Regulator needs to act quicker to protect children from harm

THE parents of a schoolboy who was fatally stabbed over a disagreement on social media say Australia’s social media ban could bring about more immediate protection for children.

Stuart and Amanda Stephens’s son, Olly, was murdered at the age of 13 by two schoolboys in Bugs Bottom in 2020 after an online grievance led to him being lured to his death, plotted over social media.

The parents, who campaigned for the Online Safety Act which was passed in 2023, said legislation to protect children in the UK from social media harms is moving “too slowly”.

Last month, the Australian government was the first in the world to implement a social media ban for children under 16.

Tech firms which run 10 social media platforms including X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok must now take steps to ensure children don’t access their sites, which includes kicking off existing users under the age threshold.

Mrs Stephens said the approach taken by the Australian government could be a more immediate solution to protect children from the harmful content they are exposed to on social media, but said that concerns over enforceability meant she would prefer to see the Online Safety Act adapted.

Mrs Stephens said: “When we first heard that Australia was doing this we were overjoyed because it felt like, finally, somebody is really sticking up for young people and trying to protect them.

“There are no two ways about it — it is harmful what they are viewing online and the world that they are living in is very unsafe.”

Mr and Mrs Stephens are part of the Bereaved Families for Online Safety, a group of 11 families who have lost children to online harms including dangerous online challenges and suicide content.

The group was a driving force in the campaign for the Online Safety Act, under which firms must act, which includes carrying out age checks, to prevent children seeing illegal and harmful material.

Industry watchdog Ofcom has handed out a handful of fines since the legislation was enacted last year. However, critics, including Mr and Mrs Stephens, say much harmful content remains accessible to children.

She said: “With the best will in the world, it’s just going to take time. Two years into it and we haven’t really seen any fantastic results.

“There are children in our Bereaved Families for Online Safety that lost their life through a TikTok challenge, which is absolutely horrific but, to this day, it is still on TikTok. There seems to be no way to actually bring down this kind of content.

“I don’t think Ofcom can work on a case-by-case basis, they have to wait until there has been a lot of people saying exactly the same thing before they can do anything, it’s just frustrating.

”Parents and schools are screaming out to the Government to say: make it mandatory that children cannot have phones in schools because then that at least blocks out seven or eight hours of the day when they wouldn’t have that kind of barrage of information coming at them.”

The couple have recently launched Olly’s Work, a charity set up in their son’s name to raise awareness and educate people about online safety, support for SEND children and the dangers of knife crime.

Mr Stephens said many parents are in the dark about the reality of their children’s lives online and that raising awareness of the harms that exist is now a main focus of campaigning.

He said: “It’s a long fight but had we known half the stuff we know now back then we wouldn’t be in this position. A big part of what we’re doing now is educating people about the harms of mobile phones.

“People like us, we had no clue, we assumed that the people who owned the mobile phone platforms had a duty of care to their end user.

“How many more children are we going to lose to this? A lot of our friends have lost children to suicide, self-harm or knife crime and all of it stems from social media. They can’t deny it anymore, they’ve got the evidence and it’s growing daily. ”

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