Tech Shock - from Parent Zone
Tech Shock: Everything you always wanted to know about tech and family life.Podcasting from Parent Zone,the media literacy experts, host Vicki Shotbolt explores the upsides and downsides of family life in the digital age. With a range of expert guests she looks at online harms to children ranging from pornography to gambling and at what should be done about them. Incurably optimistic, Vicki also celebrate the many benefits of tech for children and young people, as she considers how best to live in a world in which family life is now inescapably digital.Listen every Monday, subscribe, and give us a five star review.
Tech Shock - from Parent Zone
4. Schools and emerging tech: a new era of sexual harassment and abuse?
As both the sophistication and accessibility of AI is on the up, the ease in which someone can create and share realistic deepfakes involving ‘non-consensual intimate images’ increases also. Worryingly, schools and education settings aren't exempt from this trend.
To add to this, UCL’s Institute of Education found that – of young people who have experienced this sort of image-based sexual harassment – only 2% reported it to their school.
Kristin Woelfel is policy counsel at the Centre for Democracy and Technology. She’s also co-author of a 2024 report which, through a large-scale poll of students, teachers and parents investigated non-consensual image sharing and deepfakes. In this episode, she joins Vicki to discuss the report’s findings and to unpack this issue further.
Talking points:
- As emerging tech facilitates new possible harms, are schools actually equipped to deal with evolving forms of harassment and abuse?
- How should we respond when children and young people themselves are perpetrators of sexual harassment?
- As a first line of defence when it comes to these risks and harms, do parents have the information they need, or are they not yet part of the conversation?
Tech Shock is a Parent Zone production. Follow Parent Zone on social media for all the latest on our work on helping families to thrive in the digital age. Presented by Vicki Shotbolt. Tech Shock is produced and edited by Tim Malster.
www
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
