Safety first for young surfers

It's the burning question of the hour: how to make surfing safe for kids. The latest answer: show them a drama workshop. As part of a new Governmentbacked child-safety initiative, the KidSmart road show will visit 20 cities over the next five months to teach eight-11 year-olds about the potential dangers of using the net. And their elders and betters will also be dragged back to school for extra safe-surfing lessons.

Over the past 12 months, the Government and children's charities (not to mention Carol Vorderman) have been bombarding parents with internet child-safety information. The chief concern is with chat rooms.

A third of the 5.6 million British children who surf the net regularly use chat rooms and a fifth have been asked for personal information such as an address, phone number or photo-graph. The new scheme fea-Q tures Smart rules that help youngsters ensure their experiences on the internet are enjoyable and safe. A KidSmart website has been set up to provide links to child-friendly sites and information for parents to help their children.

Children's internet charity ChildNet International, which runs the Chat Danger website, advises parents to keep the computer in a family room, not locked away in a bedroom. It says children should be told to be wary of strangers they meet on-line and should not be allowed to use chat rooms unsupervised.

The KidSmart initiative follows the Home Office's £1.5 million "Wise up to the net'" advertising campaign, which warns teenagers and parents about the dangers of paedophiles lurking in cyberspace.

The EU is also spending 25 million euros (£15.4 million) over three years to raise awareness of chat-room dangers as part of its Safer Internet Action Plan. Some of the money will be used to set up "safer inter-net" hotlines across Europe to make is easier for kids to report abuse online.

You can, of course, keep unsuitable material off screen with programs such as Net Nanny, CyberSitter and Cyber Patrol, using a combination of website blacklists and keyword spotters to ensure sites featuring sex, drugs and violence cannot be downloaded. (Remember that while they cost around £30 each, to keep the black-list updated with the latest sites costs £20 a year).

But a review by Which? found that while most programs were good at blocking sex-related sites, they didn't stop pages containing bomb-making instructions and Nazi propaganda, or a site promoting the use of ecstasy. The programs also blocked access to innocent sites that might be suitable for older children.

Most internet service providers, which have taken a lot of stick for not doing enough to protect children online, operate a notice-andtake-down policy, which means they remove unlawful material when they are notified of its presence. Critics say ISPs should be more proactive in seeking out illegal content.

But ISPs are no longer being held solely responsible for child safety on the net. The Home Office Internet Crime Forum has recognised that computer manufacturers and retailers also have a part to play, suggesting that safe-surfing packs should be included as standard when a computer is bought.

Some ISPs do provide filtering services that make it safe for children to use the net. AOL members can use the service's Parental Controls to determine which sites can be downloaded. Four levels of access are available: kids only, teens, young adults and general access.

BTopenworld subscribers can now control what their children see and do online by signing up to the ISP's SurfMonkey service. The child-friendly web browser enables parents to set up a safety profile for each child and restrict access to a directory of 15,000 pre-approved sites. It costs £2.50 a month on top of BTopenworld's £14.99-a-month access fee.

V21 Safe Surf provides child-friendly internet access on a freephone number for £9.99 a month. It provides customers with a special web browser that filters out unsuitable content and has a control panel so parents can set the level of access.

The Internet Watch Foundation, which exists to help prevent the publication of illegal material on the inter-net and to educate users, has also taken responsibility for devising a kite mark for chat services that will enable parents to easily identify which chat rooms are safe.

You can get more information from the following websites:
Childnet International www.childnet-int.org
Chat Danger www.chatdanger.com
KidSmart www.kidsmart.org.uk
Wise Up to the Net www.wiseuptothenet.co.uk or call 0800 77 1234 for a safe-surfing booklet
Internet Watch Foundation www.iwf.org.uk
Superhighway Safety safety.ngfl.gov.uk
Safer Internet Campaign www.saferinternet.org
SurfMonkey www.btopenworld.co.uk/surfmonkey
V21 Safe Surf www.v21.co.uk