Students who send explicit photos on their cell phones wouldn’t have to be branded as sex offenders, if a new curriculum developed by Yahoo! Inc. catches on.
Technology offenses such as cyber bulling and sexting can carry serious emotional and legal consequences. In many states, the laws haven’t kept up with technology, and students who send or receive explicit photos of themselves or others can be charged with trafficking in child pornography.
To solve this problem, Yahoo!’s Trust and Safety Team has developed a Digital Safety Diversion Program, a police-taught course on online safety that comes in both proactive and reactive versions.
The one-hour proactive version of the course, usually presented at PTA meetings or school assemblies, teaches the importance of building positive online reputations and stopping cyber bullying. The three-hour, discussion-based reactive version of the course covers the same topics in more depth and requires teens to reflect on their online habits.
If teens are cited by the police for a digital offense, the reactive course provides an “opportunity to take the infraction off their record,” much like driver re-education after a minor traffic violation, said Connie Chung, policy manager at Yahoo! Trust and Safety.
“We’re excited about that happening, because we see it as a win-win situation,” said Chung. Offenders are “appropriately punished while being educated instead of reprimanded.”
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Holly Lawrence, an officer of the Sunnyvale, Calif., Department of Public Safety, first conceived of the program when she began working in schools as a neighborhood resource officer. In her first week, she received a case about kids sending naked pictures to each other and discovered a lack of clear protocol for citing the young tech offenders.
“Nobody wanted to deal with it … [because] nobody wanted these kids to be sex offenders,” Lawrence said, referring to the possibility in some states for a minor to face criminal charges if caught electronically communicating indecent material—that is, sexting.
Not content to ignore the issue, she saw an opportunity to “educate and rehabilitate” kids on “good digital citizenship,” Lawrence said.
After an extensive search, she discovered that while a few other nonprofits had developed digital safety education programs, the existing programs “didn’t seem like a good fit to have law enforcement to present,” because they tended to be game-based.
With an idea to develop a digital safety course “of a more serious nature,” Lawrence said she approached Yahoo!’s Trust and Safety team, a nonprofit branch of the Yahoo! online conglomerate headquartered in Sunnyvale.
The digital safety program offers four types of presentations: one hour for parents, one hour for teens, three hours for parents, and three hours for teens. Parents and teens watch the same videos and discuss the same general topics, “so the conversation can continue after the course, at home,” Chung said.
The discussion-based teen course encourages teens to reflect on questions such as, “What happens when you publish [material online]?” and “Can you control who sees it and who can repost it in other places?”
Chung said the teen course targets middle school students ages 11 to 14, because it is “better to reach out to younger groups before any behavior becomes the norm.”
Teens have responded positively to the trainings thus far, and the classes work best if the officer can separate the teen group by gender; the discussion is different when the girls and boys aren’t trying to impress each other, she said.
On the other hand, the parent course focuses less on discussion and more on informing parents about media today.
“Many parents feel leapfrogged by their children,” said Chung. “Children are often much more aware of what smart phones can do than their parents.”
She said that while most parents install web filters and have computer rules, many parents forget that smart phones “[are] like little computers that can go everywhere.”
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At the end of the class, parents receive a copy of a Family Media Agreement, which provides a template for parents to discuss digital safety guidelines with their kids.
The document lists responsibilities that both parents and their children should check off and agree to: For example, the teen checklist includes, “I will not give out any personal information, like my age, last name, address, or phone number,” and the parent checklist promises, “I will recognize that media is a big part of my child’s life, even if I don’t understand why.”
Along with Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety Lieutenant Tracy Hern, Lawrence teaches the curriculum she developed to other police officers around the country. In an eight-hour, one-day training session, Lawrence walks her students through the presentations for parents and teens and helps them brainstorm guiding questions for their audiences.
Officers who attend the training sessions receive CDs that include the PowerPoint slides, notes for all four class types, and a PDF copy of the Family Media Agreement.
Because the program has been certified by California’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (CAPOST), which establishes the minimum training standards for police in California, the time that officers spend in the Yahoo! diversion course can often count toward police agencies’ continuing education requirements.
To date, the program has trained and certified 134 police officers from 61 agencies across California, and enrollment has been at capacity for almost every training session, Chung said.
At a conference in Washington, D.C., Lawrence and the Yahoo! team explained the course and called for industry and law enforcement to work together.
The conference piqued the interest of several potential partners across the country, including other law enforcement agencies, as well as state attorneys groups. Chung said the police department in Arlington, Va., expressed particular enthusiasm about bringing the program to its local teens.
Teens today communicate online when they are upset and want to vent. Instead of an appropriate outlet, they’ll put up a social media post that everyone can see and “that’s how the digital drama escalates,” Lawrence said.
She said many teens are also “exploring sexuality online in an unsafe way”: They will sometimes solicit chats with strangers, and then “they’ll always get asked for a picture, and a lot of kids will send it.”
Many teens “don’t consider what’s behind” their online actions, because they “feel safe in their home” and get “caught in a false sense of security,” Lawrence said.
The Yahoo! program has helped teens “take [online safety] a little more seriously, reflect more, and think about bigger picture things,” Lawrence said. “And parents are really thankful to get guidance on how to keep that dialogue going between parents and kids, so that it’s not just one talk.”
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How a lone grad student scooped the government—and what it means for your online privacy
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