e-Safety in Schools

 Children's Minister, Delyth Morgan said: "Firstly I would like to thank the chairs for heading up the groups who will drive forward this Government's commitment to implementing the recommendations of Professor Byron's review. I am also grateful to the many stakeholders who have offered their services free of charge to take forward the work of each group.These groups will enable us to swiftly carry forward the work urgently needed to ensure children and young people are rightfully protected from harmful material contained within new technologies and media."

The working groups are as follows:

Industry standards: Chaired by Amanda Jordan, Chair and co-founder, Corporate Citizenship

Aim: To develop clearer common standards (in the form of codes of practice or other guidelines) that are adopted, monitored and consistent with EU partners and are widely recognised as good practice.

Better education: Chaired by Niel McLean, Executive Director, Becta

Aim: To ensure that children, families and the children's workforce have access to consistent and comprehensive support and information that improves their knowledge, skills and understanding of internet safety.

Video games: Chaired by Brian Leonard, Retired Director at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, previous roles included responsibility for the Byron Review

Aim: To ensure that children and young people have a safer gaming experience and parents are aware of the issues, and support mechanisms around gaming.

Public information and awareness: Chaired by Clive Michel, Head of Communications and Public Awareness, Child Exploitation & Online Protection (CEOP)

Aim: To develop a comprehensive and joined-up public awareness campaign on internet safety for children and families based on consistent messages which forms the basis of the one stop shop for all aspects of internet safety.

The launch of these groups will build on the work developed since the launch of the council to deliver on the recommendations in the Byron Review. These include:

• the development of the Know IT All e-safety resource for primary teachers with TDA and Becta;

• an assessment by Trading Standards on the enforcement of the existing law on underage games sales;

• research to ‘map’ the public’s online behaviour in terms of identifying sources of online safety advice that will support the establishment of a ‘one stop shop’;

• and providing in kind and financial support to CEOP in promoting Safer Internet Day 2009.

Further details on the above groups and the work of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety including regular newsletters on progress can be found at http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/ukccis/

 Vice President Barrot said: "We want to build an EU that is truly able to protect the most vulnerable citizens against the most terrible crimes. When we say trafficking in human beings we are talking about women and girls reduced to sexual slavery, children beaten and mistreated, forced to beg and to steal, young adults compelled to work in appalling conditions for hunger wages. When we speak about child sexual abuse and sexual exploitation, we are speaking about horrendous crimes against children that leave deep scars and suffering for their whole lives."

 The proposals, which have yet to be adopted by the 27 member states, would unify approaches to online grooming and the viewing of child pornography across the EU. So called "Sex tourists" from EU states who abused children outside the EU would also face prosecution on their return home and would include new EU rules to curb people-trafficking. Currently under UK law, British nationals who commit sex offences against children abroad can already be prosecuted in the UK, even if their actions were legal in the country they visited.

 Under the new proposals on child sexual abuse, offenders will be imprisoned for at least six years instead of one year at present. Offenses in aggravating circumstances will get 10 years instead of five years. Sexual abuses that may endanger the life of children will get 12-year sentences.   The proposal will also remove the time limit within which child sexual abuse offenses must be denounced, making prosecution easier and those convicted will have their offenses in their criminal records so that they will not be able to find jobs involving direct contacts with children, even in other EU member states.

 The commission says that in 2008 more than 1,000 commercial and about 500 non-commercial websites depicting child sex abuse were found - 71% of them in the US and the majority of the  non-commercial sites were peer-to-peer services. CEOP will lead the work of the European Financial Coalition said that up to 300 commercial child abuse websites were available at any one time and earnt well in excess of €30m (£26.8m) a year. CEOP processed 1.6m images in the past year alone and identified and rescued 50 children.

 If adopted, the new proposals would mean free legal services for victims of abuse and authorities in the EU could bring people traffickers and "sex tourists" to justice even if they committed their crimes outside the EU.

 The proposals will be discussed in the EU Council of Ministers and will be translated into national legislations once approved.

 "Our message is clear...Europe will continue to set the highest and most ambitious standards in fighting them," Barrot said.

This phenomena known as "Sexting" is becoming increasingly commonplace with children and young people.. The accessibility of adult content online means that children as young as 8 are being exposed to (often) hard-core pornography online from their own homes. However for some young people this is taken a step further with them actually creating their films or posting provocative images online.

Whilst undertaking a report into Online Pornography for  BBC Radio 4,  Penny Marshall spent time working with young people to find out their views where she began to find out more about "sexting" and how children are creating these images and posting online such as in social networking and video sharing sites. The full article can be read here

 In the past year, there have been at least two cases in the UK where police have been called into schools after footage of pupils performing sex acts has been discovered on their phones; one involved children  as young as 13.

 'What some of today's youngsters are doing is, by any civilised, contemporary standards, obscene,' says John Carr of the UK's Children's Charities' Coalition on Internet Safety.  'It also happens to be illegal. It's a genuinely new problem which is the result of the emergence of new technology together with an increasing cultural tolerance of pornography. It's horrifying, and we are only now becoming aware of the full extent of the problem. Publishing any photograph of a child - that's anyone under 18 - which is of a sexual nature is illegal. So children who put pornographic photographs of themselves online or share the material via their mobile phones are, technically, breaking the law.'

The story of Jessie Logan, can show young people the devastating effects this can have on their lives. Jessie, 18 posted nude photos of herself to her 19 year old boyfriend, when they split up those images were forwarded and Jessie was bullied (both online and offline) before eventually hanging herself.

John Carr says young people who behave inappropriately or obscenely and post their material online could do lasting and irreversible damage to their future chances of success.

'Children feel invincible online. They believe the material they are producing is private. But they are wrong on both counts. We've had documented accounts of employers, and universities and colleges, trawling the net looking for information about prospective candidates. This behaviour can have long lasting effects. What goes online stays online - for ever.'

Speaking at the annual gathering of Britain's Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel, "the industry body that regulates sexual content in publications for young people,"  Dr Byron suggests that adults need not only to understand the potential risks but the nature of the playground itself, how - if parts of it have curfews/watersheds or are deemed off-limits to young people - they could simply move on to other more risky areas.

Dr Byron said that many adults had responded to her review by suggesting that the Internet should be shut down completely, or that a 'watershed' must be imposed so that children cannot access it after 9pm and so on - showing their failure to understand the internet itself and it's benefits. Instead she said parents and teachers "should learn more about what young people are doing online."

You can listen to Dr Byron speaking - as a parent, psychologist, and researcher - at the Oxford Internet Institute, "Beyond Byron: Towards a New Culture of Responsibility"

http://www.ico.gov.uk/youth.aspx

 The website aims to encourage teenagers to think about what information they are posting online to sites such as Social Networking profiles etc, what to do if information is incorrect or you are a victim of Identity theft and what rights the Data Protection Act can give us.

Currently the site considered Social networking sites and Exam results and links to useful resources and ways the ICO can help.

Information for adults can be found here

New websites and support have been launched this month with the aim of supporting the increasing numbers of young people experiencing Cyberbullying.

One in five 11-16 year olds in the UK say they have experienced cyberbullying and three quarters say they don't feel that there is appropriate support for victims.

Cybermentors

Cybermentors is a Beatbullying project and is all about young people helping each other online. Currently over 700 volunteers have attended special training (including child protection awareness) to become an online mentor to another young person experiencing bullying. Young people can use the cybermentors site for advice and support via email or chat. Alice, 13 is one such voulnteer from Kent, you can read her story here

Many schools in Kent are beginning to offer support and training to pupils and the e-Safety officer is working with BeatBullying to promote and offer this service to more schools.

For more information please visit www.cybermentors.org.uk/  or contact the e-Safety Officer

Txt Up

Txt Up: Stand up  is a new website and text message service which offers tips on beating the bullies, submitted by young people who have been through the same experience. Teens can give advice via text message or directly at www.textup.co.uk/. Visitors can then vote on their favourite tips, and the most useful are distributed monthly via a text message service which young people can sign up to receive by texting ‘txtup' to 82120.

British parents are under-estimating how much time their children spend on the net and what they are doing online according to a new report by Symantec. The survey questioned over 9,000 adults and young people in 12 different countries

The Online Living report found that UK parents believe their children are online for 18.8 hours per week but according to young people, the true figure is 43.5 hours.

The report suggests that British parents were among those with the worst grasp of how long their children are online and that 20% of the 6,427 UK adults questioned had caught their children looking at unsuitable net sites. 81% of UK parents said they were confident that they knew what they children were looking at online but in contrast, 31% of children said their parents did not know what they were doing online. Among all the parents questioned, 75% said they talked to their children about staying safe online.

Around the world about one-third of parents are putting software controls, such as filters and parental controls on a family PC/laptop to keep children away from inappropriate content. In the UK the number putting controls on a PC is currently 54% which is higher than the global average of one third.  One-third of the UK children in the survey said they had added their parents as "friends" on a social networking site.

The survey did find that the net is helping to cement the social ties and improve relationships within families and that children and adults feel the benefits of using the internet far outweigh the risks (89% of adults and 90% of children)

"It's not about coming down hard on them when they encounter inappropriate content," said Marian Merritt, Symantec's internet safety advocate "The internet is a great place to learn and to play, but there have to be boundaries."