The law changes our kids really need (and no, a social media ban isn’t one of them)

Monday, 12 May 2025

There are many gaps in our child protection laws needing urgent attention from lawmakers. But a social-media ban isn’t one of them, argues Georgina Stylianou.

Georgina Stylianou is a director of government relations firm BRG and has worked as a political staffer for National and NZ First. She is a former journalist. BRG provides public policy consulting services to Meta in NZ.

OPINION: There’s no doubt many Kiwi parents are concerned about their children’s screen time and what they’re seeing and interacting with online.

Some feel they have lost control and are unsure how to wrestle any back. Then there are others who simply don’t care and were quite happy to allow screens to play babysitter from a very young age.

There’s also no denying that last week’s announcement that we may look to follow Australia’s social media ban for under 16s will prove popular with many voters.

The politics may well play out exactly the way National had hoped, but the reality is we currently have no way of implementing such a law, nor enforcing it. We also haven’t grappled with a variety of potential implications around privacy and data, freedom of expression, pseudonymity, identity and access to mental health and support services.

Keeping under-16s away from social media is shallow at best, a populist distraction at worst, writes Georgina Stylianou.

We’re looking up to our trans-Tasman cousin, lauding praise on them for passing a rushed-through law with a now-uncertain commencement date that bizarrely excludes the likes of YouTube and the wildly popular Roblox game, which has been called a breeding ground for sex predators.

Framing a social media ban as being about protecting Kiwi children is shallow at best and a populist distraction at worst. Successive New Zealand governments have failed to protect our children.

There are myriad law changes, new policies and new funding initiatives needed ahead of our attention being focused on a social media age ban. Here are just a few.

About 1300 vulnerable Kiwi children who are the subject of reports of concern about potential neglect and abuse currently have no social worker assigned to them. They are falling through the cracks right before our eyes and are now at real risk of becoming the next grim statistic in our dire child abuse track record.

We don’t have enough social workers in New Zealand, and the ones we have aren’t paid enough. We’re not attracting the highest-calibre candidates to what should be viewed as a vital sector of our society.

New Zealand charity Safeguarding Children has repeatedly called for significant changes to key laws, including the Children’s Act and the Education Act, which they say repeatedly expose children to risk.

They want child safe standards embedded in our legislation and safety checks, including police vetting, mandated for every person who works or volunteers with children, to prevent child abuse from happening outside the home.

Last week was Rape Awareness Week and I learned that consent is still a legal defence for those charged with rape in this country – even if the alleged victim is a child. Current laws also allow children who are the victims of sexual offending to be cross-examined about whether they wanted, or even enjoyed, what had happened to them.

The bill, put forward by National backbencher and MP for Tukituki Catherine Wedd, is intended to protect young people from from bullying, inappropriate content and social media addiction by restricting access for under 16-year-olds.

At the start of the year, media reported on our shocking child sexual abuse and exploitation statistics, with the Department of Internal Affairs saying New Zealand reports to the US-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children had risen from 9971 in 2021 to 19,685 in 2023, reaching a peak of 30,090 in 2022.

The agency noted the clear link between those who possessed or supplied objectionable child abuse material and those who would abuse a child.

The fragmentation at a central government agency level when it comes to child sexual abuse material, cybersecurity, and generally all things digital has been clear to governments for many years.

We have laws that fail to protect our children because the bar for prosecution is either too high, they haven’t kept up with the modern environment, or they simply don’t exist. Even with legislative updates, our law enforcement agencies are too under-resourced to effectively tackle our country’s child exploitation problem.

In the online safety space, a clear candidate for a legislative paint job is the Harmful Digital Communications Act – a law seen as world-leading when passed under the last National Government in 2015, but now miserably outdated.

It doesn’t capture AI, doesn’t allow for Netsafe – as the approved agency under the act – to take claims forward on behalf of a victim, and it needs to be expanded to include one-to-many harm, not just one-to-one harm.

Back to the age ban discussion: there’s nothing that magically happens in a young person’s brain on their 16th birthday. Both parents, and our education system, need to equip young people for life in the modern environment and some countries have moved to include digital literacy skills in their high-school curriculums. It’s high time we did the same.

National claims to be focused on evidence-based policy, intervening only where there is both a clear problem, and, more importantly, a solution. It is disappointing that so far they have done neither when it comes to actually protecting Kiwi kids.

This column was updated on Tuesday May 13 to include a disclosure of the writer’s professional relationship with Meta.