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World of danger behind the bedroom door
Parents strive to protect their children from ‘real-life’ risks, but, in a world increasingly dominated by the internet, are they missing the dangers online, asks Nicola David
 Increased pressure: mobiles and instant messaging take bullying out of the playground into the home PA |
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SIXTEEN young people have died in a spate of suspected suicides over the past year in and around Bridgend, in South Wales. Papyrus, a UK charity dedicated to preventing teenage suicide, has found that at least seven of the dead had visited chat rooms and websites dedicated to suicide. Japan already had the highest suicide rate among developed countries when it experienced the first recorded internet suicide pact. “By 2005, the internet suicide pacts had become an epidemic,” reported The Times last month. Nearly 100 young people — some as young as 15 — are thought to have died in suicide pacts that year. While Japan is taking steps to get the situation under control, the phenomenon is spreading to many other countries, including the UK. “We know of 30 cases of internet-related suicide in the UK since 2001, among young people as young as 13,” said a spokesperson for Papyrus. Some of these suicides have been as a result of a pact, such as the case in 2004 of a 13-year-old girl from the West Midlands who made an agreement with another girl she had met online a year earlier. The BBC reported that the 13-year-old died after taking an overdose; her friend’s suicide attempt failed.Other deaths have followed visits to websites that give detailed instructions on how to commit suicide successfully, and even incite young people to end their lives. |
 Internet risks: above: Blaengarw, near the county borough of Bridgend, where Natasha Randall, a 17-year-old, committed suicide. Police said that they were examining her computer in their investigation. PA |
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A 17-year-old student from Yorkshire hanged herself after taking advice from such a website. The Times, commenting on her death, said in May 2007: “Suicide newsgroups — and there are hundreds of such sites and associated chat rooms — are among the few places in the Western world where the desire to die isn’t stigmatised. . . there are now over ten million web pages devoted to the discussion of the subject.”
Paul Kelly, a trustee of Papyrus, says: “There are laws in place to protect people online from child pornography and sexual grooming of children, but there is nothing in place to protect vulnerable young people from being groomed to kill themselves.” The charity is campaigning for the Suicide Act of 1961 to include internet-related coercion or advice. Australia has had a similar law since 2005.
Self-generated risks
Suicide is only one of the risks that exist online, about which most adults remain largely uninformed. Sexual predators would seem the most obvious external risk, but the problem of self-generated risk is widespread.
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) — a government-funded law-enforcement agency — found that young people, mostly girls, are taking provocative pictures of themselves in their underwear, naked, or even while performing sexual acts. They upload such images to their social networking profiles, email them, or send them by mobile phone — or may even send live webcam footage.
“Kids are putting risqué photos of themselves online. But they don’t always realise that the default settings on their social networking profiles are set to ‘public’, which means that anyone in the world can see them. They must remember to set their profile to ‘private’, so only friends can see it, but even this isn’t infallible,” said a spokeswoman.
A dimension of teenage activity online is a tragically misplaced sense of being in control. While a great deal of care is taken over their pictures, and hours are spent on hair and make-up and new lingerie bought just for the occasion, increasingly girls have no idea of the enormity of the consequences they may face. “Once your photo is out there, you’ve lost all control over it. Anyone can do anything they like with it.”
CEOP warn that that “anyone” may include paedophiles who capture live webcam traffic, or who get themselves added as a “friend” to social network profiles. Once in possession of provocative images, they may track down the young person for sex or blackmail. |
 A parent talks about internet use with her teenage children PA |
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“Our research shows that 50 per cent of 11- to 16-year-olds have webcams, and often children will experiment sexually over webcams because they have a perception of safety in their own home, whereas they might feel uncomfortable exploring their sexuality in the ‘real world’.
“But a paedophile can capture images and webcam footage, and may edit them or use them to coerce a child into further action. ‘Now I’ve got this,’ they might say, ‘you have to do more of the same for me, or meet up with me for sex. If not, I’ll put your images on YouTube, or send them to your friends.’ This person might also trade the images within peer-to-peer paedophile groups, or sell them on.”
In 2006, the Daily Mail reported a warning by the head teacher of Tunbridge Wells Girls’ Grammar School, Kent, who discovered that 700 of her pupils had signed up to the social networking site Bebo. Many of the girls had attached revealing pictures of themselves, and had given personal details. “Some of these photographs could only be described as soft pornography when viewed by the wrong people. We feel this lays the girls open to potential paedophiles,” she told the newspaper.
The article reports that up to 61 per cent of British 13- to 17-year-olds have personal pages on networking sites, and many of their parents are ignorant of what they are doing online. The article stated: “Police have claimed more than 50,000 potential sexual predators are scouring the internet at any moment in time.”
The web is proving tempting in spurned relationships, too. In Canada, in 2005, a 16-year-old from Toronto was charged with possessing and distributing child pornography after he posted nude photos of his ex-girlfriend, taken with her consent at the age of 15, on a teen website.
Such photos may jeopardise or end careers: university admissions tutors and employers are increasingly researching applicants’ names on Google to discover what did not make it on to the CV. The Independent reported this month that “from Los Angeles to Lowestoft, thousands of social-network site-users have lost their jobs — or failed to clinch new ones — because of their [social networking] pages.”
Addiction
Most parents complain about the time their children spend online, but internet addiction is now a recognised problem. In China and Korea, dozens of young people have died after failing to eat or sleep between mammoth sessions on gaming and other websites.
Last year, the newspaper China Daily reported that more than two million of the country’s 18.3 million teenage internet users (mostly young men aged 15 to 20) were addicts. The most vulnerable, it said, were “good kids who impress their parents and teachers”.
In her book Caught in the Net, Dr Kimberly Young highlights warning signs of internet addiction, including decreased appetite, poor personal hygiene, aggressive behaviour, disrupted sleep patterns, fatigue, lower academic performance, and loss of interest in friends and hobbies.
Other types of addiction can also arise when young people follow up online advertisements for gambling and pornography websites. A spokesperson for Gamcare, an organisation that provides support and information to people with a gambling problem, found that 14.5 per cent of the 30,000 calls to their helpline in 2006 related to online gambling. Of those, ten per cent of the calls were from under-18s.
Cyber-bullying
During 2005-06, about a third of contacts made to Childline involved mobile-phone-related bullying, and 16 per cent were about online bullying. A 2007 survey of British eight- to 15-year-olds by Garlik, an online identity company, found that 11 per cent of respondents had been cyber-bullied either online or by email or mobile phone.
Unlike traditional bullying, there is little respite from this kind of attack. It follows children home and into their bedrooms. Thanks to internet pseudonyms, untraceable email accounts, and cheap pay-as-you-go phones, it is possible that parents and children may never know who is behind it. |
 Danger area: John Halligan, with the web page devoted to his son Ryan, who killed himself due to online bullying by his classmates PA |
| Parents afraid of letting their children play outside may find indoors just as treacherous. Last year, the Daily Mail reported that a teenager hanged himself after allegedly being cyber-bullied on the Bebo website by fellow pupils, who posted messages saying: “If you don’t kill yourself, we will do it for you.” Two of the bullies then turned up at his funeral. Protecting young people THE survey by Garlik last year highlighted the fact that parents may not realise that their children take scant notice of the warnings and advice they hear in the media or at school about internet safety. The survey suggests that as many as 20 per cent of young people may have arranged to meet someone they first encountered online — and only seven per cent of the respondents to the survey had told their parents. More than 50 per cent said they surfed the net without their parents’ knowledge, often late at night, and 40 per cent visited sites specifically forbidden by their parents. In the same survey, 30 per cent acknowledged that they had given out their full name online; also their home address (12 per cent), home telephone number (ten per cent), and school details (46 per cent). The CEO at Garlik is Tom Ilube, the former CIO of Egg. He has children of his own, and is concerned about the dangers of naïvety. “The most worrying thing is that young people don’t understand how open the web is. They think the information they post to websites is only available to their friends. Once we can get it into a young person’s head that everything they do is visible to millions of other people, they will start to self-regulate.” Internet safety issues need to be drawn together under one umbrella: there are many agencies concerned with different areas, but no one really has oversight, says Mr Ilube. “People tend to look for technical solutions for the problem, but these are social challenges we’re talking about. I could put a CCTV camera in my child’s bedroom, in order to see what they get up to in there, but that would destroy my relationship with them. In the same way, solutions to the internet problem can’t just be technological.” Asked how parents can best help their children, Mr Ilube says: “If I had to give one piece of advice to parents, it would be to talk to their children. Tell them how visible they are on the internet: tell them that if they wouldn’t put a piece of information on a billboard in Piccadilly Circus, they shouldn’t put it online.” Nicola David is the author of Staying Safe Online (Grove Books; £2.95; 978-1-85174-675-0) Websites For parents: www.ceop.gov.uk www.garlik.com (choose “Advice” then “Kids At Risk”) For young people: www.thinkuknow.co.uk www.stoptextbully.com (deals with all aspects of cyber-bullying) www.studentdepression.org 12 online safety commandments • Remember: people may not be who, or how old, they say they are • Never disclose identifying details • Only MSN with people already known in the real world • Never reply to cyber-bullying: block the sender, save the evidence, and tell a trusted adult • Don’t spend time on websites that make you feel bad about yourself • Set social networking profiles to “private” — and be careful who is added as a “friend” • Set internet security settings as high as possible • Never do anything online that could jeopardise your education or your career, or lead to a criminal record • Think of yourself as a role model: what might happen if a much younger child saw your online profile? • Never respond to spam emails, dubious competitions, or chain letters • Don’t spend too much time online: have “real-world” friends and interests, too • Pray regularly that God will bless and protect your time online |
