A Rotorua paediatrician says she wants people under 16 banned from having social media because she sees the mental and physical damage it causes.
Dr Aimee Kettoola supports a national lobby group that is pushing for legislative change to ban popular social media apps as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram.
Kettoola said a recent sex offending case in Rotorua highlighted the reason she was fighting for a law change.
Raveen Saily groomed two Bay of Plenty teenagers on Snapchat and sexually assaulted them.
Last week he admitted grooming a third victim – an Auckland 11-year-old he also met on Snapchat.
In the Rotorua case, Saily, 23, befriended a 13-year-old online last year and raped her after convincing her to meet up.
At the time he was on bail awaiting trial for raping a 16-year-old in public changing rooms in Mount Maunganui.
He was jailed in December last year for the Mount Maunganui charges and will be sentenced in December for the Rotorua offending.
Kettoola said the case was “just one of the many, I can tell you”.
Kettoola is a general paediatrician working in Rotorua for Te Whatu Ora Lakes, is a trained sexual assault assessment and treatment service provider and holds various youth worker roles.
She said she had seen a “massive increase” in online grooming and predatory behaviour through her work with at-risk and high-achieving youth.
“It is regular young people who are being approached online and are meeting up with people with really tragic outcomes,” Kettoola said.
“No amount of monitoring or education is going to improve that because there are adults with sinister intentions.”
She said there was overwhelming evidence of other damage social media caused young people and she witnessed the impacts “on the frontline”.
These included anxiety, depression, mental distress, low self-esteem, disorders, poor sleep and attention issues.
She did not want the next generation to face the same difficulties.
“One of the most pivotal things that will change our culture is to get them off social media. They are not developed to deal with the barrage of imagery they are being fed.”
She said removing a small percentage from using social media led to them being socially isolated, so the only answer was legislative change.
Kettoola backed the lobby group B416’s campaign advocating for digital age protections.
Recent figures obtained by B416 under the Official Information Act showed there had been 2109 Harmful Digital Communications Act cases involving people under 16 since the act came into force in 2015.
The act covers serious online harm, including emotional abuse, privacy breaches and sharing intimate images without consent.
In the Bay of Plenty, there have been 109 complaints under the act.
Nationally, nearly 900 children were recorded as offenders under the act. Few cases made it to court, with a majority handled informally, often through warnings or alternative action, the Official Information Act data showed.
Only one Bay of Plenty case led to a conviction and sentence, one other was dismissed when the offender completed diversion and another case did not proceed.
All others did not result in court action. Nationally, 104 cases resulted in court action since 2015.
B416 spokeswoman Dr Samantha Marsh, from the University of Auckland, said the figures reflected a system failing to keep pace with the scale of harm.
“We don’t let 12-year-olds into nightclubs. Why are we letting them into algorithm-driven digital environments that are designed to manipulate and addict?”
B416 is calling for a minimum age of 16 for access to social media, alongside stronger enforcement, platform accountability and education.
After a strong response to National MP Catherine Wedd’s proposed Social Media Age-Restricted Users Bill in May, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon put the issue into the Government’s official workstream.
Parliament’s Education and Workforce Select Committee is undertaking an inquiry into the harm young New Zealanders may be exposed to online.
Submissions closed on July 30 and oral hearings by invitation will be held. The select committee will report to the House by the end of November.
Kelly Makiha is a senior journalist who has reported for the Rotorua Daily Post for more than 25 years, covering mainly police, court, human interest and social issues.