Child safety

The Internet is a fantastic resource available to you and your children, which can help with anything from school research to planning holidays, and chatting with friends to finding information about your favourite band.

In order to use the Internet safely, you need to be able to prevent access to unwanted or undesirable web sites, and you also need to be able to protect your computer from viruses.

If you are a parent and want to allow your children to use the Internet, it’s normal to feel worried about what they might be able to access.

This is no different from wanting to know what your child is doing when they’re not with you. It is impossible to stop all access to danger, but there are some steps you can take to help keep them safe, and let them know what things to look out for.

There are various things that you can do to stop your child coming across unwanted material, but ultimately it is your responsibility to keep an eye on what they are doing.

It is quite possible to come across unwanted material, such as pornography, when using the Internet. To understand why this is the case, we have to look at the way the Internet works. Many companies, organisations and individuals make money from building a web site to promote their own products, interests and hobbies. To bring in extra money, they will sell advertising just as a newspaper or magazine would. However, the Internet doesn’t have the same policing as the British press, so web sites may contain material that some people find offensive.

Chat Rooms

Chat rooms and instant messaging (IM) are not completely safe. Chat rooms can be very good places to chat with friends and people you meet on the Internet who have similar interests. In a chat room you go to a web site where you can chat with anyone using it. The problem is that you can never be certain that the person you’re chatting to is who they say they are. It is very easy for someone to disguise their identity.

IM works in a separate program and involves ‘buddies’. Buddies are people you add to your chat list, and they can see when you are online. You can only chat with people who you add to your buddy list. As in chat rooms, you can not really be sure who you are talking to.

As a parent, you might allow chat rather than banning it, but it would be important to have a shared understanding that you can ask them who they’ve been talking to, and to stress the importance of telling you or someone else if they ever intend to meet up with a person they’ve met online. By having the computer in a family room, you’ll also be able to monitor what they’re doing more easily.

Whist it is a rarity, sexual predators can use chat rooms to ‘groom’ young people before meeting up with them. It is important to talk to your child about this so that they are aware that people in chat rooms may not be who they claim to be.

Online Gaming

Online gaming involves meeting and playing games with people you meet online. As with chat rooms, you cannot verify the identity or intentions of the people you meet. Online gaming can have a very strong social element, so it is worth monitoring who your children are chatting to while they are online playing games.

There are various things that you can do to help keep your children safe.

General Parental Advice

The list below is taken from the BBC’s chat guide site.

• Keep the computer in a family or shared room.
• Talk to your children about Internet safety. Let them know that it's OK to tell you if they have a problem.
• Ask your children to teach you how to chat, use message boards and instant messenger programmes.
• Help your children set up their email accounts and 'spam' filters.
• Limit the amount of unsupervised time your children spend online.
• Encourage your children to be open about their Internet friends and the time they spend online.