Censoring, Censuring or Empowering? Young people and digital agency

The protection of young people from troubling and disturbing onlinecontent is rightly a high policy priority in Western nations. However, ‘the child’ is increasingly being defined as anyone below the age of majority: 18 in most nations. The significant age and maturity differences between primary school children and teenagers are recognised in most cinema classification schemes but less nuanced in terms of regulated online content. While there is considerable evidence that younger children benefit from vigilant support regarding what they access online, the legal and policy focus upon the regulated protection of teenagers risks constraining opportunities as well as risks, and may impact upon their online behaviour in ways that lead to unintended consequences. This paper is framed in terms of recent debates around the Australian Law Reform Commission’s (ALRC’s) National Classification Scheme Review (which
considered content), and the Australian Government’s Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy’s Convergence Review (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, 2011) (which considered the regulatory implications of converged media). It elaborates some of the issues arising from acknowledging that older children are agents who see themselves as having choices about what they do online.