Hundreds attend Community Response to Child Abuse Conference
Photo: Warren Binford, an international children’s rights scholar and advocate at the University of Colorado, speaks on Oct. 3, 2024, during the Community Response to Child Abuse Conference in Sioux Falls. (Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight)
News Article by 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.
Read the full article on the South Dakota Searchlight here.
