wonderful possibilities are not guaranteed. For students, all of those possibilities are in jeopardy.

Students are now under continuous surveillance by public schools and companies in ways that adults would reject. In 2013, U.S. adults made clear that they don't want even a small semblance of this, when they rejected the continuous and indiscriminate monitoring of telephone data that was then provided to government.

So why do now we have children's internet activity on school-provided laptops being scanned, analyzed, and reported to public schools and school resource officers?

Public school districts think federal law requires them to monitor their students, which is a misunderstanding of the federal Children's Internet Protection Act. CIPA was passed in 2000, when students had access to school computers only when they were physically at school, whether in computer labs or classrooms. The idea was that we didn't want students to be in the computer room looking at porn, so schools had to block porn to receive a federal discount for internet access. That's literally what Congress was thinking about. But schools are effectively saying, "Because we have to block porn, it requires us to see, block and, crucially, monitor everything students do with laptops," even though students use these laptops at home, on weekends, and during the summer and holidays. So, students are being monitored by schools every second of every day. This is happening even though CIPA has a clear disclaimer that continuous tracking of students online is not required.

Schools ignore that disclaimer in the name of protecting students from self-harm, bullying and threats. They are not just blocking pornography and other visual obscenity, as the law requires, but they are spending public funds on contracts with private companies that scan and analyze students' online activities. Those private companies rely on software to alert them about concerning material; their content moderators - who are not well-trained - have seconds to review the flagged material, which they then forward to school administrators and other officials. Those alerts usually are flagged after school hours and on weekends, so law enforcement officers are the ones who are contacted.

What has been Congress' reaction to this?

The Federal Communications Commission, which has enforcement power over these issues, has been silent on this activity, even though advocates have brought the issue to their attention. Given the FCC's inaction, schools continue to get federal discounts on internet access and to proceed with the over-surveillance of children. Senators Warren, Blumenthal and Markey spearheaded a congressional inquiry in 2021 into the private-public surveillance of students, and they made clear in their report that this is far beyond what federal law requires and they're worried, as I am, that the surveillance chills students' free expression and worse endangers students, especially nonwhite students who end up facing discipline for minor infractions. They were very clear that this pervasive student surveillance was bad for students, bad for their privacy, not great for safety and unclear as to efficacy.

Where is the misunderstanding?

The federal law at issue explicitly says "Nothing in this title [...] shall be construed to require the tracking of Internet use by any identifiable minor or adult user." It explicitly says so in the law! So, it is this odd misinterpretation, to read one part of the statute and ignore the other.

Why would schools have incentive to go further than just blocking pornography and other visual obscenity, as the law requires? Why are they using this law to monitor for safety threats?

School administrators say that the monitoring makes teachers feel safer and better informed to help prevent student self-harm, suicide and threats. I believe them. School administrators and teachers are genuinely concerned about the safety and well-being of their students. But I think schools have to look at the surveillance in a clear-eyed manner. They need to work on understanding the risks to privacy and whether these surveillance tools are effective at all, or instead if they are making students less safe. They need to consider how they can best balance addressing safety concerns while protecting privacy. This article is just a first step to say, "Hey, we don't even know if these tools work, because they don't let us inside the systems to do the efficacy analysis."

Why aren't we allowed inside their black box, to see what they're collecting, whether it's effective and what they plan to do with the data?

These are private companies being granted access to all student data and then shielded from liability because they're acting on behalf of government, which is frankly bonkers. Because they're private entities, they don't have to respond to records requests, as government agencies do.These companies are getting quite a bit of private funding because investors think they're going to make money when they get bought or go public. These companies may be bought by Google or Amazon or Microsoft. We should worry about that - the end goal of the dominant tech companies. My concern grows out conversations with chief privacy officers who have said in public that the goal is to own all personal data and provide all the services of our lives, including health care. I'm not saying anything that's confidential; these goals are part of the public record, so to speak.

So this is the trade-off for school safety?

This is big business, and the biggest losers are students. I'd love the promise of safety to be fulfilled. Less bullying, less sextortion and child pornography, all the ways we could protect children at school. Right now, privacy and safety are viewed as incompatible. But it's not a zero-sum game - we can protect students' intimate privacy and endeavor to protect their safety. But right now, we're not doing this meaningful calculus at all and right now, I think students are less safe. Children are more often being disciplined for minor infractions like cursing than for [true] threats. This is often left to the discretion of school resource officers, and we find that Black students are disciplined more often in these cases. Kristin Henning at Georgetown Law wrote a brilliant book about the policing of students by school resource officers and how it brings all the recurring pathologies of the criminal justice system into the schools.

What other literature and data did you rely on?

I'm building on the work of intrepid journalists, congressional findings by Senators Warren and Markey, and scholarly research - that work gives us some important insight to what is happening. Legal scholars have been looking at the implications for school surveillance on the Fourth Amendment as well.

I've worked with the Center for Democracy and Technology for years, and they have done amazing qualitative and quantitative research on the chilling effects and the pervasiveness of these surveilled laptops. Something like 89% of teachers reported that their students' laptops are being monitored by companies like Bark and Gaggle. (There are five or so dominant student surveillance companies). And then CDT did qualitative and quantitative studies about how the surveillance impacts kids, and they interviewed parents and students.

What were their findings?

They have six main findings and five recommendations for reform. They offer a ton of data and anecdotes about how this monitoring technology has serious and harmful impacts on K-12 students, including students no longer trusting their teachers to protect their interests.

What impact do you hope the article will have?

Through my work with the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, I'm in touch with lawmakers and their staff. Usually people contact us - Capitol Hill staffers, state lawmakers or advocacy groups that I've worked with. For example, I have a new piece coming out about how to fix Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act with six very concrete proposals that should be law. Rep. Jake Auchincloss read the paper and spent an hour on the phone with me and his staffer Joe Valente. After working closely together, we are working on a draft bill based on my proposal. Every time I write, I try to articulate the theory behind my concepts like intimate privacy and pair those concepts with concrete proposals rooted in reality.

A modest reform would be reworking CIPA's monitoring provision so schools understand they are not required to track students online to obtain federal funding. But they should go further and regulate monitoring so that schools can qualify for the discount only if their surveillance technologies are independently shown to be effective and to minimize harm to privacy, expression and equality. And the details of the contracting process and the terms of contracts should be out in the open.

If these are public school districts, what about changing policy at the local level?

I'm not giving up on city and state lawmakers. In fact, most of my success in the work that we've done at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative has been with state lawmakers. When we proposed criminalizing the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images, we worked with members of Congress who introduced a bill that has been reintroduced four times; it is now called the SHIELD Act. Thanks to the intrepid work of CCRI's president, Dr. Mary Anne Franks, we're still supporting efforts to get that federal bill passed into law. By contrast, in the decade that we've been working on these issues, we now have 48 states, D.C. and Guam that have criminalized the practice. When we started, it was three. As Professor Richard Schragger has illuminated in his scholarship, localities are important laboratories of democracy. I am game to work with local school boards and local government on these issues.

What are parents' attitudes toward this?

Some are not fully informed of what's going on and how it's not actually making students safer. And then there are parents who do not like this at all. But schools are the deciders and they want students to use school-provided laptops to do their work, while protecting their in-school networks from viruses and other malware. The question is whether those laptops should be equipped with monitoring software in the way that such monitoring is currently conceived. That is what I am interrogating.

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Professor and privacy expert Danielle K. Citron of the University of Virginia School of Law calls for reforming the "permanent surveillance state" imposed on American public school students.

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Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its tech-heavy schools - The Washington Post

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Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its tech-heavy schools - The Washington Post

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‘I want it to hit people in the gut’: Chris Ofili on his epic, three-wall Grenfell fresco | Chris Ofili | The Guardian

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‘I want it to hit people in the gut’: Chris Ofili on his epic, three-wall Grenfell fresco | Chris Ofili | The Guardian

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n May 2017 Chris Ofili was at a gathering on the Lido in Venice, following the opening of an exhibition, when he was told a young artist wanted to meet him. Ofili, 54, cuts a lean, muscular figure, but with more salt than pepper in his hair, he is feeling his years professionally. "When you get to this age you're a little bit disconnected from the younger group," he says. "And I thought, 'That's really nice. Somebody would actually formally like to meet me.'"

In the near distance, he saw 24-year-old Khadija Saye, whose work was being exhibited at the Biennale with other emerging artists as part of the Diaspora Pavilion. "She had this really radiant presence," recalls Ofili. "There was an undeniably genuine, honest presence about her. And I said yeah, of course I want to meet her. We did a brief selfie and maybe exchanged a few words. But it was enough to realise, 'That's a good person there and I hope she makes really good art, because that combination can be quite special.'"

On the brink of a breakthrough ... Andichurai, from the series In This Space We Breathe by Khadija Saye. Photograph: © 2017 Estate of Khadija Saye, All Rights Reserved. Image courtesy of the Estate of Khadija Saye

Saye was, in fact, on the brink of a breakthrough with a haunting photographic series called Dwelling: In This Space We Breathe. "It turns out she made quite extraordinary, mystical, alchemic self-portraits and works fusing her history and the history of photography," says Ofili. "This work that reached into the past but also went into the future."

Just over a month later Saye was dead. She lived with her mother, Mary Mendy, on the 20th floor of the inflammable tomb and now charred monument to corporate disgrace, otherwise known as Grenfell Tower, where 72 people died in a fire. Saye had no phone to call for help - the police had taken it during a wrongful arrest - so she took to Facebook to ask for prayers and advice as she struggled to escape through the thick smoke.

A couple of days later, Ofili was back in his studio in Trinidad when he heard Saye had passed away. "At that point the fire was still burning," he says. "I remember thinking, 'What?' I didn't really understand what you're supposed to do with the loss of somebody that young who had such huge potential."

Today, in a piece by Ofili called Requiem, an image of Saye hovers high on the middle wall of Tate Britain's northern staircase. Emerging from a cluster of yellow and orange, encircled by the souls of the perished, she holds to her ear an andichurai, a Gambian incense pot and treasured possession of her mother. It is a depiction based on one of Saye's own photographs, currently exhibited at Tate Modern, also to be shown alongside Requiem.

'Beyond words' ... Chris Ofili's Requiem, installed on the walls of Tate Britain's north staircase. Photograph: Thierry Bal/© Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist

Entering the staircase from the top, passing through opaque doors, one's immediate impression is of riotous reverence. Just beneath the apex, Saye appears as though from a stained glass window in a passageway dominated by arresting purples and blues. To the left, a prophet or witness bows, his dark robes aglow in the light of the flaming building he is presenting. Tears fall from his face into an ocean of despair from which souls are trying to escape.

I was conscious that whenever I passed Grenfell, I looked away. But this luxury has expired

To the right, a flute-playing, satyr-like figure rests beneath the lilac shade of a Ceanothus Concha (the same tree that sits in a garden dedicated to Saye in east London where she once worked). It lures the souls towards it with its melody as blossoms float across the canvas. The effect reminded me of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where a stained glass window bearing the image of a black Christ - funded and created as a gift from the people of Wales after Klansmen bombed the church and killed four little girls after Sunday school in 1963 - is visible from the pulpit. If approaching the work from the bottom of the staircase, you ascend, as though underwater, through the calmer blues of the tear-soaked stream in which the souls swim, to become enveloped in more vivid colour and clearer narrative.

Ocean of despair ... a detail of Requiem. Photograph: Thierry Bal/© Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist

Requiem stands on its own, but is nonetheless pulled together by threads from Ofili's significant body of work. There's the witness, who also features prominently in Poolside Magic; his tears, echoing No Woman No Cry; the satyr, a constant feature of The Seven Deadly Sins. When the Tate originally offered Ofili the space for a new commission, which will stand for at least 10 years, he was sceptical. "The space felt awkward," he says. "It felt dated. It felt like the last kind of place I would want to make a piece of art: a thoroughfare. It didn't feel like it had any central focus."

Thinking back to similar opportunities he's had, particularly at Tate, he reflected on No Woman No Cry, a tribute to the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, whose image appears in each tear; and more recently Blue Devils, which addressed stop and search. "I thought OK, stay in that vein. Try and think of something that would address the public and the hundreds of thousands of people coming through here."

Focus ... Saye appears as if from a stained glass window Photograph: Thierry Bal/© Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist.

Quite what that thing would be eluded him for some time. It wasn't until he was in a car heading into central London from Heathrow, following another Venice trip, that it dawned on him that every time he passed Grenfell he looked away. "This time I was really conscious that I was looking away. So I looked at it again and started having these horrible thoughts about Khadija being in that building. And that's when I thought, 'Right, I really have to try and address Grenfell because this luxury of looking away, and packing away those thoughts, has expired. But I knew it was a very vulnerable and tender subject, where you could do more damage than good. And I felt that if I was going to address it, I was going to have to understand it."

He delved into the literature and testimony that emerged from the tragedy, but ultimately came back to that evening in Venice. "I thought my entry could be through the one person that I think I knew in the building who lost a life. And if I went in that way, I could keep it personal and not be too broad."

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He then set about his artistic research, visiting churches and chapels in Padua, studying the work of 13th-century painter and architect Giotto di Bondone. Focusing on frescoes, he felt a particular responsibility because the work would be up on a wall for at least a decade. "It's important at times to use skill and platform to say something that's beyond words, really. I think this is beyond words. You can't talk for 10 years. But somebody can look at something and have their own personal responses in 10 years' time."

The space was altered in a range of ways to accommodate his vision, which in turn used the space quite differently to the painting by David Tremlett that preceded it.

'We have to ask ourselves how this was allowed to happen' ... Ofili. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Raised in Manchester to Nigerian parents, Ofili has lived primarily in Trinidad since 2005, but zigzagged across "the black Atlantic", spending much of his time in London and New York. Referring to the diasporic connections made through colonialism and slavery, he says: "No matter what their plan was when they went over to conquer, there's another potential of how we can stay connected and use and exchange ideas. I'm determined to keep that callaloo mixture authentically mine. Not a generalised version. This is actually my dish. This is the way I make it. We work with what we've got."

When I interviewed him 13 years ago at his studio in the hills overlooking Port of Spain, he explained why he avoided polemic in his art. "A lot of black art that came before was set up to critique the system. I thought that was boring. Basically, you would have to be right all the time. And I was not interested in being right all the time. I wanted to be sincere and outrageous and friendly and rude and experimental and conventional. I just wanted to try to be who I am."

This informed his approach to Requiem. "I could get so much wrong if I was relying only on facts. But if I could stay in an emotional place, then there's no right and wrong, it's just connection to self, and I knew I was equipped in my emotional response. Because that's a lot to work with. I want this to hit people in the gut. The only way to do that is to say, 'Wake up, wake up!'" He clicks his fingers as though to stir someone from their slumber.

This preventable fire signalled the dominance in British life, and death, of the four horsemen of late-stage capitalism: inequality, austerity, deregulation and privatisation. Six years later, with the official inquiry still in progress and nobody yet held accountable, a body of artistic work is building in response. In the last five months alone there have been Steve McQueen's film and Gillian Slovo's play at the National Theatre, both titled Grenfell. What was it about tragedy, I ask Ofili, that has made it such a touchstone? "It was the direct by-product of a system," he says. "And we have to ask ourselves 'What set things up to allow these things to happen? Because human beings did this: there was no AI involved."

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'I want it to hit people in the gut': Chris Ofili on his epic, three-wall Grenfell fresco

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The artist has finally chosen to address the tragedy - with Requiem, a vast work depicting a flaming building, fleeing souls and an ocean of tears. He explains why he placed an artist who died at its centre

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hat do you get when you combine artificial intelligence with human stupidity? There are, unfortunately, numerous responses to that question. But in this particular case the answer can be found in Iowa's Mason City Community School District, where school administrators are using ChatGPT to help them ban books.

Ahead of the new school year, school staff have been busy trying to comply with a new state law, Senate File 496, the Parental Rights and Transparency Act, requiring every book in Iowa public school libraries to be "age appropriate" and devoid of "descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act". Of course, nobody wants hardcore porn in school libraries, but this sweeping bill, which also restricts education about gender identity and sexual orientation, isn't trying to prevent that nonexistent problem: it's about indoctrination. Republicans don't want kids learning anything that goes against their narrow worldview so, over the past couple of years, they've gone on a censorship orgy, trying to ban everything from gender studies to psychology to African American studies.

A hallmark of Republican legislation is its ambiguity. The party can't explicitly decree "we want to ban everything we don't like", because that would be blatantly unconstitutional. So instead, it couches its laws in vague language like that contained in this book-banning law. There is very little guidance in the legislation as to what constitutes a description of a sex act. (Would "the two elephants mated" count, for example?) The only real pointer given is that sex in religious texts like the Bible is absolutely fine and exempt from the law. That ambiguity gives them plausible deniability: we're not banning books, we're protecting children! It also tends to make people over-comply for fear of violating the law. One state senator told the Iowa Capital Dispatch that she knew a teacher who had removed every book from her classroom to make sure she was in compliance with the new law. Others have resorted to using AI to help them navigate the legislation.

"It is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements," Bridgette Exman, the assistant superintendent of Mason City School District, said in a statement quoted by Iowa newspaper the Gazette. "Therefore, we are using what we believe is a defensible process to identify books that should be removed from collections."

How many books are we talking about? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands? Nope. The answer to this question is the same as the answer to life, the universe, and everything: 42. The district had compiled a list of 42 titles from banned book lists across the US which needed review. Nobody, let alone an educator, could possibly read 42 books! Hence the need for technology.

So how does ChatGPT, a generative AI tool that is incapable of critical thought and whose processes, training method and underlying training datasets are worryingly opaque, figure out which books are too lewd for the eyes of young Iowans? Nobody knows. It's not clear, for example, if ChatGPT has actually "read" the books it has been asked about. All we know is that an administrator typed "does [x] book contain 'a description or depiction of a sex act'?" into ChatGPT, then waited for a reply. ChatGPT, which doesn't have a moral compass, did its job diligently and without protest: it identified 19 books as being too scandalous and they were pulled from the shelves. The banned books included The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Beloved by Toni Morrison and The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

While dystopian, Exman's tactics are smart in their own way. It is, as she put it, a "defensible process". If the powers-that-be later find a contraband book in the library, school administrators can simply blame ChatGPT. What, one wonders, do the people behind ChatGPT make of all this? They keep going on about how AI is going to advance humanity. And yet, as cases like this demonstrate, AI is far more likely to be harnessed to advance the views and agenda of powerful people. Welcome to a future where the computer constantly says no.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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Can't decide which books to ban? Leave it to ChatGPT! | Arwa Mahdawi

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Ordered to remove unsuitable books from their libraries, school administrators in Iowa outsourced the job to AI. So long, The Color Purple, Beloved, The Handmaid's Tale, writes Arwa Mahdawi

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School district uses ChatGPT to help remove library books | Popular Science

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School district uses ChatGPT to help remove library books | Popular Science

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School district uses ChatGPT to help ban library books

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Faced with new legislation, Iowa’s Mason City Community School District asked ChatGPT if certain books ‘contain a description or depiction of a sex act.’

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hould someone off work with Parkinson's be allowed a television? Does a supermarket assistant deserve a hobby? YouGov put a range of expenses to the public to ask at what income level they believed each should be attainable. The results are eye-opening. The survey shows that 76% of Britons believe that everyone should be able to afford their utility bills, while 74% think they should have the means to eat a balanced diet - in effect, meaning that around a quarter of the public believe that people on out-of-work benefits shouldn't be able to have electricity or a full complement of vitamins.

Things get particularly interesting when respondents were asked about "non-essentials". Only 60% think seasonal celebrations should be attainable for all, while 55% think everyone should be able to afford a television.

Just 39% thought everyone - the wealthiest, average earners, those on the minimum wage, and benefits claimants - should be able to pursue a non-active hobby, with only 27% believing those on any income should have the chance to go out socialising.

Such attitudes are grim, but hardly new. As British philosopher Bertrand Russell said in 1932: "The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich." And yet it feels as if minds havehardened in recent years. The cost of living crisis has seen disposable income inequality in Britain rise, with the poorest fifth of the population enduring the biggest fall as they're forced to spend more to cover the basics.Meanwhile, ministers respond to growing hardship by telling the public to just work more hours.

While the workforce has been told to slog harder, there's not only less time to relax - there's no more money to pay for it. The wage demands of low and middle earners have been dismissed as "fuelling inflation" (in fact, that's down to the highest-earning 10% getting more in their pockets). Instead of taxing bloated profits to cool the economy at the top of society, the government's strategy to bring down inflation has been to squeeze the spending ability of the average family. It's no wonder we're cutting back on treats such as holidays and eating out.

Rather than a pushback, there has been a quiet acceptance of meagre recreation - not least for those on low incomes. A decade of anti-benefits rhetoric and squeezes on living standards has fostered the belief that people on social security and low wages deserve a life of penury and boredom. Think of the rightwing press vilifying benefits claimants with widescreen TVs or the politicians insisting families should give up cheese sandwiches if they can't afford the weekly shop.

At a time when benefits and wages in real terms are falling at their fastest rate in decades, the smallest signs of pleasure are taken as proof that those on low incomes are not really struggling. Been to McDonald's lately? Then your wages must be fine. Have a smartphone for job searches? Then universal credit is clearly too high.

This narrative puts the blame squarely on the individual for their lack of resources, as if the reason someone has no cash isn't poverty wages, but their Netflix subscription. It creates a demand for ever more absurd conditions in order for critics to acknowledge hardship; until a mum with multiple sclerosis has to spend her evenings staring at a blank wall eating porridge to deserve disability benefits.

It is the Victorian workhouse mentality repackaged for the iPhone era, in which the poor and sick are expected to endure a certain level of suffering as penance for their failings. In this context, the idea that people in minimum wage jobs should have to go without a TV is not an error of the economy - it is a punishment for the crime of not being productive enough. Or, as Matthew Parris recently put it in the Times, could people on out-of-work sickness benefits not just "soldier on" and keep working?

The result is the promotion of a kind of two-tier existence, where joy, relaxation and fulfilment are seen as the preserve of wealthy people - and life for the lower orders is one of labour and survival. This is class prejudice, of course, but it is also about a general lowering of expectations across the board. In a country where it's now normalised for a home, access to basic utilities and regular meals to be out of reach for many, it's easy to become convinced that hobbies and entertainment are unreasonable requests.Before you know it, celebrating Christmas will be a privilege saved for those in the higher tax bands.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell wrote of the working class: "Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and ... saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing." Ninety years on, the sentiment is as true now as it was then. And yet it points to another problem: there is a section of society who do not think people on benefits or low wages are "ordinary human beings" - that they have the same creativity, dreams and goals as everyone else. It is not simply that art, culture and entertainment are often seen as unimportant, but that they are seen as the domain of people with money. While wealthy people can have lives enriched with theatre, golf and fine foods, the poorest in society are expected to go without even the internet or a takeaway.

It would be easy to say the left should have bigger priorities. When millions of people are struggling to afford food and gas, it can feel frivolous to argue for the right to hobbies or socialising. But all of this speaks to fundamental questions. What does it mean to have a good life? Is a modern economy working if large swathes of the population can't afford occasional leisure? And what does it say about us if we don't want that for each other?

Whether a consultant, cleaner or cancer patient, every human being deserves to curl up with a film or have a night out dancing with friends. After all, life is not just about bread, but roses too. That this can in any way be seen as radical demonstrates not only how low Britain's living standards have sunk, but the worst of our instincts that say some people deserve no better.

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Britons have become so mean that many of us think poor people don't deserve leisure time | Frances Ryan

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This is the Victorian workhouse mentality repackaged for the iPhone era, says Guardian columnist Frances Ryan

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https://twitter.com/lokiscottishrap/status/1672014717630464001?s=20

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Am I living in some kind of fever dream 😫

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Am I living in some kind of fever dream 😫 https://t.co/QyBN9p9duD

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Am I living in some kind of fever dream 😫 pic.twitter.com/QyBN9p9duD
— Darren McGarvey (@lokiscottishrap) June 22, 2023

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Am I living in some kind of fever dream 😫 https://t.co/QyBN9p9duD

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Am I living in some kind of fever dream 😫 https://t.co/QyBN9p9duD

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Am I living in some kind of fever dream 😫

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What kind of ‘isolated incident’ results in a child’s death? I notice the word ‘accident’ has not been used by the media. https://t.co/aSuhb8hZeh
— Gemma Clark 🇪🇺🌱she/her (@Gemma_clark14) June 7, 2023

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Schoolboy Hamdan Aslam died of natural causes - BBC News

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Schoolboy Hamdan Aslam died of natural causes - BBC News

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Schoolboy Hamdan Aslam died of natural causes

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Hamdan Aslam, 14, died in hospital on Tuesday after collapsing at his school in West Lothian.

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Evidence on pornography's influence on harmful sexual behaviour among children | Children's Commissioner for England

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Evidence on pornography's influence on harmful sexual behaviour among children | Children's Commissioner for England

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This paper is the second in a series of reports exploring the impact of pornography on children. As Children's Commissioner, it is my duty to protect children from harm in both the physical and online worlds. As the Online Safety Bill moves through Parliament, I want to use this opportunity to turn the tide on pornography's harms to children. I am clear that children should not be able to access pornography, and my office's work in this space continues to demonstrate the harm it can cause to children and young people.

My first report, published in January 2023, " A lot of it is actually just abuse", set out findings from a survey of over a thousand 16-21-year-olds and focus groups with teenagers. It established that the average age at which children first view pornography is now 13 years old. Substantial proportions of young people surveyed who had seen pornography viewed it at a much younger age than 13 - 27% by age 11 and 10% by the age of 9. Young people spoke about the unbearable pressure to view hardcore pornography even if they do not want to, much of which depicts degrading acts and violence against women. Our survey analysis also demonstrated a significant link between an early age of first exposure to pornography and frequency of exposure in later years. The age of first exposure and frequency of exposure were shown to be closely linked to the likelihood of a young person viewing violent content online. Frequent users of pornography were also more likely to have real-life experience of an aggressive or degrading sex act.

For too long we have brushed the issue of pornography under the carpet as awkward, uncomfortable, or too difficult to solve. It is crucial that we don't shy away from discussing the nature, scale and impacts of online pornography. No child should be able to stumble across pornography online; in a world where pornography is a click away for any child, I am clear that this must change and until then we must grapple with the implications. Sadly, we are hearing from more young people that they are watching pornography and thinking that it is reflective of real life or healthy relationships, which is not the case. This is reflected from what I heard recently from a young person:

"Porn is often the starting point for young people when it comes to sex, how to have sex, and what to expect." - Young woman, 20, first saw pornography aged 10.

From this work it is evident that some children and young people are being negatively impacted by pornography. I have been so concerned by the growing research that shows pornography may influence harmful behaviour. I knew this was an area I needed to explore further. That is why I have used my statutory powers to request data, and for the first time collected case files on child-on child sexual abuse from one police force and from one Sexual Abuse Referral Centre (SARC), where children had been referred because they had been sexually abused by another child. My office has carried out innovative analysis of the text these documents to understand more about the role that pornography might play at this sharpest end of child abuse cases.

It is incredibly concerning that I found references to specific acts of sexual violence commonly seen in pornography in half of the interviews carried out following these cases of sexual abuse. Additional review of some of these cases found children suggesting direct links between pornography exposure and the harmful sexual behaviour exhibited.

This new analysis, together with other evidence in this report, presents a compelling case. This report contributes to the literature on pornography's role in shaping and fuelling violence against women and girls.[i] The risk factors behind harmful sexual behaviour and children abusing other children are complex, with pornography being one possible factor among others. Much of the abuse is taking forms which are depicted in pornography.

This report, once again, makes for difficult reading. It includes accounts of sexual violence and descriptions of aggressive sexual acts found in pornography. It is perhaps the work that I have found hardest to publish since becoming Children's Commissioner. Each of the 502 case files analysed for this report represents terrible trauma wrought on a child, by another child.

This report is focused on the harms that children face from accessing violent pornography, and how that might influence their own harmful sexual behaviour. That is why regulation online is so critical to protect children and young people. I am categorically clear: no child should be able to access or watch pornography. Protecting children from seeing inappropriate material is critical, but it is just one part of the essential and urgent work of protecting children from sexual abuse. It cannot work in isolation and must be combined with broader preventative measures. It must also go hand in hand with making sure that any child who is a victim of this most terrible crime is given the support they need to recover, and access to swift and effective justice. That is why I have committed to further work directly with child victims to understand their experiences, so I can make wider recommendations about what needs to change.

This report is dedicated to the children who have suffered from the effects of online pornography exposure. It is my duty to stand up and protect you, and I hope this report is a step towards doing so.

**

This report is not intended to be read by children, but by researchers and policy makers interested in making children safer. It makes frequent reference to sexual harassment and sexual violence. This includes descriptions of pornographic content, language and discussion of sexual abuse. This content may be difficult to read. However, we think it is important to understand how pornography impacts children, in order that we may better protect all children from harm.

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Evidence on pornography's influence on harmful sexual behaviour among children | Children's Commissioner for England

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This paper is the second in a series of reports exploring the impact of pornography on children. As Children's Commissioner, it is my duty to protect

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Deepening poverty in Scotland – no one left behind? | JRF

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Deepening poverty in Scotland – no one left behind? | JRF

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Deepening poverty in Scotland – no one left behind?

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This briefing studies the shocking increase in very deep poverty in Scotland. The Scottish and UK Government need to reconsider their priorities if they are to argue that no one is left behind. It is possible, and the case for changing course is clear.

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The stupidity of AI | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

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The stupidity of AI | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

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n January 2021, the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI gave a limited release to a piece of software called Dall-E. The software allowed users to enter a simple description of an image they had in their mind and, after a brief pause, the software would produce an almost uncannily good interpretation of their suggestion, worthy of a jobbing illustrator or Adobe-proficient designer - but much faster, and for free. Typing in, for example, "a pig with wings flying over the moon, illustrated by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry" resulted, after a minute or two of processing, in something reminiscent of the patchy but recognisable watercolour brushes of the creator of The Little Prince.

A year or so later, when the software got a wider release, the internet went wild. Social media was flooded with all sorts of bizarre and wondrous creations, an exuberant hodgepodge of fantasies and artistic styles. And a few months later it happened again, this time with language, and a product called ChatGPT, also produced by OpenAI. Ask ChatGPT to produce a summary of the Book of Job in the style of the poet Allen Ginsberg and it would come up with a reasonable attempt in a few seconds. Ask it to render Ginsberg's poem Howl in the form of a management consultant's slide deck presentation and it would do that too. The abilities of these programs to conjure up strange new worlds in words and pictures alike entranced the public, and the desire to have a go oneself produced a growing literature on the ins and outs of making the best use of these tools, and particularly how to structure inputs to get the most interesting outcomes.

The latter skill has become known as "prompt engineering": the technique of framing one's instructions in terms most clearly understood by the system, so it returns the results that most closely match expectations - or perhaps exceed them. Tech commentators were quick to predict that prompt engineering would become a sought-after and well remunerated job description in a "no code" future, where the most powerful way of interacting with intelligent systems would be through the medium of human language. No longer would we need to know how to draw, or how to write computer code: we would simply whisper our desires to the machine and it would do the rest. The limits on AI's creations would be the limits of our own imaginations.

AI art created by Dall-E as a result of inputting 'a pig with wings flying over the moon, painted by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry'. Photograph: Dall-E/Craiyon

Imitators of and advances on Dall-E followed quickly. Dall-E mini (later renamed Craiyon) gave those not invited to OpenAI's private services a chance to play around with a similar, less powerful, but still highly impressive tool. Meanwhile, the independent commercial effort Midjourney and the open-source Stable Diffusion used a different approach to classifying and generating images, to much the same ends. Within a few months, the field had rapidly advanced to the generation of short videos and 3D models, with new tools appearing daily from academic departments and hobbyist programmers, as well as the established giants of social media and now AI: Facebook (aka Meta), Google, Microsoft and others. A new field of research, software and contestation had opened up.

The name Dall-E combines the robot protagonist of Disney's Wall-E with the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. On the one hand, you have the figure of a plucky, autonomous and adorable little machine sweeping up the debris of a collapsed human civilisation, and on the other a man whose most repeated bon mots include, "Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing," and "What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it." Both make admirable namesakes for the broad swathe of tools that have come to be known as AI image generators.

In the past year, this new wave of consumer AI, which includes both image generation and tools such as ChatGPT, has captured the popular imagination. It has also provided a boost to the fortunes of major technology companies who have, despite much effort, failed to convince most of us that either blockchain or virtual reality (" the metaverse ") are the future that any of us want. At least this one feels fun, for five minutes or so; and "AI" still has that sparkly, science-fiction quality, redolent of giant robots and superhuman brains, which provides that little contact high with the genuinely novel. What's going on under the hood, of course, is far from new.

here have been no major breakthroughs in the academic discipline of artificial intelligence for a couple of decades. The underlying technology of neural networks - a method of machine learning based on the way physical brains function - was theorised and even put into practice back in the 1990s. You could use them to generate images then, too, but they were mostly formless abstractions, blobs of colour with little emotional or aesthetic resonance. The first convincing AI chatbots date back even further. In 1964, Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developed a chatbot called Eliza. Eliza was modelled on a "person-centred" psychotherapist: whatever you said, it would mirror back to you. If you said "I feel sad", Eliza would respond with "Why do you feel sad?", and so on. (Weizenbaum actually wanted his project to demonstrate the superficiality of human communication, not to be a blueprint for future products.)

Early AIs didn't know much about the world, and academic departments lacked the computing power to exploit them at scale. The difference today is not intelligence, but data and power. The big tech companies have spent 20 years harvesting vast amounts of data from culture and everyday life, and building vast, energy-hungry data centres filled with ever more powerful computers to churn through it. What were once creaky old neural networks have become super-powered, and the gush of AI we're seeing is the result.

AI image generation relies on the assembly and analysis of millions upon millions of tagged images; that is, images that come with some kind of description of their content already attached. These images and descriptions are then processed through neural networks that learn to associate particular and deeply nuanced qualities of the image - shapes, colours, compositions - with certain words and phrases. These qualities are then layered on top of one another to produce new arrangements of shape, colour and composition, based on the billions of differently weighted associations produced by a simple prompt. But where did all those original images come from?

The datasets released by LAION, a German non-profit, are a good example of the kind of image-text collections used to train large AI models (they provided the basis for both Stable Diffusion and Google's Imagen, among others). For more than a decade, another non-profit web organisation, Common Crawl, has been indexing and storing as much of the public world wide web as it can access, filing away as many as 3bn pages every month. Researchers at LAION took a chunk of the Common Crawl data and pulled out every image with an "alt" tag, a line or so of text meant to be used to describe images on web pages. After some trimming, links to the original images and the text describing them are released in vast collections: LAION-5B, released in March 2022, contains more than five billion text-image pairs. These images are "public" images in the broadest sense: any image ever published on the internet may be gathered up into them, with exactly the kind of strange effects one may expect.

In September 2022, a San Francisco-based digital artist named Lapine was using a tool called Have I Been Trained, which allows artists to see if their work is being used to train AI image generation models. Have I Been Trained was created by the artists Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, whose own work led them to explore the ways in which artists' labour is coopted by AI. When Lapine used it to scan the LAION database, she found an image of her own face. She was able to trace this image back to photographs taken by a doctor when she was undergoing treatment for a rare genetic condition. The photographs were taken as part of her clinical documentation, and she signed documents that restricted their use to her medical file alone. The doctor involved died in 2018. Somehow, these private medical images ended up online, then in Common Crawl's archive and LAION's dataset, and were finally ingested into the neural networks as they learned about the meaning of images, and how to make new ones. For all we know, the mottled pink texture of our Saint-Exupéry-style piggy could have been blended, however subtly, from the raw flesh of a cancer patient.

"It's the digital equivalent of receiving stolen property. Someone stole the image from my deceased doctor's files and it ended up somewhere online, and then it was scraped into this dataset," Lapine told the website Ars Technica. "It's bad enough to have a photo leaked, but now it's part of a product. And this goes for anyone's photos, medical record or not. And the future abuse potential is really high." (According to her Twitter account, Lapine continues to use tools like Dall-E to make her own art.)

The entirety of this kind of publicly available AI, whether it works with images or words, as well as the many data-driven applications like it, is based on this wholesale appropriation of existing culture, the scope of which we can barely comprehend. Public or private, legal or otherwise, most of the text and images scraped up by these systems exist in the nebulous domain of "fair use" (permitted in the US, but questionable if not outright illegal in the EU). Like most of what goes on inside advanced neural networks, it's really impossible to understand how they work from the outside, rare encounters such as Lapine's aside. But we can be certain of this: far from being the magical, novel creations of brilliant machines, the outputs of this kind of AI is entirely dependent on the uncredited and unremunerated work of generations of human artists.

AI image and text generation is pure primitive accumulation: expropriation of labour from the many for the enrichment and advancement of a few Silicon Valley technology companies and their billionaire owners. These companies made their money by inserting themselves into every aspect of everyday life, including the most personal and creative areas of our lives: our secret passions, our private conversations, our likenesses and our dreams. They enclosed our imaginations in much the same manner as landlords and robber barons enclosed once-common lands. They promised that in doing so they would open up new realms of human experience, give us access to all human knowledge, and create new kinds of human connection. Instead, they are selling us back our dreams repackaged as the products of machines, with the only promise being that they'll make even more money advertising on the back of them.

he weirdness of AI image generation exists in the output as well as the input. One user tried typing in nonsense phrases and was confused and somewhat discomforted to discover that Dall-E mini seemed to have a very good idea of what a "Crungus" was: an otherwise unknown phrase that consistently produced images of a snarling, naked, ogre-like figure. Crungus was sufficiently clear within the program's imagination that he could be manipulated easily: other users quickly offered up images of ancient Crungus tapestries, Roman-style Crungus mosaics, oil paintings of Crungus, photos of Crungus hugging various celebrities, and, this being the internet, "sexy" Crungus.

So, who or what is Crungus? Twitter users were quick to describe him as "the first AI cryptid", a creature like Bigfoot who exists, in this case, within the underexplored terrain of the AI's imagination. And this is about as clear an answer as we can get at this point, due to our limited understanding of how the system works. We can't peer inside its decision-making processes because the way these neural networks "think" is inherently inhuman. It is the product of an incredibly complex, mathematical ordering of the world, as opposed to the historical, emotional way in which humans order their thinking. The Crungus is a dream emerging from the AI's model of the world, composited from billions of references that have escaped their origins and coalesced into a mythological figure untethered from human experience. Which is fine, even amazing - but it does make one ask, whose dreams are being drawn upon here? What composite of human culture, what perspective on it, produced this nightmare?

'Twitter users were quick to describe crungus as 'the first AI cryptid', a creature who exists within the underexplored terrain of the AI's imagination.' Photograph: Dall-E/Craiyon

A similar experience occurred to another digital artist experimenting with negative prompts, a technique for generating what the system considers to be the polar opposite of what is described. When the artist entered "Brando::-1", the system returned something that looked a bit like a logo for a video game company called DIGITA PNTICS. That this may, across the multiple dimensions of the system's vision of the world, be the opposite of Marlon Brando seems reasonable enough. But when they checked to see if it went the other way, by typing in " DIGITA PNTICS skyline logo::-1 ", something much stranger happened: all of the images depicted a creepy-looking woman with sunken eyes and reddened cheeks, who the artist christened Loab. Once discovered, Loab seemed unusually and disturbingly persistent. Feeding the image back into the program, combined with ever more divergent text prompts, kept bringing Loab back, in increasingly nightmarish forms, in which blood, gore and violence predominated.

Here's one explanation for Loab, and possibly Crungus: although it's very, very hard to imagine the way the machine's imagination works, it is possible to imagine it having a shape. This shape is never going to be smooth or neatly rounded: rather, it is going to have troughs and peaks, mountains and valleys, areas full of information and areas lacking many features at all. Those areas of high information correspond to networks of associations that the system "knows" a lot about. One can imagine the regions related to human faces, cars and cats, for example, being pretty dense, given the distribution of images one finds on a survey of the whole internet.

It is these regions that an AI image generator will draw on most heavily when creating its pictures. But there are other places, less visited, that come into play when negative prompting - or indeed, nonsense phrases - are deployed. In order to satisfy such queries, the machine must draw on more esoteric, less certain connections, and perhaps even infer from the totality of what it does know what its opposite may be. Here, in the hinterlands, Loab and Crungus are to be found.

That's a satisfying theory, but it does raise certain uncomfortable questions about why Crungus and Loab look like they do; why they tip towards horror and violence, why they hint at nightmares. AI image generators, in their attempt to understand and replicate the entirety of human visual culture, seem to have recreated our darkest fears as well. Perhaps this is just a sign that these systems are very good indeed at aping human consciousness, all the way down to the horror that lurks in the depths of existence: our fears of filth, death and corruption. And if so, we need to acknowledge that these will be persistent components of the machines we build in our own image. There is no escaping such obsessions and dangers, no moderating or engineering away the reality of the human condition. The dirt and disgust of living and dying will stay with us and need addressing, just as the hope, love, joy and discovery will.

This matters, because AI image generators will do what all previous technologies have done, but they will also go further. They will reproduce the biases and prejudices of those who create them, like the webcams that only recognise white faces, or the predictive policing systems that lay siege to low-income neighbourhoods. And they will also up the game: the benchmark of AI performance is shifting from the narrow domain of puzzles and challenges - playing chess or Go, or obeying traffic laws - to the much broader territory of imagination and creativity.

While claims about AI's "creativity" might be overblown - there is no true originality in image generation, only very skilled imitation and pastiche - that doesn't mean it isn't capable of taking over many common "artistic" tasks long considered the preserve of skilled workers, from illustrators and graphic designers to musicians, videographers and, indeed, writers. This is a huge shift. AI is now engaging with the underlying experience of feeling, emotion and mood, and this will allow it to shape and influence the world at ever deeper and more persuasive levels.

hatGPT was introduced in November 2022 by OpenAI, and further shifted our understanding of how AI and human creativity might interact. Structured as a chatbot - a program that mimics human conversation - ChatGPT is capable of a lot more than conversation. When properly entreated, it is capable of writing working computer code, solving mathematical problems and mimicking common writing tasks, from book reviews to academic papers, wedding speeches and legal contracts.

It was immediately obvious how the program could be a boon to those who find, say, writing emails or essays difficult, but also how, as with image generators, it could be used to replace those who make a living from those tasks. Many schools and universities have already implemented policies that ban the use of ChatGPT amid fears that students will use it to write their essays, while the academic journal Nature has had to publish policies explaining why the program cannot be listed as an author of research papers (it can't give consent, and it can't be held accountable). But institutions themselves are not immune from inappropriate uses of the tool: in February, the Peabody College of Education and Human Development, part of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, shocked students when it sent out a letter of condolence and advice following a school shooting in Michigan. While the letter spoke of the value of community, mutual respect and togetherness, a note at the bottom stated that it was written by ChatGPT - which felt both morally wrong and somehow false or uncanny to many. It seems there are many areas of life where the intercession of machines requires some deeper thought.

If it would be inappropriate to replace our communications wholesale with ChatGPT, then one clear trend is for it to become a kind of wise assistant, guiding us through the morass of available knowledge towards the information we seek. Microsoft has been an early mover in this direction, reconfiguring its often disparaged search engine Bing as a ChatGPT-powered chatbot, and massively boosting its popularity by doing so. But despite the online (and journalistic) rush to consult ChatGPT on almost every conceivable problem, its relationship to knowledge itself is somewhat shaky.

Q&A
AI explained: why do chatbots make errors?

Large language models (LLM) do not understand things in a conventional sense - and they are only as good, or as accurate, as the information with which they are provided.

They are essentially machines for matching patterns . Whether the output is "true" is not the point, so long as it matches the pattern.

If you ask a chatbot to write a biography of a moderately famous person, it may get some facts right, but then invent other details that sound like they should fit in biographies of that sort of person.

And it can be wrongfooted: ask GPT3 whether one pound of feathers weighs more than two pounds of steel, it will focus on the fact that the question looks like the classic trick question. It will not notice that the numbers have been changed.

Google's rival to ChatGPT, called Bard, had an embarrassing debut when a video demo of the chatbot showed it giving the wrong answer to a question about the James Webb space telescope.
Read more: Seven top AI acronyms explained

Thank you for your feedback.

One recent personal interaction with ChatGPT went like this. I asked it to suggest some books to read based on a new area of interest: multi-species democracy, the idea of including non-human creatures in political decision-making processes. It's pretty much the most useful application of the tool: "Hey, here's a thing I'm thinking about, can you tell me some more?" And ChatGPT obliged. It gave me a list of several books that explored this novel area of interest in depth, and described in persuasive human language why I should read them. This was brilliant! Except, it turned out that only one of the four books listed actually existed, and several of the concepts ChatGPT thought I should explore further were lifted wholesale from rightwing propaganda: it explained, for example, that the "wise use" movement promoted animal rights, when in fact it is a libertarian, anti-environment concept promoting the expansion of property rights.

Now, this didn't happen because ChatGPT is inherently rightwing. It's because it's inherently stupid. It has read most of the internet, and it knows what human language is supposed to sound like, but it has no relation to reality whatsoever. It is dreaming sentences that sound about right, and listening to it talk is frankly about as interesting as listening to someone's dreams. It is very good at producing what sounds like sense, and best of all at producing cliche and banality, which has composed the majority of its diet, but it remains incapable of relating meaningfully to the world as it actually is. Distrust anyone who pretends that this is an echo, even an approximation, of consciousness. (As this piece was going to publication, OpenAI released a new version of the system that powers ChatGPT, and said it was "less likely to make up facts".)

The belief in this kind of AI as actually knowledgeable or meaningful is actively dangerous. It risks poisoning the well of collective thought, and of our ability to think at all. If, as is being proposed by technology companies, the results of ChatGPT queries will be provided as answers to those seeking knowledge online, and if, as has been proposed by some commentators, ChatGPT is used in the classroom as a teaching aide, then its hallucinations will enter the permanent record, effectively coming between us and more legitimate, testable sources of information, until the line between the two is so blurred as to be invisible. Moreover, there has never been a time when our ability as individuals to research and critically evaluate knowledge on our own behalf has been more necessary, not least because of the damage that technology companies have already done to the ways in which information is disseminated. To place all of our trust in the dreams of badly programmed machines would be to abandon such critical thinking altogether.

AI technologies are bad for the planet too. Training a single AI model - according to research published in 2019 - might emit the equivalent of more than 284 tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is nearly five times as much as the entire lifetime of the average American car, including its manufacture. These emissions are expected to grow by nearly 50% over the next five years, all while the planet continues to heat up, acidifying the oceans, igniting wildfires, throwing up superstorms and driving species to extinction. It's hard to think of anything more utterly stupid than artificial intelligence, as it is practised in the current era.

o, let's take a step back. If these current incarnations of "artificial" "intelligence" are so dreary, what are the alternatives? Can we imagine powerful information sorting and communicating technologies that don't exploit, misuse, mislead and supplant us? Yes, we can - once we step outside the corporate power networks that have come to define the current wave of AI.

In fact, there are already examples of AI being used to benefit specific communities by bypassing the entrenched power of corporations. Indigenous languages are under threat around the world. The UN estimates that one disappears every two weeks, and with that disappearance goes generations of knowledge and experience. This problem, the result of colonialism and racist assimilation policies over centuries, is compounded by the rising dominance of machine-learning language models, which ensure that popular languages increase their power, while lesser-known ones are drained of exposure and expertise.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, a small non-profit radio station called Te Hiku Media, which broadcasts in the Māori language, decided to address this disparity between the representation of different languages in technology. Its massive archive of more than 20 years of broadcasts, representing a vast range of idioms, colloquialisms and unique phrases, many of them no longer spoken by anyone living, was being digitised, but needed to be transcribed to be of use to language researchers and the Māori community. In response, the radio station decided to train its own speech recognition model, so that it would be able to "listen" to its archive and produce transcriptions.

Over the next few years, Te Hiku Media, using open-source technologies as well as systems it developed in house, achieved the almost impossible: a highly accurate speech recognition system for the Māori language, which was built and owned by its own language community. This was more than a software effort. The station contacted every Māori community group it could and asked them to record themselves speaking pre-written statements in order to provide a corpus of annotated speech, a prerequisite for training its model.

There was a cash prize for whoever submitted the most sentences - one activist, Te Mihinga Komene, recorded 4,000 phrases alone - but the organisers found that the greatest motivation for contributors was the shared vision of revitalising the language while keeping it in the community's ownership. Within a few weeks, it created a model that recognised recorded speech with 86% accuracy - more than enough to get it started transcribing its full archive.

Te Hiku Media's achievement cleared a path for other indigenous groups to follow, with similar projects now being undertaken by Mohawk peoples in south-eastern Canada and Native Hawaiians. It also established the principle of data sovereignty around indigenous languages, and by extension, other forms of indigenous knowledge. When international for-profit companies started approaching Māori speakers to help build their own models, Te Hiku Media campaigned against these efforts, arguing, "They suppressed our languages and physically beat it out of our grandparents, and now they want to sell our language back to us as a service."

"Data is the last frontier of colonisation," wrote Keoni Mahelona, a Native Hawaiian and one of the co-founders of Te Hiku Media. All of Te Hiku's work is released under what it named the Kaitiakitanga License, a legal guarantee of guardianship and custodianship that ensures that all the data that went into the language model and other projects remains the property of the community that created it - in this case, the Māori speakers who offered their help - and is theirs to license, or not, as they deem appropriate according to their tikanga (Māori customs and protocols). In this way, the Māori language is revitalised, while resisting and altering the systems of digital colonialism that continue to repeat centuries of oppression.

The lesson of the current wave of "artificial" "intelligence", I feel, is that intelligence is a poor thing when it is imagined by corporations. If your view of the world is one in which profit maximisation is the king of virtues, and all things shall be held to the standard of shareholder value, then of course your artistic, imaginative, aesthetic and emotional expressions will be woefully impoverished. We deserve better from the tools we use, the media we consume and the communities we live within, and we will only get what we deserve when we are capable of participating in them fully. And don't be intimidated by them either - they're really not that complicated. As the science-fiction legend Ursula K Le Guin wrote: "Technology is what we can learn to do."
This article was adapted from the new edition of New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, published by Verso

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n January 2021, the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI gave a limited release to a piece of software called Dall-E. The software allowed users to enter a simple description of an image they had in their mind and, after a brief pause, the software would produce an almost uncannily good interpretation of their suggestion, worthy of a jobbing illustrator or Adobe-proficient designer - but much faster, and for free.

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As if interest-group agitation and the compulsions of capital weren't enough, wokeness can also draw upon reserves of religious strength. In our official ideological space, of course, wokenness and religious fundamentalism appear as incompatible opposites-but are they really?

Nearly a decade ago, the ex-Muslim activist Maryam Namazie was invited by London's Goldsmiths College to lecture on the topic "Apostasy, Blasphemy and Free Expression in the Age of ISIS." Her talk, which focused on Islamic oppression of women, was repeatedly and rudely disrupted by Muslim students. Did Namazie find allies among the college's Feminist Society? No. The feminists sided with the Goldsmiths Islamic Society.

This unexpected solidarity is ultimately grounded in the similarity in form of the two discourses: Wokeness operates as a secularized religious dogma, with all the contradictions this implies. John McWhorter, a black critic of racial wokeness, has enumerated some of them in his recent book, Woke Racism: "You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people / You can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do, you're a racist"; "Show interest in multiculturalism / Do not culturally appropriate."

This is no exaggeration. Anyone who doubts the movement's repressive potential would be well-advised to read " A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell," Vincent Lloyd's account in Compact of his encounter with wokeness at its worst. Lloyd's credentials are impeccable: A black professor and director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University, he is the former director of his university's black-studies program, leads anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and publishes books on anti-black racism and prison abolition, including the classic text Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination.

In the summer of 2022, Lloyd was asked by the Telluride Association to lead a six-week seminar on "Race and the Limits of Law in America" attended by 12 carefully selected 17-year-olds. Four weeks later, two of the students had been voted out by their fellows, and Lloyd himself was soon ostracized and booted. In his last class,

each student read from a prepared statement about how the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence in its content and form, how the black students had been harmed, how I was guilty of countless micro-aggressions, including through my body language, and how students didn't feel safe because I didn't immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the world's ills.

Lloyd compares these trends to "that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one's comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion." His critics relied on a series of dogmas, among them: "There is no hierarchy of oppressions-except for anti-black oppression, which is in a class of its own"; "Trust black women"; "Prison is never the answer"; "All non-black people, and many black people, are guilty of anti-blackness."

But more crucial than content was the conflict of forms between seminar and workshop. Lloyd tried to practice the seminar, an exchange of opinions: One intervention builds on another, as one student notices what another student overlooked, and as the professor guides the discussion toward the most important questions. Seminars usually focus on a particular text, and the participants try to uncover its meaning patiently. By contrast, in the sort of anti-racist workshop that Lloyd critiques, the dogma is clearly established, and the exchange focuses on how and where somebody knowingly or unknowingly violated it. As Alenka Zupančič has noted, the universe of PC workshops is the universe of Berthold Brecht's Jasager: Everybody says yes again and again, and the main argument against those who are not accepted as sincere partisans is "harm." Here is how "harm" works, according to Lloyd:

During our discussion of incarceration, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy. Outside of the seminar, I was told, the black students had to devote a great deal of time to making right the harm that was inflicted on them by hearing prison statistics that were not about blacks. A few days later, the Asian-American student was expelled from the program.

Two things should surprise us here. First, this new cult combines belief in fixed, objectivized dogmas with full trust in how one feels (although only the oppressed blacks have the right to refer to their feeling as the measure of the racist's guilt). A critical confrontation of arguments plays no role, which implies that "open debate" is a racist, white-supremacist notion. "Objective facts are a tool of white supremacy"-yes, so that, as Trumpists used to say, we need to generate alternative facts...

To be clear: There is a kernel of truth in this. Those who are brutally oppressed can't afford the deep reflection and well-elaborated debate needed to bring out the falsity of liberal-humanist ideology. But in this case, as in most other cases, those who appropriate the role of the leaders of the revolt are precisely not the brutalized victims of the racist oppression. The woke are a relatively privileged minority of a minority allowed to participate in a top quality workshop of an elite university.

Second, the mystery resides in the functioning of the big Other (the Telluride administrative authority, in this case): The view gradually imposed on all by the awokened black elite was the view of a minority (initially, even among the black participants). But how and why did these few not only succeed in terrorizing the majority, but even compelling the Telluride Association to take their side and decline to defend Lloyd? Why didn't they at least assume a more nuanced position? How does wokenness, although a minority view, manage to neutralize the larger liberal and leftist space, instilling in it a profound fear about openly opposing the woke?

Psychoanalysis has a clear answer to this paradox: the notion of superego. Superego is a cruel and insatiable agency that bombards me with impossible demands and mocks my failed attempts to meet them. It is the agency in the eyes of which I am all the more guilty, the more I try to suppress my "sinful" strivings. The old cynical Stalinist motto about the accused at the show trials who professed their innocence-"The more they are innocent, the more they deserve to be shot"-is superego at its purest.

And did McWhorter in the quoted passage not reproduce the exact structure of the superego paradox? "You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people / You can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do, you're a racist." In short, you must but you can't, because you shouldn't-the greatest sin is to do what you should strive for... This convoluted structure of an injunction, which is fulfilled when we fail to meet it, accounts for the paradox of superego. As Freud noted, the more we obey the superego commandment, the guiltier we feel. The paradox also holds in the Lacanian reading of the superego as an injunction to enjoy: Enjoyment is an impossible-real, we can't ever fully attain it, and this failure makes us feel guilty.

A series of situations that characterize today's society exemplify perfectly this type of superego pressure, like the endless PC self-examination: Was my glance at the flight attendant too intrusive and sexually offensive? Did I use any words with a possible sexist undertone while addressing her? And so on and so on. The pleasure, thrill even, provided by such self-probing is evident.

And does the same not hold even for the pathological fear some Western liberal leftists have of being counted guilty of Islamophobia? In this telling, any critique of Islam can only be an expression of Western Islamophobia. Salman Rushdie is denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and thus (partially, at least) inviting the fatwa condemning him to death. The result is predictable: The more the Western liberal leftists probe their guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of Islam. This constellation again perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: The more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be....

This superego structure, then, explains how and why, in the Telluride case, the majority and the institutional big Other were both terrorized by the woke minority. All of them were exposed to a superego pressure that is far from an authentic call to justice. The black woke elite is fully aware it won't achieve its declared goal of diminishing black oppression-and it doesn't even want that. What they really want is what they are achieving: a position of moral authority from which they may terrorize all others, without effectively changing social relations of domination.

The situation of those terrorized by the woke elite is more complex, but still clear: They submit to woke demands because most of them really are guilty of participating in social domination, but submitting to woke demands offers them an easy way out-you gladly assume your guilt insofar as this enables you to go on living the way you did. It's the old Protestant logic: "Do whatever you want, just feel guilty for it."

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As if interest-group agitation and the compulsions of capital weren't enough, wokeness can also draw upon reserves of religious strength. In our official ideological space, of course, wokenness and religious fundamentalism appear as incompatible opposites-but are they really?

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BBC News - Cut parents' benefits over school truancy, suggests Michael Gove
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-64803947

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Scottish schools have become places of indoctrination | The Spectator

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Scottish schools have become places of indoctrination | The Spectator

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Nicola Sturgeon may be on her way out - but after 16 years of SNP rule, Scottish schools are still places of indoctrination. This may sound like a hyperbolic thing to say, but that's the only conclusion you can draw when you look at what Scottish educators and the Scottish government are saying themselves.

Take the General Teaching Council for Scotland's Standard for Headship, which sets out the professional framework for what a headteacher, teachers and schools should be all about.

You would expect such a document to be all about imparting knowledge and aspiring to teach every child as much as possible. Instead, it is a horrifying mix of therapeutic new-speak that stresses the need for teachers and headteachers to focus on the matter of social justice.

In the 16-page Standard for Headship report 'social justice' is mentioned seven times. We are informed, for example, that the very culture of Scotland is 'based on social justice', that we now have 'professional values of social justice', and that social justice is about a commitment to 'sustainable policies and practices in relation to protected characteristics.... and intersectionality'.

The terms sustainable or sustainability appear 23 times in the document. This includes what some would see as a Malthusian demand for 'respect for our natural world and its limited resources' as well as a call for 'learning for sustainability', whatever that means.

This new doctrine is highly therapeutic, with the entire document grounded in a need to 'promote health and wellbeing' and 'emotional intelligence', which, as part of our culture of social justice, is 'enabling' and 'empowering' pupils to be 'safe' and 'caring'.

This melding together of social justice moralising and therapeutic language permeates through the entirety of the Scottish education system. Education in Scotland is no longer viewed as a way of passing on vitally important knowledge to children, but rather as a way to ensure that 'diversity' and 'inclusion' are embedded in our children's minds.

As one educational expert told me, if student teachers, 'don't subscribe to the particular interpretation of "social justice" that is currently in vogue, then they won't achieve registration for the General Teaching Council.'

Elsewhere the Scottish government and Education Scotland have worked to ensure that teachers are 'Embedding race equality in school'. This is not simply about treating people equally, quite the reverse in fact. Rather it is about the promotion of Critical Race Theory and the divisive and self-loathing idea of 'white privilege', which is endorsed by Education Scotland.

According to the Scottish government, 'A new package of support materials.... will embed anti-racism and race equality into all aspects of school life'. An Education Scotland policy document says that 'As the child grows, they can see diversity' in all subjects, including, 'mathematics'. Who knows, perhaps future generations in Scotland will be taught that 'their truth' means that two plus two equals colonial oppression.

Perhaps worse of all is the Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools guidance document, a policy that would fit comfortably on the shelves of the most extreme trans activist.

Schools, for example, have to ensure that children, 'demonstrate an understanding of diversity in sexuality and gender identity'. From age 12 children can self-identify and receive support and validation from schools. The school will develop a 'support plan for the transgender young person', thus creating a 'safe space for transgender young people to be themselves and have their identities respected'.

If parents don't support this development it is implied that they are a wellbeing concern. But then, many parents will not even know that this gender fluid ideology is being adopted or that their child is being transitioned with the help of the school as, 'it is best to not share information with parents or carers without considering and respecting the young person's views'.

Some of the above issues may appear to be justified and legitimate, and indeed, if we were talking about university education, being exposed to some of these ideas would be entirely legitimate. It's entirely fair for young adults to be able to debate the merits of Marx versus Malthus or the differences between critical race theory and colour-blind anti-racism. And we should be able to discuss transgender policies too - even though many universities appear to be uncomfortable with any debate on this issue.

But this is school education we are talking about. Many of these ideas are not part of a debate, they are a dogma, a form of cultural engineering, where ideas and outlooks that the majority of the Scottish population oppose are forced onto children.

For those who are directing this process there is a clear attempt to 'change the culture' of Scottish society through the politicisation of the curriculum.

To counteract this a number of colleagues and I have just set up the Scottish Union for Education, a campaign group for parents and teachers to challenge the declining standards in education and the growing indoctrination that is taking place in our schools.

The Scottish Union for Education will challenge these illiberal (and indeed illiterate) developments and aim to create a framework for ordinary parents, grandparents, teachers and communities to make their voices heard. It may appear to be a tough ask, but I am convinced that the majority are on our side and for the sake of our liberal and democratic society, something must be done.

Dr Stuart Waiton is chairperson of the Scottish Union for Education.

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Scottish schools have become places of indoctrination

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Nicola Sturgeon may be on her way out - but after 16 years of SNP rule, Scottish schools are still places of indoctrination. This may sound like a hyperbolic thing to say, but that's the only conclusion you can draw when you look at what Scottish educators and the Scottish government are saying themselves.

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Facial recognition technology: key issues and emerging concerns

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Facial recognition technology: key issues and emerging concerns

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This chapter provides an introductory overview of the recent emergence of facial recognition technologies (FRTs) into everyday societal contexts and settings. As such, the chapter provides valuable social, political and economic context to the legal, ethical and regulatory issues that surround this fast-growing area of technology development. In particular, the chapter considers a range of emerging 'pro-social' applications of FRT that have begun to be introduced across various societal domains - from the application of FRTs in retail, entertainment, leisure and domestic contexts, through to the growing prevalence of 1:1 ID matching for intimate practices such as unlocking smartphones and other personal devices. In contrast to this seemingly steady acceptance and practical take-up of FRT throughout everyday life, the chapter makes a case for continuing to pay renewed attention to the everyday harms of these technologies in situ - most notably the harms associated with misrecognition of people's presumed identities and/or mis-recognition of their inferred characteristics and attributes. All told, the chapter argues that FRT remains a technology that should not be considered as a benign addition to the current digital landscape. This remains technology that requires continued critical attention from scholars working in the social, cultural and legal domains.

Funding

ARC Discovery Program: DP200100189

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Facial recognition technology: key issues and emerging concerns

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This chapter provides an introductory overview of the recent emergence of facial recognition technologies (FRTs) into everyday societal contexts and settings. As such, the chapter provides valuable social, political and economic context to the legal, ethical and regulatory issues that surround this fast-growing area of technology development.

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Lockdowns linked to tenfold rise in child sex imagery - BBC News

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Lockdowns linked to tenfold rise in child sex imagery - BBC News

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Lockdowns linked to tenfold rise in child sex imagery

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A charity says its data highlights how predators took advantage of the worldwide Covid-19 situation.

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University of Dundee Founders Project Final Report | University of Dundee

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University of Dundee Founders Project Final Report | University of Dundee

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Introduction

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and a socio-political climate which has prompted mainstream brands, established institutions and city councils to re-examine tangible and intangible vestiges of colonialism, the University of Dundee has selected a path of transparency and acknowledgement of its own historical past.

This research is part of a wider narrative which calls for a more holistic approach and recontextualisation of Britain's imperial legacy. The UK is a multicultural society that includes descendants of the enslaved and communities from former British colonies. The alienation and underlying discontent felt by these communities is symptomatic of not only structural racism but also stems from a non-inclusive educational curriculum, skewed narratives of enslavers and general lack of significance attached to Britain's imperial legacy and its interwoven nature with modern day systemic inequalities. As a result of mounting pressure and an impetus to counteract the traditional narrative, a number of universities in the UK and several city councils have started investigating their own links with historical slavery.

The University of Dundee has its roots in the University College Dundee, which was founded in 1881 with the donation of £140,000 (RPW: £14,400,000) from Mary Ann Baxter and her cousin, John Boyd Baxter. Her brother, Sir David Baxter's, bequest of £20,000 (RPW: £1,830,000) laid the foundation for what would later become the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. Given the firm of Baxter Brothers & Co immense wealth and linen exports to transatlantic markets, questions were inevitably raised on the issue of the University of Dundee and its links with slavery and the empire. This, coupled with concerns both internally and externally regarding the university's built environment, highlighted the need for research into the provenance of bequests and donations to University of Dundee and affiliate institutions.

It is envisaged that this report, which is the culmination of three months of research, would provide a deeper understanding of the university and by extension the city's links with slavery and the empire. Due to the short time frame of this project, an emphasis was placed on themes relating to Atlantic slavery and the enslaved people. However, exploration of Chinese indentureship and bonded labour in South America was explored due to its linkages with endowments to the university in the late 19th century. This report ultimately aspires to promote the conceptualisation of further works focused on Dundee's role in Britain's imperial past and feeds into numerous other projects spearheaded by the university and heritage sector in Dundee.

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University of Dundee Founders Project Final Report

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In the wake of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and a socio-political climate which has prompted mainstream brands, established institutions and city councils to re-examine tangible and intangible vestiges of colonialism, the University of Dundee has selected a path of transparency and acknowledgement of its own historical past.

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Google change reduces airline emissions calculations - BBC News

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Google change reduces airline emissions calculations - BBC News

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By Justin Rowlatt
Climate editor

The way Google calculates the climate impact of your flights has changed.

Your flights now appear to have much less impact on the environment than they did before.

That's because the world's biggest search engine has taken a key driver of global warming out of its online carbon flight calculator.

"Google has airbrushed a huge chunk of the aviation industry's climate impacts from its pages" says Dr Doug Parr, chief scientist of Greenpeace.

With Google hosting nine out of every 10 online searches, this could have wide repercussions for people's travel decisions.

The company said it made the change following consultations with its "industry partners".

It affects the carbon calculator embedded in the company's "Google Flights" search tool.

If you have ever tried to find a flight on Google, you will have come across Google Flights.

It appears towards the top of search results and allows you to scour the web for flights and fares.

It also offers to calculate the emissions generated by your journey.

Google says this feature is designed "to help you make more sustainable travel choices".

Yet in July, Google decided to exclude all the global warming impacts of flying except CO2.

Some experts say Google's calculations now represent just over half of the real impact on the climate of flights.

"It now significantly understates the global impact of aviation on the climate", says Professor David Lee of Manchester Metropolitan University, the author of the most comprehensive scientific assessment of the contribution of air travel to global warming.

Flying affects the climate in lots of ways in addition to the CO2 produced by burning aviation fuel.

These include the creation of long thin clouds high up in the atmosphere - known as contrails - which trap heat radiated by the Earth, leading to a net warming effect on our planet.

These additional warming impacts mean that although aviation is only responsible for around 2% of global CO2 emissions, the sector is actually responsible for around 3.5% of the warming caused by human activity.

And it is a sector that is only going to get bigger.

Since 2000 emissions have risen by 50%, and the industry is expected to grow by more than 4% every year for the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Google told the BBC it "strongly believes" that non-CO2 effects of aviation should be included in its calculations.

It says it recognises that at the global scale they are a significant additional impact of flying.

But it argues the company's priority is the "accuracy of the individual flight estimates" it provides to its consumers.

It says it is working with academics to better understand how contrails and other warming impacts affect specific flights.

The UK government takes a different approach.

It recommends companies reflect the additional impacts of flying by multiplying the CO2 emissions a flight generates by a factor of 1.9 - effectively doubling their impact.

In its guidance to companies, the UK's Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy warns the value of this multiplier is "subject to significant uncertainty", but says "there is currently no better way of taking these effects into account".

Transport and Environment, a group campaigning to reduce the environmental impact of travel, agrees.

"Current scientific knowledge is sufficient to state that non-CO2 effects represent two thirds of the total climate impact of aviation", it says.

"The industry has hidden this problem for decades... Google should show customers the non-CO2 effects for each flight, as the European Parliament has proposed to do."

Google's changes are likely to have far-reaching effects.

The company's carbon calculation methodology is widely recognised as the industry standard in aviation.

It is used by Skyscanner, one of the biggest online travel agencies in the world with more than 100 million visitors a month.

A number of other major online travel businesses including Booking.com, Expedia, Tripadvisor and Visa have said they intend to use it too.

Google's chief sustainability officer, Kate Brandt, has said the company aims to "build tools that enable travellers and business around the world to prioritise sustainability".

Industry experts say the decision to change its methodology will have the opposite effect.

"I worry the impact of the equivalent of hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2 will be ignored because it has become invisible to customers," says Kit Brennan, a founder of Thrust Carbon, a UK company specialising in helping businesses reduce the effect their travel has on the climate.

He fears consumers could come to believe that non-CO2 impacts on the climate are not relevant in the longer-term, despite the science that contradicts this view.

That would mean up to 1.5% of the warming caused by human activity would be being ignored and the pressure on airlines to reduce their emissions would be cut accordingly.

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Google change reduces airline emissions calculations

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By Justin Rowlatt Climate editor The way Google calculates the climate impact of your flights has changed. Your flights now appear to have much less impact on the environment than they did before. That's because the world's biggest search engine has taken a key driver of global warming out of its online carbon flight calculator.

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YouTube joins Facebook in banning Andrew Tate - BBC News

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YouTube joins Facebook in banning Andrew Tate - BBC News

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YouTube has banned influencer Andrew Tate for violating its policies.

The Google-owned social media site took action following Meta's decision to ban Mr Tate from Facebook and Instagram.

The former kickboxer rose to fame in 2016 when he was removed from TV show Big Brother over a video which appeared to depict him attacking a woman.

He went on to gain notoriety online - with Twitter banning him for saying women should "bear responsibility" for being sexually assaulted.

At the time of his removal from Big Brother, in 2016, Mr Tate said the controversial video had been edited, calling it "a total lie trying to make me look bad".

Google, which owns YouTube, told the BBC: "We terminated channels associated with Andrew Tate for multiple violations of our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service, including our hate speech policy.

"If a channel is terminated, the uploader is unable to use, own or create any other YouTube channels."

Mr Tate's YouTube channels had more than a million followers between them.

'Hateful ideology'

TikTok has also banned an account belonging to Mr Tate as part of an ongoing investigation to remove content that violates its policies.

A TikTok spokesperson told the BBC: "Misogyny is a hateful ideology that is not tolerated on TikTok.

"We've been removing violative videos and accounts for weeks, and we welcome the news that other platforms are also taking action against this individual."

On Instagram, Tate had 4.7 million followers at the time his account was removed. That number had grown rapidly from around one million followers in June.

Meta said it had removed the kickboxing star from its platforms for violating its policies on dangerous organisations and individuals, but did not provide further details.

The BBC has approached Mr Tate for comment.

Analysis

By Marianna Spring, disinformation and social media correspondent

Andrew Tate's videos - promoting misogyny and targeting women - have come to prominence this summer, with many teens commenting on just how much he's appearing on their social media feeds.

His content has raised concerns about the real-world effect it could have, especially on the younger users exposed to it during their school holidays when they have time on their hands.

The focus has been primarily on TikTok, where users say they've been readily served up his videos - sparking a new wave of videos commenting on and criticising Mr Tate's content.

YouTube has also found itself under pressure, since it's where he has racked up millions of views.

I revealed how social media sites promote anti-women hate for BBC Panorama. The investigations exposed how some platforms' algorithms were recommending more and more misogyny to a troll account.

Since then, several sites have made commitments to better protect female users. But, once again, questions are being raised about the role social media sites play in pushing anti-women content.

Mr Tate has drawn criticism online for his comments, particularly from UK advocacy group Hope Not Hate, which welcomed Meta's ban last week.

Joe Mulhall, director of research at the group, said Mr Tate "poses a genuine threat to young men, radicalising them towards extremism misogyny, racism and homophobia".

He added: "We've provided significant evidence to the major social media platforms, including Meta, about his activity and why he must be removed."

'Absolutely a misogynist'

Videos about Mr Tate have proved popular across social media platforms, particularly on TikTok where videos using the #AndrewTate hashtag have been viewed more than 12.7 billion times.

But this number represents not just videos of Tate and his supporters - it also includes videos made by people criticising the influencer.

On YouTube, some of his most popular videos have had millions of views.

In one video, during which he was interviewed by another YouTuber, he said he was "absolutely a misogynist", adding: "I'm a realist and when you're a realist you're sexist. There's no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist."

Later in the same video he called women "intrinsically lazy" and said there was "no such thing as an independent female".

In a different video, Mr Tate said: "If I have responsibility over her, then I must have a degree of authority."

He added: "You can't be responsible for a dog if it doesn't obey you."

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YouTube joins Facebook in banning Andrew Tate

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YouTube becomes the latest platform to remove the social media influencer for violating its policies.

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Social media and moral panics: Assessing the effects of technological change on societal reaction - James P Walsh, 2020

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Social media and moral panics: Assessing the effects of technological change on societal reaction - James P Walsh, 2020

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Axon’s AI Ethics Board resigns over plan to surveil schools with armed drones | TechCrunch

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Axon’s AI Ethics Board resigns over plan to surveil schools with armed drones | TechCrunch

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Nine of 12 members of an ethics board appointed by Axon to advise its technology decisions have resigned, citing the company’s plan to install Taser-equipped drones and pervasive surveillance at schools. “After several years of work, the company has fundamentally failed to embrace the values that we have tried to instill,” the departing members write. “We have lost faith in Axon’s ability to be a responsible partner.”

Axon (formerly Taser) has grown into a juggernaut of law enforcement software and hardware in recent years, providing not just the familiar and formerly eponymous electric weapons but body cameras and entire digital platforms for evidence management. Setting aside for now the inherent risks of privatizing such things, Axon has been rather surprisingly thoughtful with its tech, soliciting the advice of the communities these tools will be used in as well as the cops who will wear or wield them.

The AI Ethics Board was established a few years ago as it became clear that machine learning was an extremely valuable tool but also one that could easily be poorly built, applied abusively or some combination of the two. The board, a collection of experts, academics and industry professionals, would provide a tempering perspective on the tech that suggested safeguards, accountability measures and so on.

It had a good start, the resigning members wrote in a statement:

Each of us joined this Board in the belief that we could influence the direction of the company in ways that would help to mitigate the harms that policing technology can sow and better capture any benefits. For a time, we saw that influence play out in some of Axon’s decisions. From not equipping any of its products with facial recognition capabilities, to withdrawing a new software tool to collect data from social media websites, to promoting desperately needed legislation to bring the use of license plate readers under control, we observed tangible evidence of the difference we were making.

I chatted with CEO Rich Smith back in 2020 and found he had a refreshingly honest take on the question of whether tech is the answer to an ongoing policing crisis.

“Tech isn’t a panacea. It’s not going to solve these problems for us,” he said. But equally true, he continued, is the fact that without technology, some of these problems will be insoluble. Body cameras and other digital tracking of police encounters is not an unmixed good but how else do we expect such events to be systematically recorded? The ones who will define these tools are not the police but the companies that make them, and Axon has jockeyed to put itself in that position.

But recently it may have gone too far in the matter of how much and what type of tech should be brought to bear as a deterrent against mass shootings.

“[Axon] intends to develop Taser-equipped drones, pre-position them in potential targets for mass and school shootings, and encircle those targets in surveillance cameras with real-time streaming capabilities,” the board’s letter reads.

“The board had been introduced to and deliberated about the Taser Drone as something to be piloted, with strict controls because there are so many questions to be answered about the use of this kind of equipment. However, the board was notified with very short notice that Axon planned to announce this tool as a widespread concept, completely bypassing the caution of the AI Ethics Board,” said Mecole McBride, former board member and advocacy director for NYU’s Policing Project watchdog group. “If it was that easy to move the Board to the side on something this consequential, we had to ask ourselves, what are we doing here?”

The board warned Axon that if they pursued this as planned, there would be resignations. It continued — and they resigned.

With this and outcry from others in the community that perhaps this was not the appropriate response to the threat of mass shootings, Smith penned this blog post acknowledging the company may have gotten ahead of itself.

“In light of feedback, we are pausing work on this project and refocusing to further engage with key constituencies to fully explore the best path forward,” he wrote. “A remotely operated non-lethal TASER-enabled drone in schools is an idea, not a product, and it’s a long way off. We have a lot of work and exploring to see if this technology is even viable and to understand if the public concerns can be adequately addressed before moving forward.”

He also said they would be “enhancing” the process of collecting alternative opinions, though as McBride pointed out, it seems to have steamrolled over its existing system. What enhancements would prevent it from doing the same thing in the future to anybody, however well staffed, that is in a purely advisory role while hawks are in the decision-making positions? Axon did not answer questions relating to the future of the board, referring me to the above-mentioned post.

Curiously, Smith claims in it that the resigning members of the ethics board “have chosen to withdraw from directly engaging on these issues before we heard or had a chance to address their technical questions.”

Yet Max Isaacs, an attorney for the Policing Project who worked with Axon and the board on this idea, stated that “For over a year, the Ethics Board engaged with Axon to discuss the parameters of a narrow pilot program,” implying Smith’s account has it backward. “The company’s breach of its promise to consult the Ethics Board before making such momentous decisions and its embrace of persistent mass surveillance indicates that Axon is not sufficiently committed to developing this technology in a responsible manner,” Isaacs said. He reiterated in another message that they “pleaded” with Axon not to go public with the idea.

An Axon representative explained that the board had weighed in on a Taser-equipped drone for police, not the one “pre-installed in public spaces” and briefly intended for use in schools. It’s a bit thin as cover for saying the board hadn’t weighed in: Their concerns for deployments by police must surely have been even more pressing for deployment in schools. And as the resignation letter noted, Axon didn’t give them much time to respond — or more likely, knew exactly what the response would be.

Whatever the case, the Taser Drone plan is on ice and Axon may think twice before jumping into a powder-keg discussion, match in hand. Tech will always have an important role in safety and law enforcement, but it does no one any good (and may well have serious repercussions) to move faster than we can think.

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Axon’s AI Ethics Board resigns over plan to surveil schools with armed drones – TechCrunch

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Nine of 12 members of an ethics board appointed by Axon to advise its technology decisions have resigned, citing the company’s plan to install Taser-equipped drones and pervasive surveillance at schools. “After several years of work, the company has fundamentally failed to embrace the v…

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The Instagram Effect

Contains upsetting scenes.

Deals with Self-Harm and Eating Disorders

The story of how Instagram became the dominant force it is today, told by former staff and insiders and through powerful testimony from users who have been negatively impacted.

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How Instagram became the dominant force it is today, told by those on the inside.

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Negative views of Russia mainly limited to western liberal democracies, poll shows | Russia | The Guardian

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Negative views of Russia mainly limited to western liberal democracies, poll shows | Russia | The Guardian

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The sharp polarisation between mainly western liberal democracies and the rest of the world in perceptions of Russia has been laid bare in an annual global poll of attitudes towards democracy.

Within Europe, 55% of those surveyed for the Alliance of Democracies said they were in favour of cutting economic ties with Russia due to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, whereas in Asia there was a majority against, and in Latin America opinion was evenly split.

Negative views of Russia are largely confined to Europe and other liberal democracies. Positive views of Russia have been retained in China, Indonesia, Egypt, Vietnam, Algeria, Morocco, Malaysia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The annual Democracy Perception Index, carried out after the invasion of Ukraine, covers 52 highly populated countries in Asia, Latin America, the US and Europe.

Majorities in a total of 20 countries thought economic ties with Russia should not be cut due to the war in Ukraine. They included Greece, Kenya, Turkey, China, Israel, Egypt, Nigeria, Indonesia, South Africa, Vietnam, Algeria, the Philippines, Hungary, Mexico, Thailand, Morocco, Malaysia, Peru, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia. Colombians were evenly split.

By contrast, among the 31 countries that favoured cutting ties, 20 were in Europe.

Although Russian diplomats will point to the findings as evidence that global public opinion does not share western interpretations of events in Ukraine, the level of distrust of Russia in some countries was high.

The countries with a widely held most negative view of Russia included Poland (net negative 87%), Ukraine (80%), Portugal (79%), Italy (65%), UK (65%), Sweden (77%), US (62%) and Germany (62%). Even in Hungary – whose leader Viktor Orbán is an ally of Putin – a net 32% have a negative view of Russia. In Venezuela, often seen as propped up by Russia, the local population has a net negative view of Russia of 36%.

Countries with a net positive view of Russia included India (36%) Indonesia (14%), Saudi Arabia (11 %), Algeria (29%), Morocco (4%), and Egypt (7%).

Sign up to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every weekday morning at 7am BST

Despite the mixed views about Russia, strong sympathy was shown for Ukraine. Most people surveyed in Asia, Latin America and Europe thought Nato, the US and the EU could do more to help Ukraine. In Latin America, 62% of respondents thought Nato has done too little and only 6% too much. In Europe 43% said Europe has done too little and 11% too much. In China, 34% said the US has done too much to help. Nearly half (46%) globally said that the European Union, United States and Nato were doing too little to assist Ukraine, while 11% said they are doing too much.

Negative perceptions of China are not as widespread as for Russia. British respondents were the most likely to want to cut economic ties with China if it invaded Taiwan.

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Negative views of Russia mainly limited to western liberal democracies, poll shows

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Annual global survey of attitudes to democracy finds many countries maintain positive views of Russia

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Struggling to pay at the supermarket till, I felt that childhood shame flooding back | Kerry Hudson | The Guardian

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Struggling to pay at the supermarket till, I felt that childhood shame flooding back | Kerry Hudson | The Guardian

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O ur bank card has been declined at the supermarket. It’s no big deal – a glitch. But I’m experiencing flight-or-fight responses: heat rising up my neck, my heart thundering. I can’t meet the cashier’s eye.

The rational part of my brain understands that this is idiotic. I recognise that knowing we definitely have money in the account is an entitlement in itself. But the irrational part is shuttled back to the many, many times in my childhood and teens when there was never enough cash. Back to carefully counted stacks of two- and five-pence pieces, often hunted out of the back of the sofa or rattled from mostly empty piggy banks.

My middle-class husband smiles, shrugs, apologises to the people waiting behind us and taps the card again. Perhaps “middle-class” and “comfortable” are often used interchangeably because, among other things, they mean you will never feel the extreme discomfort of reliving the echoes of poverty well into your 40s. When we leave, I am almost in tears. “What must they think of us? And we were buying baby food!” My husband is kind, but bewildered. As well he might be.

Often, this scarcity mindset will knock me right back to my time in the 80s living on council estates, where the corner shops had metal grilles in front of the booze, fags and cash, and a sign saying “Do not ask for credit”. I grew up knowing that, although everyone where we lived was poor, admitting it was worse than enduring it. And I still feel this way.

There were times in my 30s when I was an award-winning author writing about poverty, yet almost homeless, down to my last tenner, and not a soul, not even my closest friends, knew. Instead, I did whatever work I could find – memorably, coercing pensioners to answer fitness surveys in a call centre in West Ruislip that always smelled of Chicken Cottage boxes – and skipped meals until my paycheck came in.

If you grow up poor, it takes a long time to shake off the shame, the secrecy of it – if indeed you ever do. Even when you are not poor, there are mental gymnastics involved in freeing yourself from the scarcity mindset. I am not extravagant. I feel guilty enough about having the luck to live a better life without wearing a Gucci hair shirt, too. I still buy almost everything secondhand. But I have stopped getting the absolute cheapest, and Terry Pratchett was dead on with the boots theory and I wish I had spent more than £25 on my ill-fitting wedding dress that I had to tape to my boobs. But old habits die hard. If I buy so much as a new saucepan – something I want, but don’t need – I will revisit my elaborate budget and redo every sum to account for the £15.

There are positives, too. I am grateful for everything I have and rarely envy anyone else’s lot. I know if I ever find myself on that poverty cliff edge again – and that could be any time for most of us these days – I will manage. I remind myself I spent a decade trying to ensure my kid wouldn’t grow up as I did – and he won’t. He will never be aware of every penny, every privation, from the time he is old enough to add and subtract. I still buy him mostly secondhand stuff, but I take joy in getting him what he needs and, just sometimes, what I want to give him, for no other reason than that he, like all children, deserves some good things.

Some cuts I won’t make. I have travelled, because my peripatetic childhood taught me that there was always a new start to be had. If I can, I will always have extra food. The heating goes on in October. These things matter to me. They make me feel safe. A warm house and full fridge are what I want my kid to have, so that when he is grown and his bank card is refused, he won’t be hurtled back 30 years, but will smile, shrug and apologise.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com

… we have a small favour to ask. Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s fearless journalism since we started publishing 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5 million supporters, from 180 countries, now power us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent.

Unlike many others, the Guardian has no shareholders and no billionaire owner. Just the determination and passion to deliver high-impact global reporting, always free from commercial or political influence. Reporting like this is vital for democracy, for fairness and to demand better from the powerful.

And we provide all this for free, for everyone to read. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of the global events shaping our world, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action. Millions can benefit from open access to quality, truthful news, regardless of their ability to pay for it.

If there were ever a time to join us, it is now. Every contribution, however big or small, powers our journalism and sustains our future. ​​Support the Guardian from as little as $1 – it only takes a minute. Thank you.

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Struggling to pay at the supermarket till, I felt that childhood shame flooding back | Kerry Hudson

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When you have grown up counting the pennies, you never forget it. A problem with my card almost had me in tears, writes Kerry Hudson

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Millie Bobby Brown says media reaction to her turning 18 was ‘gross’ | The Independent

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Millie Bobby Brown says media reaction to her turning 18 was ‘gross’ | The Independent

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Millie Bobby Brown has spoken out about the "gross" sexualisation she has experienced throughout her career.

The actor turned 18 in February, and was just 12 when she was cast in Netflix's hit sci-fi series Stranger Things.

Brown opened up about the challenges of growing up in Hollywood, and how growing up in the spotlight has put this into perspective.

Speaking on The Guilty Feminist podcast, the star said that sexualised comments about her have increased since she turned 18.

"I have definitely been dealing with that more in the last couple weeks of turning 18," the actor said. "[I'm] definitely seeing a difference between the way people act and the way the press and social media react to me coming of age. It's gross."

She said that her experience in Hollywood is "a good representation of what's going on in the world and how young girls are sexualised. I have been dealing with that - but I have also been dealing with that forever."

Brown expanded on her experience with being sexualised before she was an adult, recalling a time she was "crucified" for wearing a low cut dress to a red carpet.

"I thought is this really what we should be talking about? We should be talking about the incredible people that were there at the awards show, the talent that was there, the people we are representing," she said.

The actor said her experience is similar to what other young people go through, and that it can be "overwhelming".

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"I deal with the same things any 18-year-old is dealing with," she said. "Navigating being an adult and having relationships and friendships, and it's all of those things."

Brown added: "Being liked and trying to fit in, it's all a lot, and you're trying to [know] yourself while doing that. The only difference is obviously I'm doing that in the public eye. It can be really overwhelming."

The star also discussed why she stopped sharing personal information on social media. She said she prefers to control what she puts online and hopes to use her platform as a force for good: "I'm not posting anything personal anymore. You're not gonna see that part of me. You get to see the things I choose to put out in the world.

"I hope if there's a 12-year-old that's told Instagram they're 18, and they've created an account, they're going on my account and they're not being exploited to the horrible world that's out there."

The star went on to explain how much she dislikes social media. "I think social media is the worst place of all time," she said.

When she tuned 16 in 2020, Brown shared a video to Instagram which told followers of the insecurities she'd developed due to negative comments online.

"Our world needs kindness and support in order for us children to grow and succeed," she said.

"There are moments I get frustrated from the inaccuracy, inappropriate comments, sexualisation and unnecessary insults that ultimately have resulted in pain and insecurity for me.

"I hope this video informs you on the things that go on behind the scenes of the headlines and flashing lights. don't worry I'll always find a way to smile."

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Millie Bobby Brown says media reaction to her turning 18 was 'gross'

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Millie Bobby Brown has spoken out about the "gross" sexualisation she has experienced throughout her career. The actor turned 18 in February, and was just 12 when she was cast in Netflix's hit sci-fi series Stranger Things . Brown opened up about the challenges of growing up in Hollywood, and how growing up in the spotlight has put this into perspective.

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School boards get death threats over race, gender, mask policies

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School boards get death threats over race, gender, mask policies

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The letter came to the home of Brenda Sheridan, a Loudoun County, Virginia school board member, addressed to one of her adult children. It threatened to kill them both unless she left the board.

"It is too bad that your mother is an ugly communist whore," said the hand-scrawled note, which the family read just after Christmas. "If she doesn't quit or resign before the end of the year, we will kill her, but first, we will kill you!"

School board members across the United States have endured a rash of terroristic threats and hostile messages ignited by roiling controversies over policies on curtailing the coronavirus, bathroom access for transgender students and the teaching of America's racial history.

Reuters documented the intimidation through contacts and interviews with 33 board members across 15 states and a review of threatening and harassing messages obtained from the officials or through public records requests. The news organization found more than 220 such messages in this sampling of districts. School officials or parents in 15 different counties received or witnessed threats they considered serious enough to report to police.

While school controversies are traditionally local, these threats often come from people out of state with no connection to the districts involved. They are part of a rising national wave of threats to public officials - including election officials and members of Congress - citing an array of grievances, often underpinned by apocalyptic conspiracy theories alleging "treason" or "tyranny."

About half the hostile messages documented by Reuters were sent to Sheridan, former chair of the Loudoun County, Virginia, school board, amid controversies over coronavirus protections, anti-racism efforts and bathroom policy. Twenty-two messages sent to Sheridan or the entire board included death threats or said members should be or would be killed.

In June, she received a threat saying: "Brenda, I am going to gut you like the fat f‑‑‑ing pig you are when I find you."

The message, like the letter to her home, also threatened her children. Reuters agreed not to publish any personal details about Sheridan's family members, at her request, because of her continuing safety concerns.

Board members in Pennsylvania's Pennsbury school district received racist and anti-Semitic emails from around the country from people angry over the district's diversity efforts. One said: "This why hitler threw you c‑‑ts in a gas chamber."

In Dublin, Ohio, an anonymous letter sent to the board president vowed that officials would "pay dearly" for supporting education programs on race and mask mandates to stop the coronavirus. "You have become our enemies and you will be removed one way or the other," it said.

School officials reported the messages to law enforcement in those three cases, as in many others documented by Reuters. No one has been arrested for sending these threatening messages, though a few people have been arrested for unruly or threatening behavior at board meetings.

"This why hitler threw you c‑‑ts in a gas chamber."

Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed last year to devote federal resources to combating threats to school officials after the National School Boards Association in September sent the White House a request for federal enforcement to stop the "growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation." But the association's plea for help only added to the controversy as Republican politicians argued the administration of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, sought to censor free speech and label dissenting parents as terrorists. Nineteen state school boards withdrew their membership or withheld dues from the national association in protest of its Sept. 29 letter.

The school boards association apologized to its state members for the letter on Oct. 22, saying there was "no justification" for some of its language, without specifying what it regretted. The organization did not respond to requests for comment.

The hostility faced by school officials mirrors the campaign of fear documented by Reuters against U.S. election workers in response to former President Donald Trump's false claims of voting fraud. A federal election-threats task force was announced in June, after a Reuters investigation that month revealed the widespread threats. In January, the task force reported the arrests of two people who had threatened election officials.

Biden's Justice Department has also convened a task force on threats to school officials. The department, however, declined to say who serves on it, whether the task force has met or whether it was investigating any threats. In a statement, the department said it had "taken action" to prevent violence and intimidation of "those who are threatened because of the jobs they hold," including school board members, election workers and other public officials.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, in a statement, characterized Attorney General Garland's commitment to protect school officials as simply highlighting the FBI's "ongoing efforts" to address threats of violence "regardless of the motivation." The agency emphasized it was not "investigating parents who speak out or policing speech at school board meetings."

Nearly half of the 31 school boards contacted by Reuters said they had added extra security at meetings, limited public comment or held virtual meetings when in-person gatherings became too chaotic.

In Luray, Virginia, a woman furious about mask mandates was charged by local police with making a threat after she told school board members at a January meeting that she would "bring every single gun loaded and ready" to school. The woman, Amelia King, emailed an apology to board members before the meeting was over, saying she was speaking figuratively and "in no way" meant to imply she would bring firearms to a school.

King's lawyer declined to comment on the pending charge.

Some board members have quit their posts or decided not to seek reelection. A board member in Gwinnett County, Georgia, said she bought a gun for self-defense after prolonged online harassment. The board chair in Union County, North Carolina, said she installed cameras outside her house at "every angle." Sheridan - the Loudoun County board member - said she rarely goes out in public alone anymore.

Jean Marvin, the board chair in Rochester, Minnesota, said a barrage of threats there last year deeply unsettled her fellow board members and her own children: "They said, 'Mom, they're going to kill you. They know where you live.'"

Living in fear

The wave of mostly anonymous threats has emerged against a backdrop of public protests by a new constellation of local and national activist groups, such as Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education and Parents Defending Education. Parents started some groups. Others have ties to veterans of the conservative movement or Republican political operatives.

Many Republican elected officials have sought to harness the anger over education policy in advance of this November's midterm congressional elections, releasing strident statements or passing laws addressing the issues igniting the school protests.

Much of the anger focuses on critical race theory, a once-obscure academic school of thought frequently targeted by Trump. Rarely taught outside law schools, the theory holds that racial bias - intentional or not - is baked into many U.S. laws and institutions because of the nation's history of slavery and segregation. Many conservative parents and politicians now use the term as an epithet for a wide range of anti-racism efforts and teaching on race relations that they say attempts to indoctrinate students with an anti-white and anti-American worldview.

One group, Fight for Schools, is led by Ian Prior, a former deputy director of public affairs in Trump's Department of Justice. The group took in $10,000 in donations in the past year from 1776 Action, a national group opposing critical race theory that is run by veteran Republican operatives. The organization also accepted $5,000 from the Presidential Coalition, which is overseen by former Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie.

Neither 1776 Action nor Bossie responded to requests for comment.

Fight for Schools has staged protests at board meetings since early 2021 over pandemic-related closures and teaching on race. The organization is also leading a recall campaign seeking to oust Sheridan from the Loudoun County board before the next school board elections.

Reuters found no evidence that any of the new advocacy groups are involved in threatening board members with violence. Fight for Schools, in a statement, condemned threats of physical harm, personal attacks and harassment.

The board in Loudoun County, a Washington suburb, first came under fire in 2020 over pandemic school closures. Anger built as the district implemented anti-racism efforts in August of that year, including teacher training.

By June 2021, many parents were also incensed by a proposed policy to allow transgender students to use bathrooms matching their preferred gender identity. The anger grew after the parents of a female student who was sexually assaulted in a school bathroom in May told reporters that her attacker was a "gender fluid" student. Authorities said the student was a male who wore a skirt the day of the attack. Loudoun County's juvenile court declined to comment or release records on the case, citing legal privacy protections for juvenile suspects.

Conservatives seized on the case as evidence of the danger of bathroom policies seeking to accommodate transgender students. But the district's policy did not take effect until August, well after the attack.

Sheridan, the board chair in 2021 and still a member, became a primary target for intimidation. She reported the June threat to "gut" her to authorities. But police investigators failed to identify a suspect, highlighting difficulties in investigating anonymous threats.

The Loudoun County Sheriff's Office submitted a search warrant to Google to collect information on the sender, who had used a Google email address, police reports show. But the warrant turned up multiple IP addresses, leaving investigators with "no viable investigative leads" to find the perpetrator, according to a police report.

"There's no way to know: Did that come from someone from another state, or is it my neighbor down the street who knows my routine?" Sheridan said.

Reports from the county sheriff's office, obtained through a public records request, show law enforcement was notified of more than 50 menacing messages directed toward the school board between April and November. Investigators did not pursue about half the cases after determining the messages did not constitute a criminal threat.

Police did make inquiries in at least 26 cases, including one email saying: "You people need to be arrested, tried and then hung by the neck until you're dead." But investigators either could not identify a suspect in those cases or determined they did not have enough evidence to seek prosecution, a police spokesperson said.

Reuters wrote to dozens of the email addresses used to send hostile or threatening messages to Sheridan and the Loudoun County school board. Six people responded. One self-described "patriot" spoke of rage over "leftist scum" and "Antifa." Another said "LGBTQ is an abomination." A third blasted the district's anti-racism program, saying that telling children "that race will determine their outcomes in life is truly sick."

One had written to Loudoun superintendent Scott Ziegler in June. "Your life is being laid bare on the open and dark web. I don't condone what's gonna be sent to those close to you or the danger they may be in," the email said, "but you personally do deserve it."

Contacted by Reuters, the person who sent the message, who did not give a name, said it was prompted by rage over the student sexual-assault incident. "I was warning him, not threatening him," the sender said in an email. "I'm not looking to be labeled as anti trans. I'm just anti rape in schools."

Ziegler declined to comment.

'Treason' and 'tyranny'

The people who threaten school board members often cast coronavirus and race-education policies not merely as misguided or offensive, but as part of a larger conspiracy to commit "treason" or impose "tyranny."

The message threatening to remove Dublin, Ohio, board members "one way or the other" came from a man who identified himself as "James Baker" of "Citizens to Remove CRT from America," referring to critical race theory. Reuters was unable to confirm the identity of the sender.

"All Americans know the schools have become Indoctrination Centers for Marxism," read the message, which was also sent to other districts. "WE ARE COMING AFTER ALL OF YOU STINKING TRAITORS OF AMERICA!"

Chris Valentine, the board president at the time, said the threat was the worst example of the hostile messages district officials have endured since the start of the pandemic. Valentine said he started worrying whenever he noticed an unfamiliar car parked outside his home.

"It's easily been the most difficult year-and-a-half of my life," Valentine said.

Dublin police reviewed the letter and "found no safety concerns or credible threats," a police spokesperson said. Still, the department added officers to ensure security at the next school board meeting.

"WE ARE COMING AFTER ALL OF YOU STINKING TRAITORS OF AMERICA!"

In Rochester, Minnesota, members faced months of threats and outbursts at meetings over mask mandates, critical race theory and other hot-button issues. Marvin, the board president, said her son grew so concerned that he insisted on driving her to board meetings and waiting in the parking lot to ensure her safety.

Northwest Allen County school board meetings in Indiana became so heated last fall that police officers assigned to the district refused to continue providing security unless the board took action to rein in its increasingly unruly meetings, according to an email sent by a school resource officer to the board president.

"I truly am concerned for the safety of everyone at those meetings as are the other officers who have worked them," Sergeant Kevin Neher wrote to the board president at the time, Kent Somers, on Sept. 17, in an email reviewed by Reuters.

In response, the board eliminated public comment for its next meeting. Several board members as well as the schools superintendent, Christopher Himsel, had to be escorted by half a dozen police officers to their cars, Himsel said in an interview.

Neither Neher nor Somers responded to requests for comment.

At least two parents from the district reported a local resident to the FBI, after the man posted menacing messages about school officials on Facebook, according to one of the parents. One threat to Somers warned that someone might "bag and tag your ass in a parking lot." The same man posted a message urging others to get "firearms, ammunition and extensive training" to fight the "tyranny before us," according to a police report documenting the messages. Another parent who helps oversee a Facebook group opposing the district's mask policies posted a video of himself firing a rifle to show he was not merely a "digital soldier," according to a screenshot of the message provided by a parent to Reuters.

A spokesperson for the Indianapolis FBI office declined to confirm or deny any investigations into these threats. Allen County police documented several of the messages but did not take any further action, according to a police report.

Calls for enforcement

Christine Toy-Dragoni, the then-board president in Pennsylvania's Pennsbury school district, requested FBI involvement after her board received a slew of hateful messages.

As Pennsbury's conflicts gained national attention, board members were deluged with racist, anti-Semitic and threatening messages, nearly two dozen of which Reuters viewed.

"You better grow eyes in the back of your head motherf‑‑‑er," said a message to board members in July.

The board's Toy-Dragoni responded in October with a public statement calling on the FBI to act. "These threats of violence and sexual assault and these expressions of transphobic, anti-immigrant and anti-Jewish hatred are certainly not protected by the Constitution, and must be investigated by the FBI," she said.

The school district reported the threats to local police and the FBI. Falls Township Police Chief Nelson Whitney said in an interview that his detectives spent several months working with the FBI to investigate threatening emails and other communications received by Pennsbury board members. He said state and federal prosecutors ultimately decided that the messages, "although offensive, did not rise to the level where a charge would be filed."

In the nearby North Penn district, a report that spread on conservative media about a classroom diversity exercise prompted one man to call an elementary school on Feb. 6 and leave a voicemail that threatened the teacher with sexual violence and death.

"Mass of people who know who you are," the man said. "They will fucking see your head swinging from a pole."

Jonathan Kassa, a North Penn board member, said the threat was reported to local police and the FBI. Kassa said the threat is one of many the district has received.

"This isn't some one-off, random event," Kassa said in an interview. "I certainly hope law enforcement and our legislators are paying much closer attention to what seems to be an increasingly serious threat."

Local police in Hatfield Township said they have opened an investigation. Spokespeople for the FBI declined to comment on whether the bureau was investigating the threats in the Pennsbury and North Penn districts.

In Brevard County, Florida, school board member Jennifer Jenkins faced threats and intimidation after supporting a district mask mandate. Then someone filed a false claim against her with the Florida Department of Children and Families, alleging she abused her daughter. Police in Satellite Beach, Florida, determined the claim to be unfounded and tried, unsuccessfully, to determine the identity of the person who made the false report.

Jenkins told Reuters she has installed security cameras at her home, where anti-mask demonstrators staged multiple protests. She still feels unsafe at times, worried that the threats will escalate to violence.

"All it takes," she said, "is one psychotic fringe loony toon."
Schools Under Siege
Photo editing: Corinne Perkins

Art direction: John Emerson

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School boards get death threats over race, gender, mask policies

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The letter came to the home of Brenda Sheridan, a Loudoun County, Virginia school board member, addressed to one of her adult children. It threatened to kill them both unless she left the board. "It is too bad that your mother is an ugly communist whore," said the hand-scrawled note, which the family read just after Christmas.

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Reporting abuse on social media platform TikTok

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Reporting abuse on social media platform TikTok

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Reporting abuse on social media platform TikTok

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TikTok has issued new guidance explaining the best way to report any abuse that teachers or leaders are subjected to on its platform. New guidance: a message from TikTok We are aware that students have been using TikTok to create false accounts and post inappropriate content that seeks to cause ha…

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BBC News - 'Parents cry because they can't provide food'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-59158118

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ICO to step in after schools use facial recognition to speed up lunch queue | Facial recognition | The Guardian

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ICO to step in after schools use facial recognition to speed up lunch queue | Facial recognition | The Guardian

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Privacy campaigners have raised concerns about the use of facial recognition technology on pupils queueing for lunch in school canteens in the UK.

Nine schools in North Ayrshire began taking payments for school lunches this week by scanning the faces of their pupils, according to a report in the Financial Times. More schools are expected to follow.

The company supplying the technology claimed it was more Covid-secure than other systems, as it was cashless and contactless, and sped up the lunch queue, cutting the time spent on each transaction to five seconds.

With break times shortening, schools are under pressure to get large numbers of students through lunch more quickly.

The use of other types of biometric systems, principally fingerprint scanners, have been used in schools in the UK for years, but campaigners say the use of facial recognition technology is unnecessary.

Silkie Carlom, the director of the campaign group Big Brother Watch, told the FT: "It's normalising biometric identity checks for something that is mundane. You don't need to resort to airport style [technology] for children getting their lunch."

Fraser Sampson, the biometrics commissioner for England and Wales, was also quoted as saying that just because schools could use the technology it did not mean they should. "If there is a less intrusive way, that should be used," he said.

The technology is being installed in schools in the UK by a company called CRB Cunninghams. David Swanston, its managing director, told the FT: "It's the fastest way of recognising someone at the till - it's faster than card, it's faster than fingerprint.

"In a secondary school you have around about a 25-minute period to serve potentially 1,000 pupils. So we need fast throughput at the point of sale."

Live facial recognition, technology that scans through crowds to identify faces, has been challenged by civil rights campaigners because of concerns about consent. CRB Cunninghams said the system being installed in UK schools was different - parents had to give explicit consent and cameras check against encrypted faceprint templates stored on school servers.

Schools leaders keen to improve efficiency were not averse to new technology, but there remained concerns about privacy and data protection, said Hayley Dunn, a business leadership specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders.

"Schools and colleges are adept at harnessing new technology to solve logistical issues like taking payments from young people in their canteens and many are already using fingerprint readers to improve queueing times and provide increased security," she said.

"The use of face recognition software to do this could potentially interest schools and colleges, but there would need to be strict privacy and data protection controls on any companies offering this technology.

"Leaders would also have legitimate concerns about the potential for cyber ransomware attacks and the importance of storing information securely, which they would need reassurances around before implementing any new technology."

North Ayrshire council told the FT 97% of children or their parents had given consent for the new system.

"Pupils often forget their pin number and unfortunately some have also been the victim of pin fraud, so they are supportive of the planned developments and appreciate the benefits to them," the council added.

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Privacy fears as schools use facial recognition to speed up lunch queue

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Privacy campaigners have raised concerns about the use of facial recognition technology on pupils queueing for lunch in school canteens in the UK. Nine schools in North Ayrshire began taking payments for school lunches this week by scanning the faces of their pupils, according to a report in the Financial Times.

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The Guardian view on biometric technology in schools: watch closely | Editorial | The Guardian

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The Guardian view on biometric technology in schools: watch closely | Editorial | The Guardian

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he news that schools in North Ayrshire in Scotland have introduced facial recognition technology to support payments in their canteens prompts many questions. The company behind the scheme, CRB Cunninghams, says valuable time will be saved by speeding up the process whereby children queue up and pay. North Ayrshire council says that 97% of children or their parents have given their consent. Alternative ways to buy food will be provided for the rest.

But this deal between a local authority and a technology company, whose stated aim is to remove cash from UK schools, is not the no-brainer that its backers present it as. Facial recognition technology is still relatively new. Its various forms and applications are unfamiliar to most people and their use remains controversial. The Scottish meal payment system is said to differ from "live" facial recognition software, where computers scan through crowds to match faces. Encrypted templates of the children's faces will be stored on the schools' servers. But privacy campaigners and others are rightly concerned about the decision to make facial scanning a part of children's daily routines.

The use of biometric fingerprints has been widespread in UK school canteens for years. Time pressures aside, it is easy to see why headteachers and other managers were keen to move away from cash, which has come to seem messy and labour-intensive in our electronic age. But just because pupils and their families have become accustomed to the use of some biometric data, it does not follow that these systems should be extended. Nor does the idea that facial recognition is a more Covid-secure technology than fingerprinting, as has been suggested with regard to North Ayrshire, provide sufficient justification for the decisions that have been taken. On the contrary, the deal with CRB Cunninghams should be seen as a significant step towards the normalisation of the use of facial recognition technology by public authorities.

What people think about this, and similar developments, depends on the importance that they place on privacy and personal data, and the extent to which they trust technology companies to handle them. There is no question that companies are eager to test out new capabilities, and work out how to make money out of them. In several countries, the use of such technology has been found to be illegal. Last year, the court of appeal ruled that the use of facial recognition technology by police in Wales breached privacy and equality laws. In the US and Sweden, schools have been stopped from using it to monitor attendance or security.

Typically, the buyers and sellers of these systems present them as useful tools and nothing more. But as Prof Kate Crawford, the author of a recent book about AI, and other critics have pointed out, the companies at this point are running ahead of democratic debate and decision-making. The challenges of how to regulate and secure consent for the kinds of information gathering that digital technology makes possible are a long way from being answered. And while this is the case it is ethically dubious, to put it mildly, to use children as guinea pigs.

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The Guardian view on biometric technology in schools: watch closely | Editorial

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he news that schools in North Ayrshire in Scotland have introduced facial recognition technology to support payments in their canteens prompts many questions. The company behind the scheme, CRB Cunninghams, says valuable time will be saved by speeding up the process whereby children queue up and pay.