A few months ago—and I think I might have mentioned this more than once already, so apologies—colleagues and I went to see the large hadron collider at CERN in Geneva. The facility is vast, but less than a speck in the story of the universe. The work, of course, to which thousands of our brightest people from all over the world are dedicated. It’s expensive work in which countries are eager to participate, and which has transcended war and claims on national purses at times of recession. It’s also, of course, the home of the development of the worldwide web, and that first iteration is still there. You can see it; it’s like the warehouse in the Indiana Jones movie where those top men are hiding the ark of the covenant, and that was just the baby internet. It is entirely understandable that when we consider the risks to children using the internet, we are completely daunted by the enormity of the task. It is not just the recognition that this will probably need a full global response, as Darren said, but the recognition that for every step that we can take at any level, from personal to international, there is someone who can outrun us or outfox us.

Well, I don’t think that is a good enough excuse. If the world can collaborate to find the god particle, it can collaborate to protect its children from online dangers. And article 4 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child demands it, with parties under a duty to undertake all appropriate legislative, administrative and other measures for the implementation of the rights recognised in the present convention. There is a growing body of worldwide research on how states might achieve this—far too much to go into today—but the Conservative Government’s ratification of the Convention on Cybercrime in 2011, on behalf of us all, incidentally, I think that was a declaration of intent to take action. The fact that we are just one state when UNICEF observes that many legal jurisdictions are not taking anything like adequate action shouldn’t stop us aiming to make Britain the safest country in the world for children and young people to be online. There’s a UK Green Paper due in the summer. It’s an area that, I think, commands our attention and certainly scrutiny from us all. Jayne Bryant, I agree with you that this is something we should all be looking at and something that the UK Government might still be able to do more on. I hope, actually, we find time to debate its principles here in the Assembly. Even though the legislation is coming from another place, this really is something for all of us.

But I have to say that with legislation, I find this quite a tricky one actually, because I get a bit queasy at the thought of the state coming into my home. But, I was researching this online last night, looking at some of the adverts that have been put out there by various charities warning young people against grooming and online abuse, and to be honest, that made me feel a lot, lot queasier. I actually found myself agreeing with Claire Perry, the MP whose parliamentary online child protection report came out fairly recently, which advocates default barring of adult content, opt-in filters rather than opt-out, and for households, the simplest one-click parental control. I think you can have some control over access to content in your home, but outside the home we seem to be relying very, very heavily on educating children and young people, and indeed adults, on how to recognise danger, to avoid it and how to report it. I’ve been in a class, a junior-age class, in Dyffryn Cellwen, in my region, to see what it looks like in that school and it was excellent—completely age-appropriate. But Gareth Bennett is right. For some teenagers who may, in fact, absolutely understand the dangers of texting and bullying and date apps and even those less obvious dangers of online gaming, in the moment, it all goes out of the window in the face of a compliment or a dare.

I think we might also need to face up to what’s becoming the addictive nature of social media. That idea that parents are all sitting down around a table to discuss things with their children is disappearing when we’re now looking at families, even if they’re all in the same room, all on their individual devices, all with their individual things in their ears and all in their individual worlds. Like all addictions, it has the propensity to alienate you, to distance you, from the people who can offer perspective and safety. So, I approve of all these soap operas and dramas that are running storylines on the dangers to raise awareness, but for every oversharer who posts a picture of, you know, children’s birthdays or sport’s days or school concerts, they’re opening up those children, potentially, to risks, simply from connection with those innocent posts. Of course, that runs alongside the type of things we’ve been talking about: the access to un-moderated extremist ideas, gambling, the unusual sexual content, if you like, and of course, the malignancy of the charming new cyber friend who makes you feel so very, very special.

That space between the screen and the young brain is small, it is intimate and it is secret, and I don’t think it’s one that’s necessarily reached by parental awareness. So, I certainly support what the UK Government is doing at the moment. I urge the Welsh Government, in the area where it has competence, to treat its powers as duties and maybe to look at its own emphasis on digital interaction as maybe a route into reaching the young people who are in that secret space. Thank you.