Re: [Dfey-nw-discuss] 'Safetynet and esafety'

[Tim Dobson]

Fred Phillips wrote:
> > (To be honest I'm instantly wary of anything with the word 'youngster' in 
> > it because it seems to me to be a word used by people who are really out of 
> > touch with young people)
>
> That’s Ofsted for you.

Well they sound like they are a local newspaper - "50 youngsters

> Ruth Hammond wrote:
> > http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/Ofsted-home/News/Youngsters-want-more-internet-protection-says-new-report
> >  Children living away from home, or using social care services, want to 
> > feel safer online, be protected from unsuitable sites and have adult 
> > supervision, highlights a new report.
>
> Er, no it doesn’t. Only 61% want content filtering, hardly
> unanimous. Every other question asked received a minority vote.

Actually, the base of the recommendation is a poll to a subset of young 
people asking them which should be new rules out of a list of 40.
One of the 40 potential "new rules" was 'Children should be kept safe on 
the internet'.

There is a lot of undefined scope in what "Safe" means and I would also 
suggest that a 17 year old should not be 'protected' in the same way as 
a 5 year old, so there is scope for confusion there too.

Some of the 'rules' are completely irrelevant anyway, things like 
'Punishments mustn't go too far' are covered by the UN charter of Human 
rights as far as I can see and are things I can't see anyone disagreeing 
with.

This is probably the most important segment:

"Most children advised that there should be blocks to
stop access to porn or risky websites or chatrooms. ‘Block
pornography’; ‘child locks’; ‘parental lock’; ‘web nanny
– website restriction programme’; ‘not to be able to get
onto dodgy sites’. We also heard from a few children
that because of the dangers of people getting hold of
pictures of children, there should be ‘no webcam’, and you
‘shouldn’t be able to put pictures up of yourself’. A few
young people were against blocking of sites and wanted
to be trusted more in how they used the internet: ‘no site
blocking systems – children should be their own judges of
safety’. Some thought that blocking should happen only
if there was a particular risk at the time: ‘sites should be
blocked only if reports of abuse’. A few agreed with site
blocking but wanted us to know that it usually restricted
things other than dangerous sites as well: ‘safety is
important, but it restricts access to some things I like doing
such as games’."

In my opinion, the majority of young people will reel off what they have 
heard the most if asked a question by someone important. Actually taking 
the nerve to deviate from the status quo and say "well actually i don't 
have that much of a problem staying safe on the internet and i sometimes 
get really annoyed with this blocking filtering thingy" takes quite a 
lot of nerve or a certain type of character.

I think there needs to be some way of working out from the statistics 
whether a certain child is thinking for themselves or repeating what 
they have heard.

Tim


--
www.tdobson.net
----
If each of us have one object, and we exchange them, then each of us
still has one object.
If each of us have one idea, and we exchange them, then each of us now
has two ideas.   -  George Bernard Shaw