On May 8th 2000, leading authorities on Internet safety met at a conference, Kids Helping Kids, at the House of Lords. Young journalists from Children's Express in Birmingham and London were among those to address them. Here they give their views on keeping children and teenagers safe on line.
| An English teacher looking for A Midsummer Night’s Dream found links to a dating agency, a porn site and a satanist page. |
By the end of next year, the government wants every child in the country to have access to the Internet. Many of our parents will still be struggling to set the video to record the evenings episode of EastEnders. Power within the online family is shifting. For the first time, parents are having to learn from us in order to keep up with the growth of new technology. Parents whove worked this out are on edge. Teenagers are amused.
Ben, 13, summed up the attitude of many of us: Once parents know the basics they can usually work it out, they just need a little bit of a helping hand. Ive been teaching my grandmother to use the Internet, and now she can e-mail me. Im really proud of her.
We use the Internet in many different ways. We surf the websites of our favourite pop stars or football teams. We download computer programs, games and ringing tones for our mobile phones. Some of us even do school work on it. Most of all, we use it for keeping in touch with each other by e-mail, chatrooms, ICQ and Instant Messenger, global messaging services on the Net. A lot of us have developed friendships online that may never move into the real world.
In chatrooms we talk to people from other backgrounds, other societies, other countries. These web-based notice-boards are one of the ways in which the Net has made the world a smaller place. Theyve also made some of our lives more complicated.
As visitors to chatrooms we are as anonymous as we choose to be. Many young people enjoy making up imaginary lives for themselves, living out their fantasies in front of people they will never meet. Virtual friends will never know if they are thin or fat, short or tall, black or white, so they are particularly attractive to the lonely and vulnerable. But adults are also know to masquerade as teenagers.
Another Ben, 14, who we spoke to says: Chatrooms can sometimes be quite dangerous theres no harm when its just people of the same age, but when paedophiles or some people start.
Kierra, 14, started getting unwelcome e-mails after a chat session. He was a really weird guy he said: Hi Im 44. Dyou want to talk to me?. I didnt reply so I got another one saying: I like baseball. What do you like? So I told him to go away, but he sent me another one going: but I want to be your friend. Well, I didnt want to be his, so I barred him. Evil he was really weird and creepy.
Teenagers who receive this kind of attention soon learn how to use software to block it, and most of us seem to grow out of chatrooms. There are, in any case, far stranger things on the Internet. Images of violence and gore, for example. One fourteen-year-old music fan told us about a Marilyn Manson website shed visited. Theres a links page which connects to all these Satanist cults. I went to a site which was purely pictures of dead and mutilated bodies. There was a man whod shot his head off, with blood everywhere, and people whod hanged themselves. The link to this site has since disappeared.
At least it's difficult to stumble across this kind of material by chance.
 Young people need the benefits of common sense, not nannying | |
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Pornography sometimes seems to lurk around every corner. Apparently innocent links or mis-typed web addresses sometimes land us in unexpected places. But many teenagers all right, many teenaged boys actively look for porn. Daniel, 13, put it most plainly: Whats the first word most kids looked up in the dictionary? Sex! And its in there! So kids probably look at the Internet and think wow a new dictionary.
Some boys see pornography as a way of life on the Net. Parents are naturally concerned, and perhaps with good reason. If theyre prepared to give their children Internet access, they should be prepared for them to be able to access pornography. For a lot of us, thats part of being a teenager. We need parents to swallow hard and accept it.
But that troubles many parents, who turn to filtering software like Net Nanny to keep unwanted content out of their homes. We think adults like filters because they let them think theyre in control, being responsible. A survey of filtering software published in Which? Magazine last week suggests their trust in them is misplaced. Our experience supports the view that these programs often block sites they shouldnt, while letting through sites with unsuitable content.
Many schools are joining the National Grid for Learning, a government initiative intended to provide us with access to high quality educational resources, without connecting us to anything unsuitable or inappropriate. But who decides whats inappropriate?
One school we know in Birmingham has found access to sports sites blocked and a search for the poetry of Wilfred Owen barred. Even the Childrens Express website was blocked at first, because it used the word sex too many times. But a pupil at the same school accessed a hardcore porn site while searching for educational materials on slavery, and an English teacher looking for A Midsummer Nights Dream found links to a dating agency, a porn site and a satanist page.
Many teachers arent keeping up. One 13-year-old told us: One morning we had double English, and I finished working after about 20 minutes and spent the rest of the lesson checking my e-mail and surfing the web. My teacher walked past me about four times and didnt even notice that I was on the Internet.
Schools generally seem unsure about some of the risks involved. At Kierras school theyve banned web-based e-mail accounts like Hotmail. Instead, she complains: Theyve set up a school domain so you get an address like myname@rmnet.myschool.com. Leaving aside the fact that having a school e-mail address is a bit like going to a party in your school uniform, such a policy flies in the face of Internet safety advice. Kierras e-mail address would tell thousands of complete strangers roughly how old she is, and exactly where to find her on a week day.
What should parents do? They could talk to us, their children, for a start. When children have got into trouble on the Net, their relationship with their parents has been crucial. If our parents want to have a role in our use of the Net, they need to make time to learn about it, let us teach them, and then establish some agreed rules of conduct. We can then be left to explore it on our own, safe in the knowledge that we can talk to our parents about anything we encounter.
But supervision should only go so far we are entitled to our privacy. There might be good reasons why we dont want our parents to know about every website weve visited. By the time we move into secondary school we also want our own, private e-mail accounts.
Parents need to develop relationships with their children based on trust. If parents cant trust their children, perhaps they shouldnt be on the Internet at all.
Our message is this: we need open access to the Internet so we can learn how to use the tools available both technological and intuitive to protect ourselves. We need parents to teach us the principles of common sense and self-protection. With these in place, we can learn to apply the lessons of the real world to cyberspace, and the Internet wont present a problem.
About the team
This article was produced by Birmingham bureau editor Michael Kalam, 15 and reporter Jonathan Hudson, 13; and (from London) editors Tinu Adeniji-Adele, 17; Abeyna Jones and Rupal Patel, 16; and reporter Onome Edgeworth, 10. It appeared on the Comment page in the Birmingham Post.
