Dr. Mary Aiken:

If one points to the haunted, spooky house on the hill and says, "Do not go there", it becomes attractive to kids. The answer to how they get into the deep web lies online. It is straightforward and parents would be horrified to know where their kids are. Cyberspace has to be conceptualised as a place, which is a paradigm shift. There is the real world where we are and there is cyberspace. NATO recently recognised cyberspace as a domain of operations and a domain of war, thus recognising that wars of the future will take place on land, sea, air and on computer networks. Now that we are at the point at which NATO is saying this is a place, we need to pay attention to that. We have to conceptualise cyberspace as a place, we have to think about our kids going there and then we have to think about the symbiotic relationship between what happens in a cyber context and the real world. One impacts on the other and there are consequences. The EU conceptualises the Internet as an infrastructure similar to a railway or a motorway but it is anything but; it is an entity that has the ability to have a profound and pervasive impact on humankind - on the individual in a psychological context and on the group in a sociological context.

We are passionate about this and we do this work pro bono. We volunteer our time to do this because I do not want to look back in ten or 20 years and say: "That happened on my watch. I could have informed policy." As policymakers, do members want to look back and say that this happened to all these kids on their watch? That is what motivates us.