Children are human beings too

ANY TIME politicians want to justify an unpopular policy these days they invoke child safety: anti-terrorism laws, the ID card, speed cameras, GPS tracking, Internet censorship. Terri Dowty also wants to protect children in this high-tech era, but in a different way: "Children are the crash-test dummies for so much new technology, particularly where databases are concerned," she says.

A former musician and teacher, Dowty was always interested in civil rights. As she got older, that interest took over her life. She got interested in children's rights through her work teaching, and also through home-schooling her own children. "Principally," she explains, "I wanted them to have the freedom to keep their enthusiasm for learning alive." It seems to have worked out: her older son is reading law at Oxford, having argued his way in without formal qualifications.

The experience changed how she thought about interacting with children. "You can't be authoritarian when you're with kids 24 hours a day," she says. "You can actually treat children as human beings."

Or you could – before so many high-tech systems came in that seem designed to treat children completely impersonally. Dowty's prime example is biometric systems for school registration: they take away, she says, the daily bit of contact when the teacher looks directly at each child and acknowledges their presence.

"There is this idea," she says, "that children don't really exist as human beings of the moment – they're just the adults of the future." It is that attitude that have made children a testbed: the fingerprint systems in today's school libraries are only one example.

"The whole of the transformational government agenda was tried out on teenagers first," says Dowty, "through the Connexions scheme." Now just a careers service, Connexions' original design included allowing local education authorities to use information from schools and others to build a database including every teenager in their areas. The idea was to be able to assess every teenager's life – "every area," says Dowty, "down to their sexuality and what friends they had."

She adds, "The idea was to bring services together for that young person with a broker in the middle. That's exactly what transformational government is about." Later, the Connexions idea was expanded into the "Every Child Matters" programme and rolled out to all children. "It's the whole egovernment plan," she says. "It's in the name of child protection – but actually it's a testbed for what's being envisaged for all of us. The government just brought out the Think Family paper, and they're talking about extending the assessment tool they're going to use for children – developed from the teen one – to identify adults within the child's family who need services and doing whole-family assessments. They have this obsession with carrying out holistic assessments instead of just telling people what's available."

The consequences for privacy are obvious. But, says Dowty, the privacy we're struggling to hold onto children have already lost. "There are so many devices and cameras on them now that nobody turns a blind eye to them. They are watched in a way that we weren't watched when we were children. Parents and teachers know when not to watch – but now we intervene and monitor them all the time, and also form records of very trivial misheaviour." Cameras can't decide not to see, and, she says, quite trivial offences are becoming criminalised. Should throwing food in a school cafeteria be recorded for life? "I think every child needs the right to reinvent themselves when they reach adulthood."

There are, to be sure, good uses of technology for protecting children, though she wouldn't include tracking their mobile phones as one of them. But, says Dowty, "We are confusing child protection, where the child is at risk of harm or neglect with the general needing of services of some kind."

She would like to see, for example, messaging services for children thought to be at risk, and better teaching of IT as an exciting subject. "With the amount we're wasting at the moment, we could easily buy every child broadband and online access – that would be a splendid use of technology and money." µ