One Third of School Children Said They Would Send Naked Selfies if Another Lockdown Occurs

  • Research Completed by the UK’s leading youth sexual health charity has found that 1 in 5 of British schoolchildren said they would send their partner naked selfies if another lockdown kept them apart
  • The research also found that 34% of British school children have started a new online relationship due to lockdown and that 19% would accept expensive gifts from people they have only met online.
  • The research surveyed 7000 students at an interaction class on Relationships and Sex Education

Molly Russell Material Too Difficult to Look at, Leading to Delays for Inquest

  • Instagram has passed thousands of pages of “pretty dreadful” material from the account of Molly Russell to her family’s legal team, a court heard
  • The 14-year-old took her own life in 2017 after viewing graphic images of self-harm and suicide on the platform
  • A pre-inquest hearing on Friday was told not all the material had been studied yet as it was too difficult for lawyers and police to look at for long
  • The inquest will look at how algorithms used by social media giants to keep users on the platform may have contributed to her death
  • Oliver Sanders QC told Barnet’s Coroner’s Court how Instagram’s parent company Facebook had recently released a “significant volume” of material relating to the case
  • He said: “We haven’t been able to review it all yet. Some of it is pretty dreadful and it is not something that can be reviewed in a long sitting and certainly not late at night.”

Children’s Needs Must be a Priority in Planning

  • Children must be the priority at this stage of the Covid-19 crisis, says England’s Children’s Commissioner
  • Anne Longfield calls for a recovery package to tackle a “rising tide of childhood vulnerability”
  • She warns of an “inter-generational crisis”, with the impact of the economic fall-out of the pandemic on parents determining the future prospects of their children
  • The government said the wellbeing of children was central to its response
  • Ms Longfield says the nation’s efforts to “build back better” must begin with a focus on children, “sometimes sadly lacking during the pandemic”
  • Her report, Childhood in the Time of Covid, calls for a “recovery package” to help children, especially the most vulnerable, recover from their experiences of the past six months and the ongoing crisis

Social Media Bosses Planning for Election Night Chaos in the US

  • Social media company bosses are planning for chaos on and just after the election night in the US, fuelled by false claims of victory online
  • The period between the polls closing and the declared result usually takes a few hours, but due to the pandemic and the higher use of postal voting, counting is likely to take days – perhaps even weeks
  • Social media companies believe this period – of claim and counterclaim – could push the US over the edge and into violence if Donald Trump and Joe Biden declare themselves the winner, there are fears of violence between the already polarised communities in the US

A quarter of adopted UK children affected by drinking during pregnancy

  • One in four adopted children are either diagnosed with or suspected to have a range of conditions caused by drinking in pregnancy, according to a recent survey of nearly 5,000 adopters in the UK
  • Among the adopters surveyed by the charity Adoption UK, 8% of children had a diagnosis, and a further 17% were suspected by their parents to have foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), the neurodevelopmental condition characterised by difficulty with impulse control, as well as behavioural and learning difficulties
  • Maria Catterick, the Director of the FASD Network UK, said the statistics were unsurprising given that alcohol, drugs and domestic abuse are major reasons why children are placed into the care system
  • Dr Luisa Zuccolo, from the University of Bristol, who is researching the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure said “there is far too much uncertainty on the actual extent of this problem, but it is bigger than other neurodevelopmental outcomes which receive more ‘publicity’ such as autism spectrum disorders”