Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight
SIOUX FALLS — A day after a group of South Dakota lawmakers met for the third time to discuss digital safety for children and regulations surrounding online spaces and tools, hundreds of professionals focused on child abuse prevention gathered Thursday in Sioux Falls to focus on the issue themselves.
Professionals highlighted concerns similar to those heard by lawmakers on the summer study committee. The committee is drafting bills to require age verification by app stores and makers of mobile phones and tablets, and to define artificial intelligence.
South Dakota Supreme Court Chief Justice Steven Jensen told conference attendees in his opening remarks that the new and “complex landscape of child abuse” due to technology and social media allows predators a new “ability to invade lives and homes.”
The annual Community Response to Child Abuse Conference brings together social workers, medical professionals, teachers and school officials, law enforcement, mental health providers, child advocates and members of the legal community to continue education surrounding child abuse and strengthen response efforts.
This year’s focus is digital safety, said Chrissie Young, director of the Center for Prevention of Child Maltreatment at the University of South Dakota.
The focus comes from an “explosion” of online child harm in the last five years, increasing at an “alarming rate” after the COVID pandemic, she said. During the pandemic, many children were given unsupervised access to the internet.
That not only means more risk to children regarding bullying, cyberstalking and sextortion, but an increase in cases of children putting self-generated, sexually explicit imagery online. Young added that increased access and use has led to higher rates of depression and anxiety among children.
Social media use can create an “addictive response” in children, similar to nicotine, alcohol and cocaine, studies show. Excessive social media use is anything over two hours a day, according to some experts, with many adolescents spending up to four hours a day on social media and their phones.
Expert evaluates SD efforts
Warren Binford, the keynote speaker for the conference and an international children’s rights scholar and advocate at the University of Colorado, said she was encouraged to learn of South Dakota lawmakers’ planned legislation.
Requiring age verification could encourage platforms to “bring a fence around children” in digital spaces and protect them from online predators, Binford said. That includes restricting engagement with other online users who aren’t their age or close relatives, and restricting children from creating shadow accounts unbeknownst to parents.
Binford was frustrated by the decision not to recommend legislation that would have required website-based age verification to access adult content.
A bill with that aim failed last winter in the state Senate after passing in the House, primarily due to concerns about legal battles surrounding similar legislation in other states. Binford said the “wait and see” approach isn’t helpful to children who are experiencing difficulties now. She added that websites manage age verification requirements for gambling and alcohol, and that the same can be done for pornography.
Online pornography sites are “not the ‘Playboys’ of their dads’ and grandpas’ days,” Binford said. The sites are a voluminous source of pornography that can sometimes be humiliating or violent. If children are exposed to that, it can compromise their understanding of human sexuality, leading them to become dependent on the explicit content and prone to hurtful sexual relationships with other people.
“I think it’s important for every state to pass this legislation regardless of what’s going on in the court system,” Binford told South Dakota Searchlight.
Legislative action anticipated
Sioux Falls Republican Rep. Taylor Rehfledt expects the age verification pornography bill to be re-introduced even if it isn’t recommended by the summer study committee. Rehfeldt, who attended the child abuse conference, plans to support the bill again.
Young, of the Center for Prevention of Child Maltreatment, said age verification for adult content sites is “critical” for South Dakota children. While the Legislature is taking a positive step in recommending age verification for app stores and device makers, it’s important that information is communicated to web browsers, she said. And children can still access obscene or adult content from non-mobile devices, which isn’t addressed in the summer study’s requested drafts.
“I think they’re taking the right approach. It’s one piece of the puzzle,” Young said, adding that she’d like to see the Legislature take a larger role in consumer protection laws for children, such as requiring social media platforms to implement guardrails for children on the platforms. Guardrails might include notification restrictions, eliminating auto-play for children’s accounts, or interrupting social media “infinite scrolling.”
Binford applauded efforts by some school districts in South Dakota to remove cell phones from classrooms. The summer study committee does not plan to pursue a statewide policy for cell phone use in schools.
Binford added that she believes schools should require universal online safety education — especially for middle and high school students and their parents — so they can understand the risks they face and how to protect themselves. That could be a statewide requirement with implementation control at the local level, she said.
She also recommends more funding for frontline workers, such as social workers and law enforcement personnel, to train in digital safety and technology facilitated harm.
Rehfeldt said she doesn’t see a likelihood of increased funding from the Legislature to meet those training needs. But she did say the conference confirmed for her that lawmakers will have to play a role in protecting children in digital spaces, especially since Binford and others at the conference presented evidence that exposure to technology and social media is negatively impacting South Dakota children.
“If we don’t start doing something to move in the right direction, it’ll get worse,” Rehfeldt said.