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- The Observer,
- Sunday October 22 2000
If ever you hanker after a half-assed exploration of internet issues, then tune in to that great flagship of BBC news and current affairs, Radio 4's Today programme. True, the ageing journalistic toffs who present it do not often engage in discussion of the net, but when they do they invariably take a firm grip of the wrong end of the stick.
Last Wednesday morning they turned their attention to the oft-visited question of paedophiles on the net. The item opened with a report on the dangers to children posed by internet 'chat-rooms' - virtual spaces in which people exchange text or voice messages in real time. A representative of Childnet, an internet-based charity, ex-plained how one could highlight an individual participant in a chat room and invite that person to join in a private discussion. This, he argued, is where the danger lay. 'In chat rooms,' he went on, 'it's so much easier for someone to build a relationship with a child over a period of months, so in terms of strangers actually contacting children and harming them we've got to recognise that internet chat is the new playground where this is going to happen.'
The reporter then interviewed the mother of a girl who had been picked out in this way by a 47-year-old man masquerading in cyberspace as a teenager and who had arranged a meeting (in real space) with her daughter. The point of the report was that this kind of thing is not illegal under UK law - but is in the US, where authorities do not have to wait until a child has actually been hurt before tak ing action. There then followed a hand-wringing discussion with a British police officer about the difficulties of preventing this kind of thing over here. 'There's real concern,' concluded the report, 'that British law and policing methods may be inadequate to meet the coming danger'.
All of which is true, but mostly beside the point. What was missing from the Today item - and indeed is missing from discussions of internet issues in the mass media generally - is any acknowledgment that by far the best way to protect your children from the dangers that lurk on the net is carefully to monitor what they do online, and to engage with them in discussing the dangers. Most of us warn our kids not to accept lifts or sweets from strangers. But how many give warnings about not accepting invitations to private internet chats or disclosing personal details to online contacts?
I suspect that many parents (and teachers) avoid doing this, probably out of fear of revealing their technological ignorance and suffering the loss of face this might entail. An increasing number put their faith - misguidedly - in software, by installing filtering programs which detect flesh tones, ban access to certain sites and so on. But these programs raise almost as many problems as they solve: computer-savvy kids find them easy to circumvent, for one thing; and they clumsily ban good sites as well as evil ones. But their greatest flaw is that they enable one to subcontract to a piece of software a fundamental parental responsibility - that of helping one's children to become street-wise in cyberspace.
In the brain-dead mindset of the Today programme this is apparently a job that has to be subcontracted to software, the police or some national cybercrime intelligence unit. This is hooey. It's a job for parents and it's dead simple to do: put the PC in the living room where you can keep an eye on it; do not allow your kids to install chat or other software without your knowledge and approval; and talk to them about not accepting virtual sweets from virtual strangers.
