Debate contribution: Online Harms: Impact on Young People

Debate contribution by Ms Cara Hunter on 13 May 2025.

MLA

Ms Cara Hunter

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

13 May 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Online Harms: Impact on Young People

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4948110

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I beg to move

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I welcome that we are joined today by many young people, who are listening in to the important debate. When you give your child a phone, you do not just give them access to the world; you give the world access to your child. It is no secret that I love my phone. In fact, I feel as though it is attached to me. It is like another limb. I enjoy the freedom that it gives me. It allows me to navigate roads, use social media, connect with my constituents and share details of my sheepdog, Clint, each and every day. However, as I am sure that Members are well aware, smartphones, social media and the all-pervasive internet culture that now dominates our lives and our children's lives is not always light-hearted, liberating or even enjoyable. Whether it is from Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube or any one of the millions of online games that are ever available at the tap of a screen, our young people, like the rest of us, contend with the very real temptation of smartphones, tablets and social media as an omnipresent reality.

We used to live in one reality. We now live our lives both online and offline. Devices have been meticulously crafted so as to become extensions of our limbs. Companies that create social media content conduct research on how dopamine in the brain works to make our social media platforms as addictive as possible. Being without your phone and access to apps and the internet can trigger separation anxiety. Apps and algorithms are carefully designed to maximise user attention, and they demand that we use our phone for ever longer periods and return to it in repeated and predictable ways. New, intoxicating prospects are suggested through our phone. For example, X, formerly known as Twitter, utilises a pull-down method to refresh your page. That triggers the same dopamine feeling in the brain as when you play a slot machine in a casino. Since Instagram came into existence, the number of teenage girls self-harming in the United States has increased dramatically and steadily year-on-year. Virtual communities of toxic trolls prompting vulnerable children into dangerous and damaging acts of self-mutilation have also been linked, sadly, to suicide here in the UK. Moreover, now more than ever, extreme, conspiratorial and misogynistic ideas linger in vast yet closed echo chambers from which there is limited chance of escape. Many of us only read about such online spaces, but many young people call them home: hidden forums, incel group chats and much, much more. Some here may consider my words to be designed to create a sense of fear and panic, so I want to say that I am open to the many benefits that technology offers us. I am, however, also sober in my assessment of the risks, especially to our children and their education. If you talk to teachers, they will tell you about students who leave the classroom to check their phone, about students who are unable to concentrate because they were up all night falling into the TikTok wormhole and about parents who battle over dinner with children who are just overcome by the comfort of the screen on their phone. That is a daily reality for so many young people across the North and across the world. It is clear that unambiguous leadership is what is needed in order to address phone use in schools. We need to see strong leadership and decision-making from the Executive to remedy some of the ongoing challenges that our young people face. On that note, I was listening recently to a Bear and Scully podcast. They noted that, in Northern Ireland, if people feel that they are addicted to their phone, there is nowhere for them to go to get guidance on how to get a digital detox, which would be healthy for us all. Some may find the concept of that rather funny, but it is a real problem. Countries across Europe, such as France, Spain and Luxembourg, and nations around the world are now beginning to act on that very real issue. The direction of action is clear. I know that teenagers will hate me for saying this, so I am really sorry, guys, but the 45-year-old version of you will thank me: smartphones need to be banned in our schools. Politically speaking, that is not very advantageous for us to say, but it really needs to happen, and today is a good day on which to start the conversation. All the evidence shows that devices are hijacking our children's nervous systems and luring them into often uncontrollable patterns of misuse. They risk being bombarded with often hateful, divisive and even destructive content. Banning smartphones from school is not a complete remedy for all the problems that I have mentioned, but it is a much-needed, strong start. Children do want boundaries, and it has been psychologically proven that boundaries help our young people feel safe.

I thank the Member for his intervention. When I was doing some research ahead of the debate, I found a statistic that a quarter of children aged five to seven have access to a smartphone, so I absolutely agree that we need to establish boundaries and put them in place early. As I said, banning smartphones from school will not answer all the concerns and queries that we have, but it is really important that we set boundaries. Today, the Minister has an opportunity to reflect on the hard decision to remove phones from the classroom. Our schools must be places of learning and places where children can connect. If we look at our neighbours around —.

Yes.

I thank the Member for his intervention and wholeheartedly agree with him. Those things can coexist. Even we, as the Education Committee, can do more to involve parents in the conversation with our young people about the benefits and downsides of technology in education. I take the Member's point and agree with him. We have seen such decisions being made across Europe in even greater numbers. Some countries have even established welfare commissions to investigate the impact of digital devices on the lives of young people. Denmark has passed a ban on smartphones because it does not feel that children under the age of 17 should be able to access them. If smartphones were banned in schools, our young people would still have access to them before and after school. It is important to state that they would only be withdrawn during school hours. The Danish commission found that 94% of young people create a social media account before they turn 13, noting that that increases their risk of exposure to inappropriate material; distracts from the essentials of childhood, such as physical activity and spending time with family and friends; and reduces interest in activities such as reading. We have already seen a sharp decline in the number of young people who read, so today is an opportunity to raise that among the negative impacts of phone addiction. The Danish commission recommended that no child under 13 should be given a smartphone, while Norway has imposed strict measures to ban children under the age of 15 from having social media accounts. It is really important that parents are part of that conversation. Simply put, all the jurisdictions that have carefully investigated and considered the harms that are posed by those devices have acted to end the experiment through which we are living. They are halting the normalisation of our young people having powerful computers in their pockets and are closing the door through which children may have unfettered access to the world of pornography and violent and extreme content. They are ending the stress of having to maintain the sense of a perfect life that many young people feel. There is a lot of stress online. People compare their online personas to those of others. There is a lot of pressure and weight attached to looking at perfect online lives that have been created. Anxiety and depression are on the rise among our young people. I have no doubt that the online world often contributes to that and to feelings of despair. The motion refers to the importance of counselling for our young people in the school space. It is really important to say that, especially as the Minister is here. After a series of savage cuts to programmes that are aimed at serving young people and their mental health in school, it is critical that that money finds its way back to such important services. My inbox is inundated with correspondence from school-age children and those who have recently left school, who repeatedly cite the challenges that they face with their mental health, the world online and cyberbullying. If we expect our young people to grow up to be resilient, strong and content, we must ensure that they have access to critical mental health services in their school settings. Furthermore, the RSE curriculum will be pivotal in tackling online misogyny. I have mentioned 'Adolescence' in the House before. It is an important time in our history to reflect on the positives and the blessings of phone usage when it comes to education, but there are so many harms, and —

— we must do everything that we can in the House to end them.

1,571 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 12:36 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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