“The Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre works incredibly hard to protect children on the Internet.  Children are its inspiration.  Children are its focus.  A huge amount of the work they do is aimed specifically at children.  Therefore, children should be involved in their work in order to ensure that it is modern, hard hitting and engaging for children and young people

For this reason, CEOP has set up its own Youth Advisory Panel - a team of up to sixty eleven to eighteen year olds who give up their time to keep CEOP’s resources contemporary, appealing and “cool” and to ensure that CEOP’s messages about the importance of safer internet usage are delivered in a way that appeals directly to the target audience ….children.

I believe that this Youth Advisory Panel, whereby children are directly involved in the work of the Centre, is a crucial factor contributing towards the success of CEOP in educating and empowering children to stay safe online.

Who knows best what will have the greatest impact on children?  Children.  And who will now have the ability to go online and feel informed, comfortable and safe in their use of the internet?  Children.  And who now has the power to influence the work of a centre which is globally renowned for its incredible work?  Children.  It all revolves around children.  Therefore, the Youth Advisory Panel is an innovative and creative way of emphasising not only the importance of children’s opinions within this field of work, but also ensuring that their opinions are valued and taken into consideration in order to influence online child protection in a highly positive way.”

By Jodie White
Student

10 July 2007

Keywords: CEOP, Youth Panel, Children, Young People.