You're kidding?
Even tech-ignorant kids around 15-16 are able to use proxy servers to access Facebook etc. at school when they're not supposed to. Maybe they didn't understand the question.
Parents who think their tearaway hacking kiddies are seeing all sorts of things they shouldn't online are buying into some of the top myths about children on the web, according to a new report. EU Kids Online, a research project based at the London School of Economics and Political Science, talked to kids across Europe about …
Given the availability of pr0n online, I think it speaks volumes for Google's Safe Search that only 1-in-7 kids had seen sexual images in the past year. My kids use Google Image Search all the time for school work and I can't recall ever seeing dubious material appearing.
Only 1 in 7 *admitted* to seeing sexual images in a survey. There is a big difference.
The same applies to the question about the filters. Of course they said 'no'; admitting it would get them barred from the pc and they would lose access to all that pr0n.
Yeah, anyone who has ever worked with kids will know that most really know fuck all about the Internet other than how to browse it, do a bit of Facebook and Youtube etc.
It goes further than the Internet too, their whole concept and understanding of IT is shit for the most part. Sure they know how to use a PC, but they don't understand how it works. That is down to the piss poor IT (sorry ICT - aghh) courses taught in schools these days.
as an ex (history) teacher, kids really dont know that much about IT. They realised that they could play flash games and then minimise the screen, and the smarter ones changed the monitor screen size to hide the windows task bar, but i had them completely stumped by magically bringing back the last open program (i'd pressed alt and tab), it took them months to figure that one out (plenty of detention time, u dont get away with playing flash games in my classroom)!
1 in 7? I reckon it was higher than that when the Internet wasn't prevalent. We all remember our first view of hedge p0rn (by which I mean the joy of finding an inexplicably abandoned mag in a hedge as an adolescent).
Maybe though, it's actually true and is due to the other myth that kids are so sexually active these days that p0rn doesn't interest them as they're all out getting the real thing. I await a hard-hitting documentary by Anna Richardson on one hand yelling at the world to stop exposing kids to sexualised content while on the other showing use full-frontal nudity under the guise of "education"... Hopefully sponsored by the Daily Mail.
When I was at school, we didn't rely on hedgerows. One of my enterprising mates had the idea to obtain a large brown paper envelope and commandeering the school teletype, typed something along the lines of...
"Dear Newsagent,
Unfortunately I am unwell and cannot get out of the house. I would like to buy the current edition of Razzle*. I have sent my son round to collect it. Please can you put it into the envelope and seal it down as he is too young to read it. "
* insert appropriate 1970s grumble-mag...
Occasionally this ruse actually worked!
A popular US monthly compendium of condensed articles from other publications with very conservative social and political (think: bathroom reading at your grammy's) once launched a 2nd magazine dedicated entirely to "Family Values". The premiere episode was about teenage pregnancy and featured a provocative looking nymphette on the cover, eating an apple ("Eve", get it?) presumably in the early stages of pregnancy. The 2nd cover was about teenage sex, and looked like an Abercrombie & Fitch advert.....
Oh, I dunno. Could be a typo. It was initially p0rn, which my peers & I were using as a young 20-somethings back in the late '70s. The first "pr0n" usage that I'm aware of was on Usenet in roughly 1982 or '83, certainly well before TheGreatRenaming ... the author of the post got laughed at, but admitted the typo.
Do you really think your age group invented hacking the English language? Might want to look into middle English and then go later back and read up on old English ... Or not. Suit yourself.
"Promoting children’s online opportunities, including their right to communicate and their need to take some risks is important to counter simplistic calls for restricting children’s internet use. The ambition must be, instead, to maximise benefits (as defined by children as well as adults) while reducing harm (which is not necessarily the same as reducing risk)."
Am I seeing things? A sane view of children and the net? I'm amazed.
I do feel that some of the data is flawed (questioning the children at home face-to-face will not always "open them up" in my opinion, contrary to what the report claims), some points made sound surprisingly refreshing amidst all the usual panic.
Simple to eliminate.
Room of kids.
Stack of survey forms.
Box of pens.
Mu8ltiple choice questions where they tick the boxes.
No way to tell who filled in which form.
Now full disclosure is possible, and the answers are going to be as honest as the kids will entertain.
Methinks you are a bit concerned about the survey not being the usual shock horror kiddies being exposed to hard core porn while looking for Sponge bob websites.
To be honest. If anything, I'd expect kids to exaggerate. So it is quite possibly less.
...in the first place?
If my lad wants to drool over it it's fine by me esp. after he's 10.
Compared to being a bigot or a bully, I'd take pr0n any day. After all, those teenage hormones and stresses need some relief (pun intended) instead of stifling them until they become destructive and uncontrollable.
Best bit is about how conversation and listening puts most of the problems in order. This I need to work on harder.
Exactly my point - it did no harm to me or my mates at all. If anything it just made me totally accepting of other people's choices.
It's a really good point about the stifling too - it's so bizarre that as a society we totally shield anyone under 16 from the real world and responsibility then when they turn feral we wonder why.
Still - sounds like you have the right idea - it's nice to see that not everyone is totally illogical :)
No, it's not. It's EXACTLY the same. Really. People haven't changed as a race in thirty years, nor have the odds & ends that they find titillating. It might be more available, and/or easier to access, but trust me, your Granddad had access to porn. So did his father. And his father. Try to remember, I *am* a grandfather ...
When we were going through my Grandad's things, we found a daguerreotype of my Grandmother, naked, and in an almost shockingly pornographic pose. It was accompanied by a quite steamy letter, sent to him, by her, from "the old country". The letter indicated that she quite missed having sex with him, going into some detail, and hoped to join him in California in a year or two. According to the date on the letter, Grandma was only 14 in the photo ... She joined him here when she was 17, and they were married for 70+ years before she passed away.
Needless to say, we buried him with the photo & letter in his breast pocket. Seemed fitting, somehow. We have a scan of the letter, but couldn't bring ourselves to scan the photo ... Far too personal.
Seriously - I'd rather have my son seeing some crazy German bondage fetish shit (ahem) than the beheading / torture / injury vids. The former either turn you on (and if it does, that ship already sailed) or makes you rethink Germany's defacto leadership position in the EU; the latter seriously fucks you up. I've never sought it out (sometimes it comes up during searches for Spongebob) but it's profoundly horrifying if you have any empathy at all.
Of course, I'd rather that my son not be watching the crazy German bondage fetish shit (ahem). He's three, and that's way too young to be exposed to things like the EU.
I guess it depends a lot on the view of what the child considers pornographic. Example, at boarding school (in the '80s) there were numerous issues of certain well-known publications, with pictures of women all in remarkably similar poses. There were also copy-of-copy-of-copy (repeat: until false) of VHS recordings of what amounted to little more than bluey-grey "noise" patterns and grunting. While technically it would be classed as "pornography", my thoughts were "meh". When I get around to it, I'll find myself a real girl. Until then, I would class porn as a very poor substitute.
Having said this, it is worth looking at the statistic from the other way around. One in seven is quite a low number (assuming they fessed up), but on the other hand that's four in a class of thirty...
..You don't ever jump out of your window at night to go to those nasty places I told you not to go to, do you?
Little Timmy: "No, I would NEVER do that!"
Well, that's ok then.
Little Timmy (under his breath): "Sucker!".
As for the hedge porn, anyone else used to go 'hedge-hunting' ?...
Happy days.
...and that was with skipping most of the lessons. I signed up for CS but the teacher that came in wasn't qualified to teach CS so we were grouped into IT. Oh yes, "how to use a word processor" and "how to use a database". Given I had *written* a database for the BBC Micro, ported it to RISC OS, and was working on ARM code for speeding up some of the creeping featuritis, and bashed off an entire user guide in EdWord (later venerable !Edit ;) ), I didn't think that attending "IT" and discovering how little the teacher understood Econet and networking in general would have done me much good. So I went back up to the dorm to cut some code... but somehow usually ended up playing Interdictor. Oh well.
It'll be good to see "programming" introduced back into education, for there are numerous disciplines you have to grasp before you can even get to writing code - the main ones being to *understand* the problem and to break it down into chunks which can be attacked a bit at a time. How to devise alternatives, for sometimes the most obvious method is not the best. Not to mention the concept of modularisation so code can be reused instead of rewriting the same thing over and over (which means defining a decent API so the module isn't too quirky or specific to the first program you wrote it for). There is so much ground to cover before we ever get to #include <stdio.h>...
I admit that's higher than I would have expected, but I don't know that it's necessarily cause for alarm. Alot of the time, that could mean a friend-of-a-friend, not a total stranger. And it did say most didn't go alone, which in some cases could even mean their parents were there. Anyway, it's a sign of the times I guess. Now that the internet fully mainstream, I expect people will think of it more and more as just another way to know people, rather than making a sharp distinction between online and offline friends.
So... one-third of kids, by their own report, can circumvent the restrictions that their parents think they've applied to their internet use?
One-*third*?
And 9% have met up IRL with someone they first met online? NINE FREAKIN' PERCENT?
I don't quite see that putting "only" in front of these numbers makes them small.
I frequently meet with people I have previously only had contact with online. Having just moved house, almost all the people I have met in my new area have come from online or phone contact. Seriously, people these days rarely meet others through anything other than remote contact first, so the figure for adults must be way more than 9%, so what exactly is your point, veti?
"...For example, while parents worry more about 'stranger danger', children find cyberbullying the most upsetting risk."
So, can we finally disband CEOP and that other police-led ship of fools, the IWF? After a decade or more of being continually bullied (and censored) about 'stranger danger' online we finally see the lies exposed by an independent third party with no vested interest in promoting the same old tired, sensationalist propaganda (which was always utterly baseless, not that you'd have found many journalists bothering to ask).
Ah well, CEOP have already thankfully been neutered by Theresa May - she just needs to finish the job now. I don't see so many examples of gobshite police officers all over the TV and radio shouting about 'global networks' of 'online predators' these days (not like the good old Jim Gamble days). CEOP was a nice job creation scheme for ex-coppers while it lasted, but it gets real tricky to justify a £12million pa budget when your number one target simply disappears off the radar (if it was ever there in the first place).