Online Safety in the Pacific: A Report on a Living Lab in Kiribati, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands

With cable internet systems rolling out across the Pacific, access to affordable and fast digital connectivity in the region is set to rapidly expand, opening up unprecedented opportunities for children but also potentially exposing them to new risks of harm. Child online safety in the Pacific region thus stands at a critical juncture. However, there is very little rigorous and reliable evidence to guide policy and decision making in relation to children’s digital practices and online safety This report presents the key findings of research undertaken to map the challenges and opportunities that technology presents for children in the Solomon Islands, Kiribati and Papua New Guinea. The project deployed a qualitative, participatory research methodology developed by the Young and Resilient Research Centre and previously deployed in over 70 countries. From December 2019 to March 2020, the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University, ChildFund Australia and Plan International Australia conducted half-day creative workshops conducted separately with 96 children aged 10-18; 58 parents and carers; and 50 representatives of government departments, local and international NGOs, schools, police, telecommunications companies, religious organisations and community leaders. Workshop activities explored key themes relating to each group’s perceptions and experiences of children’s digital media use and online safety, with the overall aim of generating an evidence base for ChildFund Australia’s and Plan International Australia’s future child protection programming in the Pacific region. Activities included writing, discussion, polls, and arts-based tools. Participants were engaged individually, in small groups, and as a whole group. Overall, despite different cultural practices and contexts at play in the three countries that participated in the study, across the sample, there were remarkable similarities in children’s, parents’/carers’ and other adult stakeholders’ experiences of navigating online safety issues for and with children

Online Safety Perceptions, Needs, and Expectations of Young People in Southeast Asia: Consultations with Young People in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam

Globally, children and young people's access to digital devices and online spaces are fundamental to what it means to be a young person in the contemporary context. Young people's access to digital technology earlier in life, and in greater numbers, has resulted in increased societal awareness and concern about ensuring their safety and wellbeing online. One manifestation of that concern is through calls for online platforms to take greater responsibility for safeguarding users' privacy and wellbeing. A growing body of work asserts the importance of technology industries adopting a human-centric approach when designing their online platforms and services to ensure those products are safer for the people who use them. In Southeast Asia in particular, penetration and use of online technologies among young people is rapidly advancing. It follows then that young people in this region should be included in discourses about and practices for online safety. This report describes outcomes of a project that explored online experiences of children and young people in four countries in Southeast Asia - Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam - showing how young people in these countries perceive and experience key elements of their lives online. The report also presents young participants' ideas and aspirations about how to ensure they and their peers remain safe online, reinforcing the value of such ideas for key stakeholders when planning, developing, and operationalising their online products and services

Child-centred Indicators for Violence Prevention: Summary Report on a Living Lab in the City of Valenzuela, Philippines

In 2015, world leaders made a commitment to end all forms of violence against children by 2030, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To achieve the aspirations of the SDG global targets, Governments set targets, taking into account national circumstances, to reduce children’s risk and be responsive to local contexts. Prevention and response efforts need to be grounded in the best available evidence to achieve measurable reductions in violence, and if the needs of children are to be foregrounded, strategies to end violence must respect not only children’s protection rights but also their participation rights. Moreover, it is critical that the processes for monitoring and measuring impacts centre children’s needs, aspirations and experiences. If children themselves report that violence is reducing in their personal lives, in their communities and in their countries, we will know that efforts to address violence, abuse and neglect are succeeding. This report describes a project undertaken in collaboration with End Violence, the City of Valenzuela, the Young and Resilient Research Centre and other partners to develop child-centred indicators for violence prevention in the City of Valenzuela in greater Manila, Philippines. Child and adult stakeholders worked together in a series of 14 participatory workshops to creatively explore children’s experiences and perceptions of violence, to map their aspirations for change, to ideate strategies for addressing violence in their communities, and to develop child-centred indicators against which violence reduction can be measured. This project found that children’s perspectives are a vital resource for efforts to localise INSPIRE strategies and that the deployment of child-centred indicators usefully augments and complements the INSPIRE measurement framework. Beyond the City of Valenzuela, there is opportunity to scale the use of these child-centred indicators to other parts of the Philippines and globally. The report also offers reflections on the key strengths and limitations of the Living Lab process for engaging a wide range of stakeholders, including children themselves, in the project of ending violence against children

Reimagining Online Safety Education through the Eyes of Young People: Co-Design Workshops with Young People to Inform Digital Learning Experiences

Online safety education is typically designed by adults for young people. As a consequence, it often reflects adult perspectives and concerns. While existing education has been somewhat successful in raising young people’s awareness about online harms, young Australians report gaps in their online safety skills and knowledge. This is particularly true when it comes to managing difficult experiences online and supporting others through negative experiences.1 Young people also describe feeling misunderstood and disempowered by current online safety messaging.2 With funding from the eSafety Commissioner’s Online Safety Grants, and in partnership with the PROJECT ROCKIT Foundation, this project aimed to create online safety learning experiences with and for young people to better meet their needs and address their concerns. To inform the design of these learning experiences, the Young and Resilient Research Centre (Y&R) at Western Sydney University (WSU) led a survey and a creative and participatory process to co-design youth-centred online safety education with young people

Fix My Food: Children's Views on Transforming Food Systems

Sustainable food systems are critical to ensuring that all children and adolescents are able to access nutritious, safe, affordable, and sustainable foods. However, current food systems are failing children and adolescents. Globally, two out of three young children do not consume a diet of minimal diversity and three in four adolescents in low-income and middle-income countries do not consume enough fruit and vegetables. At the same time, in the same settings, children and adolescents often have ready access to cheap, nutrient-poor processed and ultra-processed foods. Urgent action to radically transform food systems and deliver on children’s right to good nutrition is needed. UNICEF partnered with the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University to bring the voices of children to the forefront through participatory food systems dialogues in 18 countries around the world. Over 700 children and adolescents aged 10-19 from significantly diverse backgrounds participated in two-and-a-half-hour workshops to share their lived experiences, insights, and perspectives on food systems. The workshops help understand children’s views and perspectives on food systems; the key challenges to attaining nutritious, safe, desirable, and sustainable food; and how children want food systems to change. Additionally, UNICEF conducted U-Report polls involving 22,561 children and youth in 23 countries who reported on their experiences of food systems and food environments. Workshop findings exposed how children are knowledgeable about the importance of food and what it means to them and their communities. They understand how food is produced and how it travels from farm to mouth. They are clear about the main barriers – physical and financial – to nutritious, safe, and sustainable diets and are concerned about the links between current food systems, environmental degradation, and climate change. U-Report data demonstrated that cost and safety of food (32%) followed by taste (25%) were the biggest influence on food choice. During workshop activities children expressed a strong desire to be engaged in dialogue and action to transform their food systems and to address food poverty, food quality, environmental degradation, and climate change. Children voiced two key recommendations to aid food system transformation 1) improve the availability, accessibility and affordability of nutritious foods; and 2) reduce the impact of food systems on environmental degradation and climate change. Children call on political leaders and public/private-sector stakeholders to work across all levels of society to strengthen food systems; from implementing effective regulation of food industries to promoting individual and community behaviour change. Doing so will support people to sustain themselves while also sustaining the environment. Children call on governments and other stakeholders to work with them during this process to create platforms for their ongoing participation in the process of food systems transformation

The Future of Work and Childcare: Towards Equity and Justice for Western Sydney Communities

This white paper by Western Sydney University researchers advocates for more equitable models of work and childcare that prioritise gender equity, gentle parenting, community building, social support, and climate justice. The care economy in western Sydney is under-resourced and inflexible, and current policies prioritise economic growth over family and community relationships. Women, especially those from disadvantaged or marginalised backgrounds, face greater challenges in accessing education and earning less than men. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted existing inequalities in work and childcare responsibilities. The researchers propose a vision statement and a place-based research agenda to influence socially just policy making and practices. The six proposed research streams include defining gendered workforce participation, understanding the childcare sector, mapping formal childcare services, generating a childcare stress metric, collecting evidence on innovative models and informal childcare supports, and co-creating equitable and just systems through design justice workshops with local people, groups, and the sector

Gender and the Political: Deconstructing the Female Terrorist

The female terrorist circulates within contemporary Western culture as an object of fascination and heightened concern. Gender and the Political analyses cultural constructions of the female terrorist, arguing that she operates as a limit case of both feminine and feminist agency. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, this book demonstrates that the development of the discourse on terrorism evolves in parallel with, and in response to, radical feminism in the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Situated at the borderlines between sexuality, threat and abjection, Amanda Third argues that the figure of the female terrorist compels a reexamination of the project of radical politics and the limits of modernity

Reframing the 'whiteness' of U.S. Feminism : the protest movement, radical feminism, and the abjection of whiteness

Histories that track the rise of second-wave feminism frequently note that the U.S. women’s movement, in both its active constituents and the conceptualization of its aims, remained overwhelmingly white until well into the 1970s, when “the difference debate” gripped feminism. Whilst it has become customary to acknowledge the whiteness of late 1960s/early 1970s U.S. feminism, and evidence demonstrates that the initial phases of second-wave feminism were indeed profoundly shaped by a blindness to the circumstances of women of colour, what is rarely interrogated are the very conditions that produced this “whitewashing”. Second-wave feminism comprised a spectrum of groups with widely divergent understandings of women’s subordination, and an equally divergent set of strategies for putting cultural and political change into effect. However, in the late 1960s a small number of women’s groups who identified either as “politicos” or “feminists” – those now labelled “radical feminists” – came to dominate the political scene of feminism. In the following pages, I consider this relationship between the emergence of radical feminism in the late 1960s and the changing nature of the North American social protest movement. In particular, I track the origins of “white” feminism by situating radical feminism’s blindness to differences of colour in relation to the problematic currency of whiteness within the broader context of the larger social protest movement

Submission to the review of the Enhancing Online Safety Act 2015 and the Online Content Scheme

The comments below draw on research on children’s and young people’s online safety I have conducted – with colleagues across research, industry, government and community organisations – over the last ten years. My work focuses on the social and cultural dimensions of children’s and young people’s digital practices, with particular emphases on online safety, children’s rights in the digital age, the intergenerational dynamics shaping technology practice, and vulnerable young people’s technological engagements

Shooting from the hip': Valerie Solanas, SCUM and the apocalyptic politics of radical feminism

Positioned as she is, at the beginning of second wave feminism in North America, Solanas' manifesto gets ignored by second wave feminist histories because the implication of her manifesto is the destabilisation of the defining category, the differentiation between men and women, that forms the basis of feminism's ability to represent itself, right at a point in time when cultural feminists were struggling to construct women as a category in order to effect social and political change