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Chat rooms pose growing threat to Irish kids
31-07-2006
by Maxim Kelly

A shocking 11 percent of Irish children who have met adults posing as children online report they have been subject to attempted physical harm.

While a new survey on internet usage amongst nine- to 16-year-olds in Ireland shows most young people use the internet to meet their peers and reported a positive experience, the Minister for Education and Science, Mary Hanafin, said the findings were very worrying.

"This survey contains a wealth of information about how our young people are using all forms of modern technology to access the internet and communicate through it. Worryingly though, it seems very often that parents are not fully aware of the hidden dangers that are part the emergence of these new technologies," she said.

The authors of the National Centre for Technology in Education's survey added that in all cases of physical and verbal abuse reported, the children affected said the person who introduced themselves on the internet had lied about their age and turned out to be an adult.

"The survey shows that children have a huge exposure to the internet. This is very positive from a learning and educational point of view, but parents must realise that allowing children unregulated access to chat rooms and other social networks can have very dangerous consequences," Minister Hanafin added.

The survey, carried out by the National Centre for Technology in Education, and its internet safety initiative called Webwise, found nearly all youngsters (96 percent) have used the internet. All children use PCs, and almost 40 percent claim to own their own PC.

A quarter of the children surveyed said they used the internet at home everyday, and 52 percent are using it at least once a week at school.

Over half of the 850 children surveyed said that their parents spoke with them very rarely or not at all about what they did on the internet, Twenty-seven percent said they had met someone new on the internet who asked for information like their photo, phone number, street address, or which school they attend: this is up from 19 percent in 2003.

Minister Hanafin said: "all young people need to be very cautious about the level of personal details and images which they upload onto their web pages. They should be particularly careful about what they reveal about themselves when chatting online with people they have only met online as this information can be used to identify or locate them."

Jerome Morrissey, director of the NCTE urged all parents and teachers to use his organisation's Webwise resources to learn about the technologies children are using.

"These findings have implications for parental supervision and monitoring of children's appropriate use of ICT. Effective age verification and moderation strategies could be implemented by online services which would allow young people to meet and communicate with others online with a greater degree of safety," Morrissey said.