Interviews// Dr Tanya Byron - The Exit Interview

SPOnG: I'm getting images of you stood up in court...

Tanya Byron: It was a bit like that! Before me, Google had their session and I sat through that and they (the select committee) were pretty tough on them, so by the time I sat in the chair I was thinking, 'this is going to be hideous!' But it was fine.


SPOnG: Do you think the contents of your report will inform the select committee to some degree then?

Tanya Byron: Well, they'll publish their own report. But they won't do, for example, the huge literature review that I have...

Can I talk about that? Because there's been some stuff on some other gaming websites asking questions about how the research has been done for this.


SPOnG: By all means...

Tanya Byron: It would would be great if you could help people understand this, because I wouldn't want there to be any questioning of the Review based on the fact that there's been some odd reports on how the research was done.

When we started, we identified the key academics in the field both in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world. We asked them to submit what they thought were their top five papers, because I felt I needed to start somewhere but I needed a bit of a boundary around it because otherwise I'll be drowning in it.

Once I'd done that and got a sense of the polarisation within the research world itself, I then commissioned Professor David Buckingham from the Institute of Education to do a really comprehensive literature review and to prepare me a report (you can see Professor Buckingham's IOE profile here – ed). So, the literature that I'm reviewing in my Byron Review is comprehensive and up to date. You'll see from the bibliography that we read pretty much everything we needed to read in order to make the recommendations.


SPOnG: Have you met Keith Vaz?

Tanya Byron: I did. I met him the other day with Mrs Pakeera.


SPOnG: Did you see his comments the other day? He asked in Parliament, "When can we have a debate on the excellent Byron review, which was published this morning? It accepts finally and for the first time that children can be affected by violent video games and access to the internet”. How would respond to that?

Tanya Byron: Well, I'm glad that he was positive about it, obviously, because he's someone who has a lot to say about this issue and is very passionate about it. I think he's correct in saying that my report does accept that violent video games and inappropriate content on the internet can have a negative impact on some children. But what I'm not saying is that there is a simple causal model, that the technology in itself harms children. I'm not saying that.

What I'm saying is, you have to think about the child. It's more about what the child brings to the technology, which will mediate their experience, than the technology itself.

So, if you have a young child, whose brain isn't developed enough to differentiate between fantasy and reality, who cannot critically evaluate the context of what they're experiencing, clearly you don't want them to be playing extremely violent video games or games of an extreme sexual nature. They just won't be able to understand it, and it may impact on them in a way that could be negative, even if it just distresses them or makes them very stressed and unhappy.

So, I'm glad that he welcomed it, and for me what's been very interesting about this review is that it seems to have united some previously very polarised parties, and I think that's a good place. I think if we can continue along those lines we can start to have a much more sensible debate that's less about blame and more about how we can move forward to make sure children play the many, many brilliant computer and video games that are produced for them, but also that we can empower parents to say no to their kids, and to empower retailers to also help at the point of sale.