Activity 8:Legal contexts and digital identities - An ethical dilemma linked to digital and online activity

In this post I am going to talk about an incident that occurred at a school that I worked at related to the misuse of Facebook and how myself and the school dealt with it.

Firstly I would like to draw your attention to Facebook’s policy on the age at which a child can legally sign up to and use Facebook:

‘Facebook requires everyone to be at least 13 years old before they can create an account (in some jurisdictions, this age limit may be higher). Creating an account with false info is a violation of our terms. This includes accounts registered on the behalf of someone under 13.’

The incident in question refers to a 10 year old girl (from another class), speaking to me in confidence about a 10 year old boy in my class who was ‘Facebooking’ her requesting that they become boyfriend and girlfriend.

The girl in question was not interested in this boy's advances and had Facebooked the girl stating this fact. The boy’s mother from my class had also become involved in the messaging and had started Facebooking the girl as well, stating that she should not be mean to her son and should not be rejecting him like she was through social media.
It was at this point that the girl had told her teacher who in turn had told her to tell me, as the boy and mother who were harassing the child were from my class. I am also the ICT lead at the school.

The girl was feeling embarrassed, distressed and confused as to why she was being ‘cyberbullied’ by this mother and child and wanted the matter resolved.

This was the first time as a teacher that I had been involved in such a case but I was aware that the child from my class had a history of using social media as well as playing inappropriate computer games (such as Grand Theft Auto 5). Through my subsequent conversations with this child it was very obvious that he was relatively unsupervised in the virtual and game playing world, to do as he pleased.

Policies & Procedures

Our school has constructed policies around the appropriate and inappropriate use of the Internet and its safety using the National Administration Guidelines (NAG’s) to aid in the writing of the policies. Internet safety falls under NAG 5 which relates to health and safety.

Having rigorously gone through the Internet Safety guidelines as a result of this activity I have determined that it needs to be updated.

We are now using ‘School Docs’ who are a Policies & Procedures’ service and we will be ensuring that all of our policies meet legislative and best practice requirements, and we will be consulting with them and other schools to ensure that all possible eventualities surrounding inappropriate use of the Internet have been met.

We have nothing in our policies surrounding guidelines to deal with the ethical dilemma such as the one set out above. This is due to the fact that this incident did not occur using school computers or within school but was directly affecting a student within the school and being perpetrated by a student and their parent from within my class.

Within our NAG 5 Internet Safety procedure we have the following policies which I can refer you to:

• Social networking sites will not be accessible. Teachers/students/parents of current class cannot be ‘friends’ as this would be considered unprofessional.
• Misuse of ICT. Under no circumstances should ICT be used to facilitate behaviour which is either inappropriate in the school environment or illegal.
• Queries or concerns regarding other cybersafety issues should be taken to the School Cyber Safety Manager, or the Deputy Principal.

It is important to note that this incident falls under the category of ‘Cybersafety’ which DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY: Safe and responsible use in schools (Schools, 2015) state as:

Cybersafety: Involves conduct or behavioral concerns.

Examples include cyberbullying, smear campaigns, accessing inappropriate content, creating spoof websites or sexting.

Due to this beinga clear case of Cybersafety for which we have no clear policies and guidelines surrounding this type of scenario, it was dealt in an acceptable way but it could have been dealt with better.
It was resolved in the following way:

• I approached the girl’s teacher and then the principal for advice
• The girl logged into her facebook account on my computer and showed us the evidence
• We called in the boy’s parent to discuss the issue and what was deemed acceptable
• The children and the boys parent were made aware of the age limit of Facebook
• We hosted a Cybersafety evening with an external company to educate the staff and parents

What should have been different?

The issue was resolved. It did not occur again within the school, (while I was there) and as a result of the incident we ran a series of lessons school-wide on Internet Safety; the culmination of which was a Cybersafety evening for the parents hosted by a professional organisation and concluded with children presenting their own findings to the parents.

However, what we did wrong was the following:

• Not having guidelines to help us deal with this incident
• Not involving the girl’s parents

It also made us aware that we could only deal effectively with issues that occur on school premises. However, referring again to DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY: Safe and responsible use in schools (Schools, 2015)  it does state under ‘School’s responsibility and authority to act’ that “In general, a school’s responsibility to maintain a safe-educational environment justifies a measure of authority over off-premises and student after-hours conduct.”
Quite what this looks like in regards to this scenario and quite how we are expected to police what goes on after hours is something we are still not sure about though.

In conclusion, we felt that we had robust policies and procedures in place surrounding Internet Safety and the ethical dilemma's the use of the Internet and digital technologies can throw up. This scenario also showed us that we had not thought of and covered every eventuality and that without proper guidelines a delicate situation can be handled inappropriately despite the best of intentions.

Perhaps there should also be some more specific guidance from the Ministry as to how one justifies a measure of authority over off-premises and student after-hours conduct as well?

Bibliography
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Schools, A. G. F. O. R. (2015). DIGITAL.