News Our Feedback to EC 14 October 2022
Have your say - Youth strategy
You can also get involved in forming EU laws. The European Commission would like to hear your views on laws and policies currently in development. They offer a platform "Have your say" with the list of all new EU initiatives open for public consultation. You need to register to write your feedback. https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say
EU Youth Strategy 2019-2027 – interim evaluation
About this initiative: The aim of this initiative is to evaluate the strategy’s overall effectiveness and performance, efficiency, relevance, coherence and EU added value.
Feedback period: for stage 2 it is 23 September 2022 - 21 October 2022
Feedback from Europeans for Safe Connections
We "Europeans for Safe Connections" think that EU Youth Strategy fails to fulfil its aims.
One of EU Youth Strategy aims is "to support social and civic engagement". Young people should develop respect and tolerance for minorities, people with handicap, people with other opinions and needs - this includes people that do not like cigarette smog as well as people that do not like electro smog. Young people should learn that using wireless is the same as smoking - the exposition reaches also your surrounding.
One of EU youth policies is "Health and well-being of young people". But young people are not educated how to use modern technologies safely. It's like a baby playing with the knife. We have to teach them how to use it safely so that they do not harm themselves nor others. The same applies to wireless products.
Young people have the right to explore the world and enrich their lives with information. Adults and responsible authorities have a duty to ensure healthy psychosocial and physiologic development.
Children have a "gift" that they learn easily how to use tablets, mobile phones and computers, so it is not necessary to increase efforts in digital education. On the opposite, we think that children are increasingly exposed to uncontrollable digitisation in schools and at home, and that non-digital skills are being reduced. By overusing digital tools, children's graphomotor skills, memory, creativity, decision-making and problem-solving can be compromised. Researcher Rüdiger Maas found that children are becoming more and more dependent and unhappy and blaims digital media as a reason. www.focus.de/familie/kindergesundheit/ruediger-maas-im-focus-online-interview-wir-erziehen-eine-generation-von-ungluecklichen-kindern-mahnt-forscher_id_24431828.html
A number of medical researchers confirm that digital technologies can be compared to digital drugs. It is irrelevant whether we are talking about addiction to computer games, social media, watching television, Internet multimedia content or just browsing the Internet. It's all a connected vessel. Children learn addiction quite early and get dopamine and adrenaline through screens. There is a reduced need for face-to-face socialising, going out, playing sports. Psychological problems arise from the lack of screen time, which can develop into serious conditions. There is also harmful effect of blue light on the brain. Add to these facts the fact that most authorities (whether institutions or parents) are completely unaware that wireless technology damages child's health, either acutely or in the long term.
Let's teach kids and teens that all technology can be useful, but it also has downsides. Encourage creativity and healthy curiosity, but at the same time ensure that technology does not become a digital drug or a means of harmful exposure, which will ultimately harm a child's health and development.
It is essential to educate all stakeholders, including educational authorities and organisations involved in the digitalisation in education, about the pitfalls of wireless technologies. By adult's example they would also be indirectly educated. It is necessary to promote discussion on the inclusion of a preventive approach in the national curricula of the Ministries of Education and Health and on the onset of use at a later stage in development.
Best regards
Petra Bertová and Kamil Bartošák
on behalf of the Europeans for Safe Connections
This feedback was sent from a wired internet connection
- No use of harmful radiation
- Less electricity consumption
- Increased data security
Feedback from l’Association Résistance 5G Nantes
The problem of children and young adolescents facing digital tools concerns the addiction to cell phones and, more broadly, the addiction to screens caused by the captology of attention that has been very well established by neuroscientists working for GAFAM (and that some of them have denounced): catastrophic addiction for health, concentration, memorization, social relations, etc. This has been well demonstrated by neurologists Michel Desmurget and Manfred Spitzer, among others.
1. The evil comes from GAFAM and Silicon Valley. These people have worked on how to capture the attention of everyone, especially young people and children, the old targets of advertisers. However, the leaders and executives of GAFAM have taken radical measures to protect their own children from screens and cell phones (schools without screens, no personal screens or mobiles before the age of 15).
2. The OECD's international Pisa survey clearly sounds the alarm: teaching with digital tools is globally impoverishing, especially for learning the mother tongue and math. This is perfectly understood by the designers of GAFAM who protect their children.
3. Concerning mobile telephony and children’s brain cancers, the Mobi-Kids study was largely influenced by the operator Orange, which masked its obvious conflicts of interest. This was recognized afterwards (and minimized) after the Phonegate Alert investigation denounced it. Europe should therefore denounce it too ; . industrial lobbies cannot continue to manipulate science with impunity.
4. Cell phone manufacturers are fiddling the head, trunk and pelvis SARs of their devices on a massive scale, either at the design stage or during upgrades. This is even more dangerous for children and young adolescents. These manufacturers must be ruthlessly prosecuted. As for the SAR measurement protocols, they must be reviewed in a more restrictive way (in contact with the head and the body).
To protect our children and youth, prevention efforts must be massively increased throughout Europe, in all establishments that welcome children and parents. In response to the alarming findings in the field, a number of local authorities and regional health agencies in France are already funding initiatives to prevent the risks associated with overexposure to screens, the most important of which are health and human risks (major developmental delays, behavioral problems, sleep disorders, language problems, delays in schooling, etc.), as well as exposure to violence, cyber-bullying and pornography (from the age of 8 onwards). This is all the more important as overexposure to screens is most often combined with exposure to radio frequencies which are now known to disrupt brain activity. We therefore invite the European public authorities to increase their efforts in this direction in all establishments, in particular: day nurseries, after-school care, primary, secondary and high schools.
We must therefore make a strong effort to raise awareness, while respecting three conditions:
1. Awareness must concern the "educational world" in the broadest sense : pupils, but also parents and the educational community, including teachers, management and school doctors;
2. The solicited associations or institutions must be able to demonstrate the absence of conflict of interest, in other words, they must not be financed by the digital industry, which has invested the field of prevention in order to better influence it;
3. Carry an ambitious message:
- Respect the recommendations of the WHO and pediatricians' associations by banning the sale of digital toys, tablets and computers for babies and children under 3 years old. This also implies a ban on the sale or promotion of smartphone applications for children under 3.
- No screens before 5 years old : in line with the World Health Organization's message of "as little screen time as possible" before 5 years old.
- No more than one hour per day before 10 years old.
- No smartphones before the age of 15, as is the case for the children of GAFAM executives: access to the Internet for children on their own inexorably exposes them to inappropriate content.
- Encourage the "No Screen Challenge" or "Disconnect Challenge" : successfully implemented in France for the past 20 years, this appears to be the best way until now to raise awareness, allowing participants to discover the benefits of disconnection.
- Possibly authorize the use of the phone without internet for young people under 15 years old in order to establish a link with parents (school outing times etc.) by recommending the hands-free kit, and not to apply it against the ear, the trunk and at the level of the pelvis.
- Prohibit the access of minors to pornographic content up to the age of 18 years of age, in accordance with the law.
- Be inspired by the article n° L227/24 of the French Penal Code, transposed in the law of June 17, 2008, to all primary, middle and high school students, as well as their parents, defining digital harassment as a crime (risk for the authors of harassment of up to 3 years of imprisonment and 45000 € of fine).
Promote books and notebooks instead of screens at school:
- No screens present within nurseries, preschools and elementary school. The connections for the administration must be wired, and wifi and bluetooth prohibited.
- No screens outside of the teaching of computer science at the college.
- The screens used in the school environment must remain in the establishments.
- End the principle of replacing notebooks and books with expensive digital tablets, often diverted from their educational use.
For many communities, offering tablets was seen as an opportunity to give a "gift" to their citizens while contributing to improving education. However, the ecological, economic and psychological cost of these devices is enormous. Bad-adapted and rapidly obsolete, they often end up in a closet or are diverted to serve as game consoles, or the data is collected for the benefit of industrialists with little concern for the general interest. Favoring deconcentration, enemies of memorization, they are more the enemies than the allies of learning.
Thus, as long as no serious - and independent - study demonstrates the famous "benefit/risk" of these digital terminals, it is recommended to stop their distribution and to maintain the use of printed books and notebooks. In the future, for basic democratic purposes, any introduction of digital tools in schools should be subject to prior consultation and validation by the educational community of the school (teachers, school medicine, management, parents and students).
l’Association Résistance 5G Nantes
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid02227hZBxc9gD7gyNrDMQyHds5is1cDVxKeYbA1SZXrS2X3J6YYmN495jXZd66fsHnl&id=100082714988907