Harry and Meghan want to protect children. They can’t escape her father’s shadow

Brussels: Prince Harry has a message for big tech companies that channels a sentiment shared by the Australian parliament – and many Australian parents.

Joined by his wife, Meghan, the prince arrived at the European parliament on Tuesday (Brussels time) to intensify calls on social media giants to make their platforms safer for young people.

“Don’t put anything in front of our children that you wouldn’t put in front of your own children,” he said at an event in Brussels to promote online safety.

“The majority of these companies, they don’t let their children on social media because they know the dangers.

“So why would you create something that you know is going to harm someone else’s child?”

Harry made the remarks on stage without Meghan speaking alongside him, although she was in the room and arrived with him in a long-awaited appearance.

This was the first time the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had appeared together in front of the cameras since the shocking criminal charges were levelled against Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle, in Florida last week.

American prosecutors have charged Markle with possessing child sexual abuse material and produced evidence that suggests he appeared in photographs with some of the alleged victims.

Markle denied the claims and was released from detention last Friday on the condition he wore an electronic monitoring device – only to be arrested again on Tuesday after trying to remove the device from his ankle. Florida police said he was arrested after he tried to cut off the ankle bracelet in the early hours of the morning. Once again, Meghan’s father was making headlines for all the wrong reasons. (The news broke early on Wednesday, AEDT).

His son – and Meghan’s half-brother – Thomas Markle jnr, was also named as a “person of interest” in the investigation last week.

The Brussels event, held at the centre of parliamentary power in the European Union, was meant to include joint remarks by Harry and Meghan, but those plans changed after the US prosecution.

The duchess chose not to speak or to take questions at the event because of the global attention on her and her father.

“She’s just not strong enough, emotionally, to be doing any public speaking right now,” one of her supporters told the British media.

Meghan broke off contact with her father in 2018 and revealed last month that she had been warned in 2019 about his conduct. She said she had seen a letter that made accusations against him, and had given it to British police. The Metropolitan Police have launched an inquiry to determine why they did not act on the concerns.

The Duchess of Sussex also said she acted to shield her children – Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5 – from her father.

“I hope it can now be understood that, despite certain media publications’ distortion over the years, any distance from my father, and my choice to not allow him to have contact with our children, was for one reason: to protect them,” she said in a statement on October 24.

That is not enough for her critics, however, who have questioned her stated support for children at the event in Brussels and wondered why she did not go public with the letter about her father years ago.

Biographer Andrew Lownie, whose devastating book about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor delved deeply into royal scandal, said Meghan did not seem to be surprised by the allegations.

“One has to question what did she know and why didn’t she say anything?” he told The Times of London last week. “She’s campaigning on so many issues, but this is not one that she seems to have taken any interest in up ’til now.”

One critic, Daily Beast editor Tom Sykes, went over the public timeline to accuse Meghan of falsely blaming the royal family for her suicidal thoughts in 2019. In a celebrated interview with Oprah Winfrey, she had blamed “racist” media coverage as a big factor in her life.

Sykes concluded that Meghan’s anguish stemmed from revelations about her father in the letter she saw in 2019, rather than any conduct by the royal family or the media.

This is a convenient angle for the British media, which turned on Harry and Meghan with a vengeance when they chose to quit their royal duties in January 2020 and then moved to California in March that year.

But it is based on big assumptions about what Meghan knew about her father. It also seems to suggest she could have gone public about him in 2019, when the police inquiry is yet to determine why nobody acted on the letter she handed to the police that year.

Amid this furore, Meghan avoided commenting on the case when she appeared with Harry in Brussels. She held her husband’s hand when they arrived at the online safety event, but she left all the speaking to him once it was under way.

While critics question the couple’s campaign to protect children, they have been active on the issue for at least six years. Harry wrote an opinion column for US magazine Fast Company in August 2020 that called for social media to be “redesigned” to look after the mental health of young people.

Harry and Meghan did not pioneer this campaign on social media, and many others did more than them. Even so, they were active before Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen released damning files in 2021 about the company’s strategies to recruit young customers. They were also active before American psychologist Jonathan Haidt released an influential book, The Anxious Generation, in 2024.

All the signs suggest the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are serious about bringing social media under greater control to protect children and their mental health, regardless of the media scrutiny over the Markle case.

Everything Harry said in Brussels could have been said by Liberal leader Peter Dutton in 2024, when he and colleague David Coleman called for age restrictions on social media, and by Anthony Albanese the same year, when the prime minister picked up that proposal and put it to parliament.

“This has to be about prevention,” Harry said in Brussels.

“We can no longer sit here and wait for thousands more children to lose their lives, and thousands more parents, millions more parents, to have their children’s lives changed forever.

“This whole mission has to be about safety by design. By the time that it’s on the phone, in an app, in a kid’s hands, it’s already too late.”

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