Day 2 of the Children in Scotland Annual Conference, we attended a discussion workshop led by Sally Macnair about child protection in Scotland.
Sally was joined by another 5 woman who sat at a panel and spoke about their own professions and jobs and how they support and try to help and protect children who are neglected and abused in all different ways.
Maggie and Anna from YoungScot gave us an insight to their newly launched campaign, 5 Rights. This campaign supports young people on social media to be educated about their rights online and to know how to stay as safe as possible. In my opinion, they would be a positive source of education for young people as they don’t view social media as a bad thing and realise that children and young people are going to use social media. They realise that instead of banning young people from social media they should be taught how to stay safe online and how to spot anything that might be dangerous for them.
Sounds great Tegan! I agree that Young Scot’s 5 rights approach is a good way of helping young people to stay safe online.
What a great summary of this panel event! I also enjoyed hearing about the work that Young Scot are doing to protect children and young people online. It was especially interesting to see their ‘Bad Romance’ snapchat video and to hear from Anna about her own experience and those of her peers. I agree with you, Tegan… we can’t (and shouldn’t) stop children and young people going online and using social media. The best thing we can do is to make them aware of the risks, their rights and how best to protect themselves against these risks.