How safe are your children?

RECENT figures show that more than half of all eight to 10-year-olds and more than 75% of those aged 10 to 16 years in Ireland use the internet on a daily basis.
“Over the last number of years, society has witnessed an addition to the Irish childhood experience; the internet and new communication mediums have taken a central place in all social spheres amongst children and young people. The internet is now part of our children’s lives. Online and offline have merged, a fact that is particularly true for teenagers who use social networking sites as an extension of their social lives and daily activities,” the  ISPCC’s National Children’s Consultation report, Children and the Internet: This will come back and bite us in the butt, which was released last week, stated.
The report showed that three quarters of its secondary school-aged respondents use the internet most commonly for communication or social purposes, through social networking sites.
The study also revealed that almost a quarter (24%) of this age group did not use privacy settings, while over one third (36%) of the primary children surveyed indicated they did not know how to keep their social network account private.

Friends

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Bebo and MySpace, allow users to share views, information, photos and video with other users. The numbers of ‘friends’ a user has on Facebook is a status symbol, Dr Maureen Griffin believes.
“From my experience visiting schools, they are starting off with 150 to 200 frends in first year going up to anywhere from 600 to over 1,000 friends by Leaving Cert. This is huge because, by default, when you set up a Facebook account, your friends see everything. Students should customise their settings so they can pick and choose who sees what,” she advises.
“The ‘friends’ thing seems to be a total popularity thing, the more ‘friends’ you have the cooler you are. The kids are accepting people as ‘friends’ with the press of a button that they don’t know from Adam. Numerous people have told me that they accepted people as friends and they found out afterwards that they were strangers or they sent them a message that was inappropriate or weird. They all know how to block them and they don’t seem to be too bothered by it but the danger comes in terms of what they are putting up online,” Dr Griffin outlines.
“From my experience, children and young people do not know about the permanence of what they are uploading and what I try to do is draw parallels between what they do online and what they do in real life.
“So even things like uploading a picture of yourself, I have asked students if they would take their normal camera and take a photo, go down to the shop and get the picture developed or bring it into one of the booths and get it developed and then distribute it amongst their friends. They thought this was so weird. They don’t see the physical side of it,” she says.
“With technology and things like Facebook and other places where you are uploading information about yourself, you are distanced so much from what you are doing that you don’t consider the impact of it. You are at home in the comfort of your own house and you are pressing buttons on a computer. You are not seeing the permanency of this or other people’s reaction to it,” she notes.

Consequences

Pupils and students in classes are horrified, Dr Griffin says, when she informs them of things that she, and other members of the public, can access on their social network profiles.
“It does shock them and I have got great feedback from students saying that it really made them think about what other people can do with information. I ask them about how they would feel if somebody downloaded all their information from Facebook. That is something you can do, everything that you put up there can be downloaded. The kids think it is creepy and they think it is weird but they are so distanced from it. It doesn’t enter their mind that it is there forever and could come back again to haunt them and that other people could access their information. The consequences really don’t hit home and I suppose that is one of the characteristics of adolescents. They don’t have that impulse control that we would have as adults,” Dr Griffin outlines.
“Neurologically, adolescents are not the same as adults. Their prefrontal cortex is not as developed as ours so they don’t have that impulse control mechanism that we have. For instance, an adult might feel like writing a really harsh email to someone every now and again. They might sit down and say ‘I am going to send this to the boss now’. But they don’t do it because their impulse control kicks in and they think ‘if I send that now, I am going to risk losing my job’. There are consequences to it but teenagers don’t see that.
“We have to try to encourage young people and children to count to five before they post something online. We have to get them to think about who is going to see it. It is one of the fantastic things about adolescence, the risk taking side of it, but the horrible thing for them is that what they do now, could have huge consequences for them down the line,” she adds.

Jobs

According to a 2009 report by CBS News, Employers Look At Facebook Too by Sharyn Alfonsi, an increasing number of potential employers are accessing people’s online profiles and “using them to decide whom they hire”.
Earlier this month TheJournal.ie reported that, according to research by Hays Ireland, “four out of five jobseekers who use networking sites said they do not care what a potential employer could find out about them through social media”. Indeed, many professionals have Facebook profiles and Dr Griffin has even spoken to some teachers about making sure their account is private.
Dr Griffin says she has a Facebook page “to stay up to speed” with developments on it and believes social networking sites can be very useful.
“Young people put a lot of information up on social networking sites but we have to look at whether it is a thing that older generations are very private, whereas the next generation coming up seem to have no problem with sharing all of this personal information. I suppose what worries me is not just what a child can put up about themselves but also what they can put up about the family,” she says.

Security

Some children and teenagers put up detailed information on the activities and whereabouts of themselves and family members. 
“Say for example ‘we are all headin’ off to France next week on holidays’. Burglars are using Facebook; they are using it to understand people’s movements and their whereabouts. If your house is burgled, there are a number of insurance companies in Ireland that will not pay because you have advertised the fact that you are not going to be there,” Dr Griffin claims.
Many parents join social networking sites like Facebook and ‘friend’ their children, if not to police what they are doing online, to at least be aware of it. Dr Griffin’s experience throws up a worrying issue for these parents. Often, they are being conned.
“We look at research that has been conducted saying ‘oh parents are on Facebook and they are friends with their children on it. 60% of parents are friends with their kids online so Ireland has nothing to worry about in terms of internet safety’. But from the schools I visited, when teachers go out of the room there is kind of a laugh and a giggle, and they say ‘yeah I have my fake account that I am friends with my mam on and then I have my real account’,” she reveals.
“Even children who do ask their parents if they can set up a Facebook account, they might be told ‘yes but you have to be my friend’ and they accept the parents as a friend. Students have told me that these are not their genuine profiles, they make up a fake account to be friends with their parents and then they have their own one,” she revealed.
For parents who find themselves ‘friends’ with a sterilised profile of their child, the reasons might not be as bad as they think.
“It is not necessarily that they are getting up to anything, it is just that they get to that age in their lives when they want a little bit of privacy,” Dr Griffin says.
For primary school children, Dr Griffin believes the prevalence of social media largely depends on the activity of their peers and access to the internet.
“I have been to some schools where kids have the Firefly phones (These feature built-in parental controls that allow parents to restrict incoming and outgoing calls as well as limit or restrict texting). Not a lot of those kids would therefore be on the internet or social networking sites,” she explains.
“Then I have been to other primary schools where an awful lot of kids would be online. So it is kind of a case of they go home and say ‘my friend Johnny is on the internet and he is on this site Club Penguin and I want to be on Club Penguin too’. It is putting pressure on parents. I think, in primary school, children ask their parents to use the computer and they look at their parents as being the experts in relation to internet use and internet safety,” she adds.
Unfortunately for parents, this attitude changes when children go into secondary school.
“Between first and second year in secondary school, they change completely. They realise their parents know nothing about the internet and they are the experts. It reverts completely,” she says.

Involvement

The ISPCC survey showed that just under half of the secondary school age group surveyed said they used the internet at home in their bedroom (44%), rather than in a communal area in the home. This leads to less parental control and, in many cases, awareness of what children and young people are accessing on the internet.
“Some parents are fantastic and are so involved and know what their kids are doing. They use the internet with them. They restrict internet use. They create a happy balance between internet time, real-life time and family time. Then you have parents at the other extreme who view their kids as experts and think they could never possibly know what is going on with the internet or that they could never get up to speed with internet usage, so they step  back and they trust that their child is acting appropriately online,” Dr Griffin observes.
While there are programmes that allow parents to block certain internet activity, these are not a panacea.
“What I am doing is not teaching them how to block things; yes I explain to parents how to set up safe search filters so that when their child is searching using youtube or yahoo or google that they are limiting some of the explicit content that is online. But the point isn’t to block everything, because your child can access the internet through their phone, through a friend’s house or will be able to access it when they go to college, so it is about teaching responsible behaviour online and teaching them how to be safe when they are online,” she believes.
“Yes, you can check histories but kids know how to delete histories. Kids are one step ahead so it is not about that. It is not about trying to block,” she adds.
The ISPCC report states that while the internet and other new technologies are a positive development in the lives of young people, “undoubtedly, they need to come with a health warning. We must ensure that parents, children and the wider society are savvier when it comes to the risks associated with new technologies and that personal and corporate responsibility is backed up with the relevant legislation”.

Responsibility

Dr Griffin acknowledges that technologies that make connecting with people so much easier have their drawbacks.
“We have given children and young people this technology to the point that they are accessing the internet from laptops in their bedrooms. These laptops are password protected and kids have free reign to go onto the internet whenever they want. We have to look at setting limits and making young people aware of the consequences of their actions online, no matter how distanced they feel from it,” she says.
“I don’t want to scare kids, that is not the purpose of it. It is trying to instil a sense of caution and not a sense of fear but of course that is easier said than done,” Dr Griffin adds.
The ISPCC survey also indicates that of the primary school children surveyed, 88% said they thought that Bebo or Facebook should have a ‘help button’ to be used if they were worried or upset. Of the teenagers, 78% said they agreed with a ‘panic button’.
“Parental vigilance is required to help keep young people safe online. Any child or young person using a social network site should be made aware of privacy settings and their importance from the moment they sign up. While service providers have a responsibility with this, parents also have an integral role to play in understanding privacy settings and monitoring their children’s safety,” the report states.
The ISPCC has also launched a Safe Click Code leaflet, aimed at raising awareness around internet safety, which is available on its website.