Woman's Hour - Parenting: Sharenting

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

Sharenting is the overuse of social media by parents to share content based on their children, such as baby pictures or blogs describing what their children are up to. Posts which adults may see as engaging or funny may not be viewed as such by the children involved when they grow into teenagers or young adults applying for their first job. Jane speaks to Claire Bessant, a solicitor and associate professor at Northumbria law school and Leah Plunkett, an associate professor of legal skills at the University of New Hampshire in the US and author of ‘Sharenthood’.

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, this is Jane Garvey and this is the Woman's Hour Parenting Podcast. This week it's about sharenting, oversharing effectively on social media, cutesy or maybe not so cutesy images of your children, anecdotes about what they've done and what they've said. Is it wise and what could lie in store for you in the future? I talked to Claire Besant, who is Associate Professor at Northumbria Law School, and to Associate Professor of Legal Skills at the University of New Hampshire in the States,

Leah Plunkett, also the author of a useful book on this subject called Sherendhood. So I asked Claire, first of all, whether if you are a parent effectively you can post images of your children doing pretty much whatever you like whenever you like for children they do have a right to privacy just as any adult would have a right to privacy but the difficulty that children face which adults perhaps don't face is how they actually go about exercising those rights, how they would bring a claim if someone actually did breach their right to privacy. So technically you could put anything up there. It's whether a child would then be able to do something about it,

which is the real question, which we don't have 100% answers to yet. But does all that change then as soon as the child becomes 18, their own image belongs to them and nobody else? Well, technically their images belong to them the whole time. Just because you're a parent doesn't mean that you own your child or that you have a right to make every decision in relation to that child. And there's been cases, going right back to the Gillett case which makes clear that a parent does have responsibilities in relation to their children

but the decisions that they can make they dwindle and that as a child gets older they have much more ability to make those decisions themselves. Okay bear with me one moment we're really short of time Leah can you tell us about the situation in the States then? In the United States, parents can post images of their children unless those images would violate what we would call a law of general applicability. So you cannot post an image of your child if that image would violate criminal law, if that image would reflect abuse or neglect of the child or, heaven forbid, pornography. But really, until you get to those outer limits of what criminal or other general bodies of law would prohibit, parents in the U.S. do get to choose when, whether, how and why to post images of their minor children. And we should be clear here, we're not talking about people who make a living out of their

family life. And there are plenty of people out there, YouTubers, people on Instagram, vloggers who catalogue every single day in their children's lives. We're talking about the average person, Claire. And I just wonder how much, honestly, the average parent knows about all this and understands what they're doing. Yeah, I think there's not enough data out there at the moment as to what parents do understand and whether they do appreciate that there could be risks posed to their children or that their children have got a right to privacy and what the implications are if they do start to put information out there.

Because obviously we've always shared information about our children, whether that's with friends, whether that's with family. But the difference nowadays is that when something is shared online, it can be up there forever. Something that you share thinking it's just with a handful of friends can be spread further if it's tagged or reposted. So it's a hugely different scenario to what it was 10, 15 years ago. Leah, there was an absolutely dreadful case in the

United States of effectively a famous online family who were, they were guilty of neglect, but they also had half a million subscribers watching their family life. It was unbelievable. That's correct. So that you're referring to the YouTube channel Daddy05 that was run by the Martin family. And they were positioning themselves as a family prank channel. So they would play little jokes on each other and on the kids. But it took a really dark turn. And they were in particular playing what they called jokes on one of their children, a young boy named Cody. And the images were so disturbing that viewers contacted Child Protective Services.

Some of the children in the family were removed from the family's custody for a bit. And the YouTube channel was taken down. And one of the things I find so alarming about this is that they got to half a million followers. It's devastating. Yeah. And that's an extreme half a million followers before. Yeah, well, it's devastating. Yeah. And that's an extreme example, unfortunately, rare. But I just wonder, it seems to me, Claire, to be the logical step, that there ought to be some kind of warning put out before you post any image of a child.

Wouldn't it be logical for something to flash up on the screen saying, are you certain you want to post this image of Tallulah sitting on the potty bearing in mind that she could be the Secretary of State for Defence in 35 years? I think that'd be an excellent way to deal with it and irrespective of whether she's going to be a Prime Minister in 35 years Tallulah might not like that in two years time she's probably not going to like it in 10 years time and really it's probably not just even putting something out there to tell parents think about it but just having a wider education for children so that they maybe start the conversation with their parents as well as parents being told about it the nspcc has a

family online agreement a sort of pro forma that can help families actually discuss what do parents put out there as well as what do children put out there? Because obviously there are issues nowadays, children could be putting things out about their parents that parents might object to. And it's probably there needs to be a whole discussion between families about generally what do we want to put out there and how is that going to make us feel? I know you actually believe this is pivotal don't you Claire that you should have a conversation with your children and actually tell them what it is you're posting of them on social media and who's seeing it? I do because at the end of the day the majority of the information that is being put out there when parents share it is the children's information. I mean, there are cases where parents are obviously sharing information, which is to talk about their parenting, the struggles that they're having, and which is information about themselves. But inevitably, if they're talking about themselves and how they parent, they've got to be revealing some information about their children as well.

It's difficult, isn't it? Because parenting can come as a real shock to people. It's a huge responsibility. It can be very lonely. And by sharing images and going on Facebook groups and all the rest of it, well, you can make connections, can't you? Yeah, and there's a huge amount of evidence that shows that a lot of parents are sharenting because of the support that they gain from it, particularly groups where children are suffering from illnesses or where parents need particular support that maybe their immediate community or their family can't provide.

That if they can share with like-minded parents, they can get the support from them that they couldn't get closer to home. I know you've looked at blogs, people who write specific parenting blogs. What concerns you about them Claire? I suppose one of the things there is if it's a blog it tends to be on a constant basis. It is an in-depth discussion of the family's life. It tends to be much more detail that is going out to the world and blogs tend to be public available as opposed to when parents are sharing on facebook quite often they can have privacy settings so that they are limiting who actually sees what's out there just is any of it completely undeletable if there is an image of me sitting on a potty out there on the internet is there anything i can do to delete it technically the you have got rights under the data protection act and the data protection

regulation that say that you could ask for information to be taken down and it would be the same if i posted something up about you that you could then say well actually i didn't want that to be up there can that be taken down so technically there are ways to go about it I suppose the question is if I've put something up there about you someone else has seen it and they've reposted it somewhere else and someone else has seen it so the truth is there's no hope really difficult it gets really difficult and of course it's not just family and friends it's schools as well what right as a parent do you have with regard to what your school does? Schools are bound by the Data Protection Act and by the data protection regulations.

So the position with regard to schools is perhaps much clearer in law, I'd say, because they are bound to actually tell parents what they're going to post up or at least give them guidance, provide them with privacy policies saying what type of information they might be posting online, the types of purposes if it's for an educational purpose and they're much more likely to actually ask parents to provide consent. So that's relatively simple. I just wonder how far away or how close do you think we are to a situation in Britain where a person, a young person, takes legal action against their parents? Gosh, that's really hard. A few years ago, there was a newspaper article that suggested there was an Austrian child who was suing her dad because he refused to take down photographs.

Now, it turned out really to be, I think, a bit of a hoax. But it really did start the discussion going. And I looked into all of the law at the time, and technically you could perhaps use data protection, although there's potential issues with that. There are court remedies as well, if parents are posting confidential information or if they're sharing private information about the child but there

are issues for the child in terms of if they can get a solicitor to represent them how they would pay to go to court whether the courts would think that they had the mental capacity to actually bring those proceedings so there's all sorts of hurdles for children that adults wouldn't have in a very similar situation if someone shared information about them. But put very simply, Claire, think before you post is the bottom line, isn't it? Thank you very much. Yeah. OK, thank you.

Really appreciate it. That's Claire Besant. And that was the Woman's Hour Parenting Podcast. If there's something you'd like us to cover in this podcast, contact the programme via the website bbc.co.uk slash womanshour. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies.

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