Internet porn one of most serious issues affecting Welsh children

[Technology]

The ease and frequency with which youngsters are accessing porn online has been described as “one of the most serious public health issues affecting children in Wales”.

Children as young as 11 are becoming addicted to obscene material on the internet, according to Welsh campaigners.

The problem, they say, is so bad it has led to some instances of children simulating extremely violent or graphically sexual scenes at schools.

Concerns are growing after figures revealed three quarters of children have unaccompanied access to the internet and 800,000 can view adult content, 14 % of whom are younger than 10.

It comes as the government considers tightening controls on internet pornography.

The Prime Minister is to discuss plans where home broadband customers can choose to opt out of having access to sites with adult content.

Research suggests as many as one in three under-10s has seen pornography on the web and Welsh teaching bosses say it is a serious child protection issue.

Four in every five children aged 14 to 16 admit regularly accessing explicit images and video footage on their home computers.

The situation is alarming to many parents and campaigners warn that exposure to these images inflicts “serious mental harm” on minors and prevents them from forming healthy adult relationships in later life.

Mid and West Wales AM Rebecca Evans said access to pornography has a profound and negative effect on our children.

“This is one of the most serious and pressing public health issues affecting children and young people,” said Ms Evans.

“A cross-party parliamentary report showed children and young people are accessing online pornography and websites showing extreme violence.

“It found that it is having a serious impact on the children and young people’s development, from diminishing their sympathy for victims of sexual assault to reducing their inhibitions and making them more vulnerable to abuse or exploitation.

“We already successfully regulate British TV channels, cinema screens, High Street hoardings and newsagent shelves to stop children seeing inappropriate images – and mobile phone companies are able to restrict access to adult material – so why should the internet be any different?”

Meanwhile, school leaders have voiced fears that the rising use of social networking may be providing quick access to inappropriate online material for children on sites many parents assume are ‘safe’.

Anna Brychan, director of NAHT Cymru – which has gathered for its annual conference this weekend – said new technologies and social networking sites present schools, parents and pupils with a huge range of challenges.

“One of the difficulties is that very young children are often considerably more technologically savvy than their parents,” she said.

“The capacity of even very small children to enter a dubious and damaging virtual world can easily be underestimated by parents and carers. School leaders are telling us that this manifests itself in children simulating extremely violent or graphically sexual scenes at school.

“Influences on children now extend far beyond their families and peer group. Schools have become very responsive to the challenges they face in terms of dealing with the hugely more complex lives of their pupils.”

A spokesman for NAHT said: “Internet safety is taught in schools; controls are in place and there is oversight of pupils’ use of technology. It is a fast-moving world and schools know they’ll have to remain vigilant and one step ahead of their pupils.”

But the NAHT said that, for parents, control can be much harder.

“We think that increasing parental awareness of these issues and helping them to make sure their children benefit from the positive aspects of technology but are not damaged by its negative aspects needs some serious consideration,” the spokesman said.

Only 3% of pornographic websites currently require proof-of-age before granting access to sexually explicit material, and two-thirds do not even include any adult-content warnings.

Keith Towler, Children’s Commissioner for Wales, said there is no quick fix solution to safeguarding children and young people online .

“It is impossible for us to ignore the fact that children and young people are using the internet to play, socialise and to learn in every part of their lives,” he said.

“We can make a difference by investing in teaching children and young people to become confident citizens of this new digital space. We must embrace new technologies, learn about them and use this knowledge to help our children and young people develop the skills to become safe and responsible internet users.”

:view: Source

[Alanon]

Only 3% of pornographic websites currently require proof-of-age before granting access to sexually explicit material, and two-thirds do not even include any adult-content warnings.

Are they serious? They're really counting this as a valid argument? O.o Are they mentally retarded? How's that going to stop anyone??? You can just go ahead and lie, and get there regardless. -.-

Bah. I love it when they tackle non-issues.

[Shadowx]

This is how the world is being held by someone with money and power my friend. You can do nothing to stop them. Obviously, those S-O-B gonna pay for this, for ruining their childhood. *^&^^$%$# ;(

[Frosticles]

If i were him i wouldnt have 2 hands on the keyboard if you get what i mean ;D

[rudrax]

A law argument should be made that every porn site must use PORN prefix to their site..Then a software should be made which blocks every site prefixed PORN..This will help the guardian to keep their children away from such site..And yeah, the proxy sites gonna create problems for this..any opinion for this?

[Tweety.Abd]

Pron...the worst thing humanity has to offer.

[a2ms]

A law argument should be made that every porn site must use PORN prefix to their site..Then a software should be made which blocks every site prefixed PORN..This will help the guardian to keep their children away from such site..And yeah, the proxy sites gonna create problems for this..any opinion for this?

Actually they have a TLD for this.. it would be yourdomain.xxx ... but of course not everyone uses it and not every site will change to it... Specially with self hosted sites you can't enforce or restrict a specific type of content..

Better show your kids games sites like minigames.com or neopets.com.. they will be entretained and you won't have to worry..

[calguyhunk]

Better show your kids games sites like minigames.com or neopets.com.. they will be entretained and you won't have to worry..

I appeciate your sentiments a2ms, but do you mean to say that no kid will be curious enough to google 'sex' just because they're playing cute games on the net?

The first time a kid searches for that, he'll have stumbled onto a bunch of pornographic links without ever wanting to watch such meterial. I remember a Sri Lankan author saying something to the effect of "As a kid, I Googled 'sex' for titillation and all I got was tits". :o

In my case, the PC guy had not even installed flash on a kid's computer precisely because of this issue and had also set the home page to 'Rediff.com' - an Indian search engine that returns no result for 'sex' and other such queries.

But guess what, installing flash and going to google/yahoo takes precisely a couple of minutes. I think you can guess the rest. I really don't want my kids to have to deal with that some day.

So the optional opt-in that is being planned/discussed and debated in the UK seems to me to be the most pragmatic solution to protect innocent little children without subverting free speech for adults.

[calguyhunk]

Pron...the worst thing humanity has to offer.

Terrorism, war, riots, violence, bigotry..... I think there are things much worse than that. Research upon reseach has shown that prOn doesn't affect adults adversely. As long as you keep that kinda' material away from the reach of kids, it ain't an issue, methinks ;)

[Tweety.Abd]

Pron...the worst thing humanity has to offer.

Terrorism, war, riots, violence, bigotry..... I think there are things much worse than that. Research upon reseach has shown that prOn doesn't affect adults adversely. As long as you keep that kinda' material away from the reach of kids, it ain't an issue, methinks ;)

I were referring to the children, but I believe what you've said its correct in a sense. But the real issue is: how do you keep it out of reach of the children?

[Alanon]

Hell, use a limited account on the PC, and kill the flash on a separate installment of Sandboxie, and lock the folder to prevent changes. And use a password protected anti-virus with parental control. That's to say to prevent a genious kid from getting where you don't want him to. And use a paranoid HOSTS file, which blocks a bunch of them. And I believe some ISP's have an option for filtering of adult content.

[calguyhunk]

Hell, use a limited account on the PC, and kill the flash on a separate installment of Sandboxie, and lock the folder to prevent changes. And use a password protected anti-virus with parental control. That's to say to prevent a genious kid from getting where you don't want him to. And use a paranoid HOSTS file, which blocks a bunch of them. And I believe some ISP's have an option for filtering of adult content.

The problem though is much more acute with mobile devices. The way high speed net capable devices (3G, 4G smartphones, tablets etc.) have proliferated over the last few years, just monitoring the good old fiber optic home connection is not good enough anymore :(

And it'll be difficult to stop the genius kid anyways. I recall an incident from when we were kids. I had a friend, whose father's PC guy had installed Net Nanny and edited the hosts file to block a lot of the common adult content websites from IP lists available on the net from anti-prOn right wing websites.

Not being able to surf the 'good stuff', he was asking us how to do it. Detailed instructions on disabling Net Nanny didn't help. I didn't realize that the hosts file was edited, till much later, when we were in college, and I took a look at his PC when it was time for an upgrade and that is how I found out.

So obviously, long story short - When all my advises failed (he could still use proxies, but it was so painfully slow, that 1 hour of buffering only allowed him 'bout 5 minutes of actual viewing :() I finally advised him to go with the crude sledgehammer option - install Windows on another partition, do whatever he has to, then re-format.

He used to do that every day LOL with the help of one of those $1 Windows DVDs that are freely available everywhere :hehe:

[DKT27]

The problem though is much more acute with mobile devices. The way high speed net capable devices (3G, 4G smartphones, tablets etc.) have proliferated over the last few years, just monitoring the good old fiber optic home connection is not good enough anymore :(

And it'll be difficult to stop the genius kid anyways. I recall an incident from when we were kids. I had a friend, whose father's PC guy had installed Net Nanny and edited the hosts file to block a lot of the common adult content websites from IP lists available on the net from anti-prOn right wing websites.

Not being able to surf the 'good stuff', he was asking us how to do it. Detailed instructions on disabling Net Nanny didn't help. I didn't realize that the hosts file was edited, till much later, when we were in college, and I took a look at his PC when it was time for an upgrade and that is how I found out.

So obviously, long story short - When all my advises failed (he could still use proxies, but it was so painfully slow, that 1 hour of buffering only allowed him 'bout 5 minutes of actual viewing :() I finally advised him to go with the crude sledgehammer option - install Windows on another partition, do whatever he has to, then re-format.

He used to do that every day LOL with the help of one of those $1 Windows DVDs that are freely available everywhere :hehe:

Damn. When I was 14-15, all my friend's parents (father's specifically) prevented them to use the good side of the web by totally disallowing them to use the internet as there was "bad stuff" out there. Hell, they didn't allow the usage of it even in their supervision. And on the other hand, all the spoiled brat kids were allowed to do whatever they wanted, including watching porn. So yea, block good people from using the good part and allow bad people to whatever they want. Of course, the parent's mindsets differ, but it's the mentality of all of them.

[Alanon]

Hell, I wen't old school - actual DVD's from a shady shop where I'd simply buy the smut. XDDD

As for mobiles - don't spoil your kid, when in doubt, go Java. XD

[calguyhunk]

As for mobiles - don't spoil your kid, when in doubt, go Java. XD

But even Java based dumbphones these days have high speed internet (3G) capability :(

[Alanon]

What I meant was, don't hook up the little bugger to mobile internet. XD

What'll he use it for? Posting Angry Birds results online? XDDDD Hooking up to his Facebook so that his classmates would be able to track his posts and comments LIVE via their mobiles, instead of him actually speaking out loud???

It used to be that mobiles were given to kids for emergencies only - lifethreatning situations, so they can call for help if they're lost, or worse, or even so that the parents can call to check up on them. This hasn't changed to this day.

But now I'm seeing freakin' kids with freakin' tablets on the street! What can they possibly use it for? I'm an adult, and I find it impractical. And I'm an internet hog. So go figure. And just imagine - if the PC is infection-prone, so is the smartphone. If I paid for his phone, I want my investment safe. That at least means a consciousness has to be developed that the thingy is not a toy. -.-

Besides, you learn to appreciate the little things in life when you have no uber powerful options - you get to learn how to spell properly, annunciate, speak correctly, wothout the LOL ROFL LMAO IMHO shite penetrating into actual speech.

Now before I go on a rave any further, let me say that all of this applies to smart, independent children and dumbasses alike. A smart kid will easily bypass anything, and that's OK. If he's smart enough to do that, he's smart enough to know of the dangers. I've had NO supervision, and look at me now. I got a dedicated internet connection, and a modicum of privacy at about when I was 13, and I managed the basics instantly. I was smart enough to separate the garbage from gold, and remained unscathed, and my vocabulary spans on both ends of the spectrum - the correct one, the official, I use in everyday speech, and I can apply internet jargon when needed. And I'm in no way impaired as opposed to internet addicts who live and breathe binary code. I've never had a Facebook profile. Never used live.com address, but immediatelly hopped aboard the gmail train, I've used mobile internet for a total of maybe 20 times, ever.

Now all of these things are a hundred times worse for a dumbass kid, whose only goal is to rape the phone for all it's functions. No young teenager has a real need for Facebook or Skype, or MSN, or Tweet, or Mail on the go. Business users use that, and even amongst them there will be a small percentage of those who will use over half of these on a daily basis. The fact that your kid would want it only because it's popular is not a god enough reason, especially when weighing the potential of harm with the benefits.

Bottom line, I would not buy my kid a smartphone, or a tablet. If he would be able to bypass what I placed on the PC to prevent him from browsing porn, kudos for him, he would have then beaten me in that regard. Which is why if I thought that I had a smart, independent teenager I would'nt bother to restrict the PC, and if my kid were really what I would have pegged him to be, an explanation as to why he can't have a cutting-edge phone would suffice. After all, bear in mind, I too am still in my teens, and I simply never wanted a smartphone. Am I then one in a million? I think not.