NETUCATION Blog

Tag: online pornography

  • Parents warned over children’s online safety

    Boy looking depress cyberbullyingProfessor says sexting is a problem in most schools, and calls for more communication between parents and children

    Parents are over-confident about keeping their children safe online but many are avoiding difficult conversations about sexting and cyberbullying, according to research.

    Andy Phippen, professor of social responsibility at Plymouth University, said sexting – where schoolchildren are encouraged to take explicit photographs of themselves and send to other pupils – was a problem in most schools, despite the study revealing that 89% of parents believe their child has not been touched by cyberbullying or sexting.

    “There is a disconnect between how safe parents think they can keep their children online and their actual ability to do that,” Phippen said. “Those conversations are not being had – we have a hell of a long way to go on internet safety. In schools we hear teachers unwilling to talk to teenagers about sexual images because they worry about their jobs, schools unwilling to record instances of cyberbulling because they are worried about their Ofsted reports.”

    But sexting was a real and present problem, he said, adding that on a recent school training day on internet safety boys at the school said sexting was common and cited an example of a video that had been shared of a 14-year-old girl at the school inserting a hairbrush into her vagina.

    Phippen said that some girls he had worked with around sexting said it was flattering if a “fit boy” asked for a explicit photograph of them, while others felt under pressure from older boys to send photographs of themselves in order to gain popularity. “It can be part of the mating ritual for teenagers,” said Phippen. “We know that schools are dealing with this on a regular basis, it is extremely rare to come into a school where it is not at all at problem.”

    More than half of parents with children in primary and secondary school and 42% of parents with teenagers who were questioned had not discussed porn with their children. And only 15% of parents with 15-18 year olds thought their children accessed pornography online. Parents are likely to be turning a blind eye to the real impact of online pornography, as evidence from the NSPCC shows that the majority of 14 year old boys and many teenagers have accessed this content.

    AVG security expert Tony Anscombe said half of the parents consider a school’s internet safety policy when making their selection, and 95% thought online safety should be mandatory in schools. “We know parents take responsibility of online safety seriously […] yet we’re not living up to the standards we’re setting by avoiding conversations about exposure to explicit adult content, privacy or other Internet-related threats,” he said. “It comes as no surprise then that nearly 90% of parents aren’t aware of whether their child has been exposed to cyberbullying or sexting – two of the most common internet risks facing children.”

    The survey of 2,000 parents carried out by AVG technologies and Plymouth University found 92% were confident about their ability to teach online safety. “People tend to think they are protected in some way, that there are parental fixes in place – but that is not always the case,” said Phippen.

    Some schools were making big efforts to ensure children stayed safe online, but without a lack of statutory guidance and compulsory sex and relationship education in schools, tackling of the issues facing children was patchy around the country, he said. The government was lagging behind internet service providers who were coming up with solutions to issues raised, such as “splash pages” due to be introduced that will warn users when they area about to view illegal online content and server setting that restrict access to content throughout a home, he added. The study showed that 79% of parents had not received an invite to discuss online safety at school, but 89% felt the government needed to do more to teach children about internet safety.

    “The industry is responding, but the government’s rhetoric is that ‘someone should do something’ instead of funding better education in this area, and making sex and relationship education compulsory,” he said.

    source: The Guardian newspaper

  • Online pornography: David Cameron’s war

    Eradicating child abuse images is tough; protecting children from seeing pornography is even more complex

    British Prime Minister David CameronThe Daily Mail’s preening claim to have “won” the battle against internet pornography had an appropriate sidebar beside it online, showing multiple celebrities wearing teeny bikinis and flaunting their curves. Such is the contradiction of David Cameron‘s “war” on porn on the web.

    Cameron’s crusade conflates two things. First are the child abuse images, which anyone sensible wants removed: they are records of exploitation of children who could not consent, who are being abused, and show criminal acts whose viewing criminalises others.

    Plenty of work goes into wiping out child abuse images, and making it impossible to access, through schemes such as BT’s Cleanfeed, Microsoft’s PhotoDNA, and Google’s own photo-hashing service. But eradicating child abuse images would really involve controlling peer-to-peer technology or password-protected forums.

    Second is the much more complex area of pornography that isn’t illegal, but to which the easy access afforded by the internet causes concern for any parent – and anyone interested in the sort of society children are growing up in.

    An article in the Times Educational Supplement by Chloe Combi provides a sober perspective, describing how easily accessible pornography is making secondary school pupils think pubic hair is ugly on women, sexting is normal and that porn film narratives and scenarios depict a version of real life to be aspired to.

    Move on from the Mail Online or Page 3 and you arrive at American websites, which see a sexual continuum between the ages of 13 (when you’re allowed to create profiles on Facebook, Twitter and so on, to meet US legislation – though in fact many children ignore that – and 18, when viewing “porn” suddenly becomes legal. Yet any parent knows that things change enormously between those ages.

    If Cameron really wanted to stop online pornography he could ask ISPs to ban YouTube, Blogger and Tumblr. The latter, recently acquired by Yahoo, is trying to tamp down the visibility of porn on its network – which is reckoned to extend to millions of blogs.

    Blogger was recently the target of a crackdown by Google, which didn’t want the “adult” “blogs” on there to be selling adverts for off-site adult services. Because it’s fine to be an adult blog (behind nothing more difficult to evade than a confirm-your-age button) and use Google adverts.

    It’s tempting to consider blocking YouTube at home, because it simply has no boundaries, and boundaries matter when you’re a parent. There is no easy way of preventing an eight-year-old, alone with a tablet and browsing YouTube for games videos from landing on some of the very adult-themed videos that are often linked to them – and it isn’t possible to supervise a child all the time.

    For the internet service providers, meanwhile, Cameron’s crusade is guaranteed bad news. You could start a sweepstake now for the first article saying “Internet Porn Filter FAILURE!” – pointing the finger at an ISP for failing to be filter comprehensively enough. And then after that there will be another child killer who has somehow managed to “evade” the filters, because the only way to stop someone really determined to access peer-to-peer systems or well-hidden sites is to cut off the internet.

    It’s been 18 months since Cameron last hassled the internet industry over this, and it’s sure to happen again, because new internet signups – who will now have to actively disable filters for pornography – happen slowly. In the meantime, we’re left with software filters, which are expensive, and hard to make work on newer devices such as tablets and smartphones. Or parental intervention, which is difficult and time-consuming. Monday marked an important day in the battle – but not a game-changing one.

    source: The Guardian, UK