Start taking an active interest

WHEN anybody looks at safety – particularly for their child – it’s the physical environment they look at.

When it comes to the internet, they can’t see it and so they don’t see the risk and they don’t see the need for safety.

The internet is truly global. The whole world is in that room. If you visualise that, you see the enormity of safety issues in cyberspace.

To put it another way, every single criminal in the world can have access to that room.

These online chatrooms [like the one used by the girl in this example] exist and there’s many millions of them.

It’s about having a dialogue between parents and children that currently is not happening. Children are upstairs on the computer, parents stay downstairs because they might not understand the computer.

One of the most important things to do is put the computer in the room where the TV is. The kitchen or lounge are the two best places to have computer access.

Parents can then be engaged without being overly protective. It’s not that you are watching everything they do – but you are taking an active interest in what’s going on.

What we have got to do is minimise the risk because that’s all you can do at the end of the day.

There can be inappropriate contact and that has to be known from a very early age. I think the education system has to be making that very clear.

We need to change the culture of modern society. Start the conversation early – the earlier the better.

The best resource I recommend to parents is getsafeonline.org. It’s full of information and is regularly updated. Every single police force adds to it and monitors it.

There are smartphone parental controls as well as parental controls for your

computer.