Safety first for young surfers

Parents were warned this week to move home computers out of their children's bedrooms and into a family room to protect children from potential child abusers.

A report by Britain's Internet Crime Forum has recommended that children should not be left to surf alone on the estimated 100,000 chat sites worldwide. Forum chairman Detective Chief Superintendent Keith Ackerman warned that girls aged 13 to 17 were the most likely targets of predatory adult sex offenders who exploit the anonymity of the Web.

The report, Chat Wise, Street Wise, recommends educating parents about the risks of their children using chat rooms and suggests a kitemarking scheme to identify safe sites. A study quoted in the report estimates that a quarter of British children use chat rooms.

At the launch of the report, Lord Bassam, Home Office under-secretary, announced that a high-level meeting of key players in the Internet industry, child welfare organisations and the police would be held next week to take forward its recommendations.

Schools have also been given new guidelines issued this week by the Department of Education on what it calls 'safer surfing'.

The guidelines stress that schools should not publish individual photographs of named students on school Web sites and should make children's e-mail addresses anonymous in an effort to prevent them from receiving messages from strangers outside school.

Next week's meeting will focus on how to tackle the increasing problem of Internet chat rooms being used by paedophiles to meet and subsequently abuse children and how to prevent access to child pornography on the Internet.

It will also discuss how Internet service providers and the police can work together to bring paedophiles to justice, and how to increase the confidence of parents that their children will be safe on the Net.

Priscilla Lui Tsang Sun-kai, director of Against Child Abuse, said Hong Kong teachers and parents also needed clear guidelines on how to help children avoid the dangers of the Net, and that current guidelines might not reach every teacher.

However, in its parents pages, the Hong Kong EducationCity Web site includes police advice on how to prevent on-line abuse, warning surfers not to divulge personal information.

In Hong Kong, the first known online sex-abuse case came to light in 1998 when a 14-year-old boy was befriended by a woman through a youth chat-line. The woman pretended to be a child and masterminded an elaborate seduction before the police were alerted and she fled the SAR.

The Education Department has published two guidelines on Information Technology learning, but these only mention privacy and Internet security issues briefly. Last year, the Curriculum Development Institute developed a series of teaching materials on IT in education, designed for primary schools, which give further guidelines.

'We recognised that it would not be enough to give the teachers a guideline to tell the students what they should do,' said Simon Ip Tang-ping, the Education Department's senior curriculum development officer for IT and Strategies. 'Cultivating proper attitudes to using IT is more difficult than teaching IT skills. It is therefore important we start at primary school level,' he said.

But Mr Ip added that the Education Department had not yet discussed specific policies or measures to deal with online child abuse problems.