The author of a major report that demolished the precepts of transgender ‘care’ for children has now warned that Britain is engaging in a “deliberate social experiment” by allowing minors to use smartphones for several hours a day.
Warning of potentially deleterious impacts of screen time on children, Dr Hillary Cass has suggested that the UK should consider following Australia in banning social media for under-16s.
Baroness Cass of Barnet, who was given a seat in the House of Lords earlier this year in recognition of her work on transgenderism treatments for children, warned in her maiden speech last month that smartphone use in children was tied to increased rates of anxiety, depression and insomnia, especially for those who already have mental health issues or face bullying in school.
“Everyone in this House knows that children are not like adults, only smaller. They are in a dynamic state of physical, personal and emotional development,” she said per The Times of London.
“If we imagine a deliberate social experiment where we exposed children to several hours of screen time a day, including potentially harmful content, some negative effects would surely be inevitable — and that is what we have done.”
Speaking to The House magazine this week, Baroness Cass added: “We’ve got to find better ways of protecting children and young people…But I think we’ve just got to be really creative and think about multimodal ways.”
“Many schools are doing the right thing and have very good policies in place [on phone use], but our stats are still problematic. And so, I think, having that alone is not proving to be enough.”
Dr Cass, who was a relatively unknown paediatrician for most of her career, became the subject of international debate following the publication this year of her near-400 page review into ‘treatments’ given by the National Health Service to children claiming to be confused about their gender.
The review undercut key pillars of the transgenderism movement, notably finding that justifications for providing “gender affirming care”, such as the administration of puberty blocking drugs to children, was built on “shaky foundations”. She found that there was little evidence that such practices help the “mental or psychosocial health” of patients while the long-term “cognitive and psychosexual development” largely remain to be seen.
The report went on to claim that many doctors in Britain were “afraid” to speak out against the novel treatments as a result of the “toxicity” of the gender debate. This toxicity impacted Cass, herself, following the publication of her landmark report after which she said that security had advised her to stop taking public transport over concerns about her safety.
“The most challenging thing about this is people feeling that they can’t just ask what they want to ask. They can’t talk about it. If you talk about it, somebody says, ‘Well, you’re transphobic’. In medicine, if you have a topic that you can’t discuss, that’s really risky for the patients and for the clinical study,” Baroness Cass said this week.
The warnings from Cass about screen time for children comes as Australia is set to ban social media for children under the age of 16. Under the new law, which will not come into effect until next year, big tech firms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram will be required to block minors from using their platforms or face fines of up to A$49.5 million ($32 million).
The British government has said that it will be looking “very closely” at the Australian model, with Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle saying in September that a similar ban in the UK is “on the table” given the “considerable evidence” that social media was “harming vulnerable young people”.
