Teenagers at more risk online than Interrailing in Europe, say experts

Safeguarding experts and child psychologists have said the risks to teenagers are increasingly “far greater” online at home than when travelling independently following the row about the television presenter Kirstie Allsopp allowing her teenage son to go Interrailing.

A debate on the protection of teenagers was prompted by Allsopp, who revealed that social services had interviewed her after she posted online about her son, then 15, taking a rail trip around Europe after his GCSEs.

A child safeguarding consultant, Simon Bailey, told the Guardian: “The risk is far greater with a child up in their bedroom with access to a smart device than it is travelling to Berlin, Munich and seeing some of the wonderful sights that Europe provides.”

Bailey, a former chief constable who was the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) lead for child protection before becoming a consultant on the issue, said teenagers were at greater risk at home on their smartphones than many parents realise.

“There is a greater risk to children now in the online space than there ever has been before and actually the online world in which they inhabit poses greater risks than the physical world in which they live in.”

Bailey pointed to recent research by Childlight , which found that more than 300 million children around the world face sexual exploitation and abuse online each year. Bailey said the findings should “send cold shivers down every parent’s spine” and that they should be more focused on managing these risks.

He said that most of the time “in the physical world, a 15-, 16-year-old is going to recognise if somebody poses [a threat]” but that “in the online world, they just don’t know who they are talking to, what their motives are”.

Allsopp’s son Oscar, now 16, went Interrailing around Europe over the holidays when he was still 15. After writing about it on X, Allsopp was contacted by a social worker from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and asked what safeguarding was put in place for her son’s trip.

Alan Wood, founding chair of What Works for Children’s Social Care, said it “it was not unreasonable” for social services to make an initial contact but that he felt “a bit dubious about saying childhood is up to 18” and applying to older teenagers “rules and arrangements and processes which are really designed for much younger children”.

Wood, who has led many children’s services departments, said he felt technology posed a greater threat for teenagers. “Where I think a lot of the risk is coming from is slightly different to taking a tour at 15. I think the social alienation of individual children by being glued to social media and games and things like that for me is an area that potentially does have quite an impact on their mental health or emotional health.”

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, whose book Anxious Generation explored the twin trends of the decline in adolescent freedom and unsupervised play coupled with the rise in a reliance on screens, praised Allsopp for the decision.

He posted on X at the weekend: “If we’re going to roll back the phone-based childhood, we MUST give kids back a fun, exciting, and at times risky childhood in the real world. Kirstie gave that gift to her 15-year-old son.”

Dan O’Hare, an educational psychologist, said that children’s decreasing amounts of physical freedom and increased screen time had an impact on wellbeing.

He said parental worry about safety can shrink young people’s physical freedom, meaning that “you’re having less physical activity, you’re spending more time not engaging with the world around you, but rather through screens – and you’re exposed to content that you might never have come across if you were out in the park.

“I think all of these factors need to be considered … risk just doesn’t come from the immediate world around us. Risk in 2024 can come from thousands of miles away in a different time zone, at 3am in the morning.”

O’Hare said that independence was something that needed to be “cultivated as a skill” from an early age. He added that weighing up the risk of a teenager travelling without an adult would depend on how much support they had through childhood to build independence and whether they had learned how to go to others for help.