The Protection Policy for Youth Online in Japan

Review of Evidence Based Policy Making

OECD (2012a) advised all stakeholders to reduce online risks and provide a safer Internet environment. This recommendation obliges every stakeholder to provide a safer online environment for teenagers and young people. To provide effective protection, it is important to implement a youth protection policy at every level of government, as well as in the private sector and educational organizations. Without clear role definitions, it will be difficult to implement a concrete protection policy.

The most effective way to solve these problems is to think about each problem separately, clarifying the political tasks each sector should deal with. One tactic that can help to achieve this is to adopt an Evidence Based Policy (EBP).

An EBP is an approach derived from Evidence Based Medicine; it was proposed by Gordon Guyatt at Manchester University in Canada (Tsutani 2000). EBP is used in areas such as social policy, educational policy, and welfare policy (Sowaki 2010). The OECD (2007) has argued that EBP-based policy making enables people and organizations to choose clear and simple evidence from among many options. EBP has been widely adopted in various policy areas for evidence based policy making.

Nishimura (2005) pointed out that evidence should be based on “objective and politically neutral statistical indicators.” Such evidence would gain public understanding and help to establish trust between government and society (OECD 2004). In addition, the OECD (2012) has emphasized the need to set indicators as metrics of the evidence, allowing people to visualize the actual condition of each political area.

From these discussions, it seems clear that EBM can be effective in supporting rational decision making for effective educational policy implementation. One key measure to promote the policy will involve establishing an indicator to evaluate the evidence.