Disability, Child Protection and the Internet: The Socio-Cultural Construction of Risk

Abstract

Today, children and young people are foisted into precarious social conditions defined by the rapid encroachment of virtual media into the intricacies of contemporary life. For children with disability, technological proficiency and the judicious use of virtual platforms may open new horizons for social inclusion and belongingness. Yet, reformulations of child safeguarding practice are prompted by novel and sophisticated threats to child safety in the digital era. In this paper, a scoping review of published literature, utilising the PAGER framework (Bardbury- Jones et al 2022), provides a basis to elaborate upon child protection risks grounded in internet use by children and young people with disabilities. Findings reveal diverse protection-versus-empowerment debates at the crux of disability and online child protection. The conditions that practitioners, parents, children and young people with disabilities are thrust into within the risk and reward nexus of the web are suffused with complexity. More applied social research is necessary, given that the scarce evidence within the wider paucity of relevant research, remains preoccupied with cyber bullying and internet safety for children with learning disabilities and autism. Social research may be lagging behind, and dangerously outpaced by, evolving virtual technological change underway. Specifically, the contribution of the present paper is twofold. Firstly, critical commentary on literature is presented, as retrieved through a scoping method. Secondly, this fosters the development of a critical intervention, contributing a valuable addition to scholarly debates within this field. Specifically, risk competence versus risk adversity is illuminated as a theoretical linchpin to query decision making processes specific to internet use and children with disabilities.