Cyber-bullying: Young People’s Mental Health

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

I am delighted to be able to lead this debate, even at this comparatively late hour, about the effect of cyber-bullying on young people’s mental health. This important debate arises out of a cross-party inquiry that I set up in Parliament to look into this issue and which published its report earlier this year. It took evidence from over 1,000 young people and was supported by the excellent charities the Children’s Society and YoungMinds, which showed conspicuous dedication, skill and professionalism. Without them, this important work could not have been done. I am very grateful too to colleagues from across the House—Conservative, Labour and Scottish National party colleagues—for their valuable input, as well as to the many witnesses who gave evidence.

Just to provide a bit of context, this all really arises out of my experiences as a constituency MP. I visited schools in Cheltenham, from Bournside to All Saints’, and I spoke to parents and agencies such as Teens in Crisis, which has been commissioned by some schools to provide regular support. I became deeply struck—I fancy that other hon. Members in this House have as well—by the apparent increase in child and adolescent mental health problems. To me at any rate, it does not feel so much like a temporary spike, but more like a lasting surge. I want to say a bit about that before turning to the specific issue of cyber-bullying and what our inquiry found.

[Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)]

As a member of that panel, I want to place on record my thanks to my hon. Friend, who has shown such leadership in this area. I also pay tribute to the young people who gave evidence to the panel. That evidence was deeply moving at times and it was a real credit to them given what they have been through.

[Alex Chalk]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. He should not be modest about his contribution, which was absolutely fantastic and gratefully received.

To say a little more about the context, recent research by the Prince’s Trust suggested that young people’s wellbeing has declined over the last 12 months and is now at its lowest level since the study was first commissioned in 2009. What is interesting as well is that this is not just a British phenomenon. A recent article by NBC in the United States, citing research from Johns Hopkins University, referred to an acute mental health crisis happening among members of the youngest generation of Americans, with, as the article put it,

“critical implications for the country’s future.”

Similar data is emerging from France and Germany.

Much of the debate in this House has been about a cure—about how we go about fixing the problems after they have emerged. We have debated achieving parity of esteem, funding child and adolescent mental health service beds closer to home, and so on. All that is vitally important, of course, but equal attention must be paid to prevention. Why is the surge happening in the first place? How can we stop it taking root?

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate, and I sought his permission beforehand to intervene. With 20% of young people—that is one in five—indicating that their fear of cyber-bullies makes them reluctant to go to school, does he agree that much more must be done to thwart the faceless keyboard warriors who are making the lives of so many young people so very difficult?

[Alex Chalk]

I do agree. The hon. Gentleman makes the point very powerfully, and in a moment I will develop why I agree with him so wholeheartedly. I found from speaking to young people that the role of social media has become impossible to ignore. It is not the only issue, of course, but it is a recurrent theme. Although there appeared to be a correlation between the rise of social media and the decline in adolescent mental health, I, colleagues and hon. Members wanted to know if there was causation, too. The report provided powerful evidence to suggest that there is.

By way of context, I should make it clear what the inquiry and this debate are not about. The inquiry was not set up to blame all the world’s ills on the internet or social media. My view is that social media is broadly a force for good. Equally, the internet as a whole fosters social mobility and opportunity. It spreads ideas and enhances freedom across the world. The inquiry did not seek to address all the concerns posed by social media use either. It deliberately left out the issues of fake news, sexting, sleep deprivation and others. All those are important but have been traversed elsewhere, and dealing with them would have made the report unwieldy and unfocused.

Instead, the report and this debate are about one issue only, cyber-bullying, and that is because the evidence from young people, including those we spoke to in the inquiry, suggested it was the single biggest risk factor in mental ill health associated with social media use. We wanted to drill down on that by taking evidence not just from young people but from experts in brain development, and the evidence from more than 1,000 young people was clear: cyber-bullying can be utterly devastating. It is relentless and inescapable. We heard harrowing evidence from young people taken to the very edge of despair. No one is saying of course that bullying does not exist in the analogue world, but it is this added toxic cyber layer, with its extraordinary capacity to amplify torment, that can prove so destructive.

What is so troubling is that the inquiry also found that children are using social media at a very early age —61% had a social media account at the age of 12 or under—and for a long time too: nearly half use it for more than three hours a day and nearly 10% check their social media feeds between midnight and 6 am, with girls twice as likely as boys to be high-intensity users. A troubling proportion—68%—of young people were affected by cyber-bullying, and the medical evidence showed that its impact could last into adulthood, with what one expert called

“lasting consequences on the adolescent brain”.

It seems that this searing experience can be a scarring one too.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his powerful speech tonight. I speak as an MP from Scotland, where this is very topical, the issue of revenge porn online having been highlighted in the Sunday Herald. My colleague Councillor Rhiannon Spear, a young female councillor in Glasgow, had a powerful impact this weekend when she talked about boys taking photographs of her naked and posting them on Twitter. Does he agree that the Government need to look more at revenge porn, given how these images are distributed on social media and the impact it has on young people’s mental health?

[Alex Chalk]

The hon. Gentleman rightly raises a really important point. It is only recently of course that revenge porn has become a criminal offence, but I dare say there is more that could be done. It is just one aspect of the hinterland of cyber-bullying but an extremely important one to raise.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is doing us tremendous service by bringing this topic to the House. To what extent is anonymous bullying a factor? We all know from before the age of the internet the devastating effect of poison pen letters, even on a small scale; here one can have anonymised poison pen electronic letters that are accessible worldwide. Is it people who are known to victims mainly or is it people sheltering behind anonymity?

[Alex Chalk]

That is an extremely good point. In truth, it is both, and not only is it the nature of the bullying but the volume. Social media provides the opportunity, whether through sham accounts, spoof accounts or whatever, to multiply the torment, so my right hon. Friend raises such an important issue.

The most striking thing of all perhaps was that 83% of the young people told our inquiry that they thought the social media companies should do more to tackle this scourge. They felt that the onus was on the victim to act—to block or delete—and that reporting all too often felt like shouting into an empty room. There is a perceived lack of consequences for those who engage in bullying behaviour online in a way that is different from real life. There is some evidence from some platforms of temporary sanctions for cyber-bullies to nudge them back to good behaviour, but they remain the exception.

In fairness, the message is starting to get through. In his new year 2018 message, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, vowed to “fix Facebook”. One of the priorities he highlighted was “protecting our community from abuse and hate”, and he admitted that enforcement of house policies was failing. I am afraid we concluded that he was right. It is particularly impactful and devastating when the people who are being affected are under the age of 18. They are just children.

While we were grateful for the constructive engagement of social media companies—and it is true to say that the larger companies tended to take the issue more seriously—the unavoidable overall impression was that announcements and measures were largely tokenistic: slow and inadequate. Because there was so little transparency about the number of reports and the nature of the response, it was, in effect, impossible to determine whether the resources allocated bore any relation to the scale of the problem. The companies essentially continue to mark their own homework. As one witness put it, companies faced with growing alarm about the implications for young people’s mental health are “walking backwards slowly”. That is not acceptable, because our evidence showed that those failures have an impact on children and young people, and that the effect is particularly profound, concerning and long-lasting.

It is important to emphasise that tackling cyber-bullying must be a joint endeavour. Parents, guardians and teachers all have a role to play, but it is equally true that when it comes to minors, social media companies bear responsibility as well. It is simply not enough to sign children up and then just let them get on with it. It is important for the companies to be age-appropriate, and to do more to identify under-13s and, when appropriate, gain explicit consent from parents or guardians. They should provide timely, effective and consistent responses to online bullying, and they must become more accountable. What do I mean by that? I mean that they must publish data about their responses to reports of online bullying. Only then—if we know the number of reports, and the nature and timeliness of the responses—will any sensible assessment of the efficacy of those responses be possible.

As for the Government, I think that they ought to do what they reasonably can to improve our understanding of the role of social media in adolescent mental health. We are very much in the scientific foothills of our understanding of these issues, and the firmest possible evidence base will help to tailor the best solutions. I recognise, however, that the Government have gone a long way with the digital charter to increase the tempo, and I urge them to continue that important work.

My final comments are thanks. I thank the young people—more than 1,000 of them—who responded to the inquiry and gave evidence, and without whom the report would have had no currency. It was their evidence that gave its conclusions their heft, and it was their experience that left such a marked impression on all who took part in the inquiry.