Keeping children safe from the Web is harder

Achild zooms down a pavement on a scooter, heading straight for a busy road. A mother, her shouts ignored, is sprinting to catch up. And just in time he stops dead, his hand reaching up for the button on the pedestrian crossing.

Scary stuff, but teaching kids to stop at busy roads is basic parenting. Now think back to the last time you blearily handed a young child your iPad at 6 a.m., or left them playing on the CBeebies website while you knocked up dinner. Or, for those with teenagers, thought nothing of leaving them all evening to ping messages back and forth on BBM, Facebook, Snapchat, ask.fm or Omegle. How many children, the Internet at their fingertips, even know to look out for a red man, albeit a virtual one?

Because yes, the web is a wondrous thing but that isn’t to excuse its dark side. Or to think that your children can hide from its worst excesses — at least, not indefinitely. Cyberbullying, grooming and pornography are all real concerns, as is the pressure girls feel under to exploit their bodies by sharing intimate images. The head-in-the-sand approach won’t work when it comes to dealing with the unsavoury, which is why there is a growing discussion about how best to protect children as they head into the online wilderness.

First, just remember: “The online world is like another high street for kids and you need to be in it and parenting in it.” So says Vicki Shotbolt, who heads the Parent Zone, a broad-church family-support group that recently launched the UK’s first courses about how to parent in the digital age.

Catch them young and you’ll be surprised what children will share with you: that’s the straight-forward advice of anyone working to help keep kids safe online. No, you’ll never stop children typing “sex” into Google pretty much as soon as they can spell it; nor will you prevent teenage girls from asking the Internet how they can be thinner, prettier, better liked. But you can get them to talk to you about it, which is often more than half the battle.

“The Internet has become the new battleground in tensions between children and parents,” says Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology at London School of Economics, and director of the EU Kids Online Network. “Most of the issues are about parenting rather than the Internet.”

Bans and filters just won’t cut it when kids can visit a mate’s house or use a 3G network to check out sites that parents would rather imagine don’t exist. Take Pornhub, a pornographic video-sharing website that Shotbolt — who has a 14-year-old son, so presumably knows what she’s talking about — says is something of a secondary-school rite of passage. She recalls a recent survey by the snappily acronymed Atvod (the Authority for Television on Demand): “They couldn’t find a single 14-year-old who hadn’t seen hardcore pornography so had to keep asking younger children. That’s a real worry, as that’s where young people are getting their sex education from.” The images that a younger child might stumble upon online are likely to be a lot less vivid, but it’s impossible to “un-see” something, points out Siobhan Freegard, who runs the Netmums Internet forum. “We had a mum saying her daughter had seen a picture of someone drowning puppies, which just popped up in her Facebook feed under “cute puppies”; the child cried herself to sleep for weeks afterwards.”

A recent Netmums survey, which quizzed 825 children aged seven to 16 and 1,127 parents, found that more than half of all kids had stumbled on inappropriate content, with one in 11 looking for it deliberately.

That, he adds, explains why “filtering is never going to be a complete solution.” That said, “Filtering is the best technology can offer, which is why kids need to be talking to you about what they have seen. They should minimise whatever has upset them and tell an adult. Hopefully the adult is informed enough not to go hysterical.”

Shotbolt thinks the trouble is partly that, “Parents are not very confident how to parent in digital spaces. Most parents learn from their parents or their peers, but in this context you can’t because no one has done it before.” And being overvigilant isn’t the answer. “Research shows parents don’t know where the line is between stifling kids’ creativity with technology and keeping them safe,” she adds.

If this sounds daunting, remember there are parallels with television: just as you should interact with a child about what they’ve been watching, so you should talk to them about what games they’re playing. “Some games are great; some are not,” Professor Livingstone says. “It’s hard to offer rules in the abstract, but are they making them use their imagination or showing them unpleasant images — which can be girls with slim waists and long, blonde hair.”

Virtual “stranger danger” is less of a worry for young kids than you might imagine because most interactive sites where you play against other people are heavily moderated. Facebook has made it easier to report upsetting comments, or people on a fishing expedition to befriend underage strangers. Freegard’s own daughter was nearly caught out by someone who’d randomly stumbled on the same name as one of her daughter’s classmates. But, as the Netmums co-founder recalls, even though they sussed out the ruse — thanks to her daughter talking to her mother about her suspicions — “literally that very same evening, she comes running down the stairs saying, ‘Justin Bieber wants to be my friend!’” THE INDEPENDENT

A recent Netmums survey, which

quizzed 825 children aged seven

to 16 and 1,127 parents, found that more than half of all kids had stumbled on inappropriate

content.