Internet Safety and Children

John Carr is the Internet Advisor for the National Child Helpline and a leading expert in the field of fighting child abuse. In August 2003 he joined members on our Your Child's Safety board to answer their questions about child safety online

Q: How do we teach our children about the grooming signals used by paedophiles without frightening them or coming across as being 'paranoid parents'? clare_uk
A: Dr Rachel O'Connell of the Cyberspace Research Unit at the University of Central Lancashire is one of the UK's leading experts in this. She runs a website at www.fkbko.net which offers great advice to kids about chat rooms, and links to some of her other published work that deal with this issue. The other place to look is the COPINE project at the University of Cork.

Q: We get profiles of likely perpetrators, but not of the victims. It would be good if parents and teachers had guidelines for spotting when children are miserable enough to look for this kind of solace, and some advice for getting their kids to look for friends and activities offline. nance444
A: There are two kinds of kids who are likely to get into trouble online. The ones you have described, and another category: high-risk takers. Paedophiles are often very adept at identifying children in either category and at establishing contact with them. In almost every case things have started to go wrong when the paedophile has persuaded the child to leave the semi-public arena of a chat room and go off for a one-to-one chat, so that's a key danger signal. However much you might feel like screaming with anxiety and fear for your child's safety, don't. Talk to them openly and as calmly as you can about your worries and concerns, show that you understand that 'stuff happens' on the Internet - and that means you have to take a little time to get to understand the issues yourself. Maybe your child can be your teacher and, in so doing, show you where she goes online and who she meets there.

Q: We always hear about cases of abuse over the Internet, but how common is it really? I suppose it's a difficult crime to legislate against, but what are the current laws on the subject? theodina
A: The basic rule is that whatever is illegal in the real world is illegal in the online world, so there are very few laws that are specific to the Internet, although this is starting to change. In the UK we have a Sex Offences Bill currently going through Parliament. It should be law by October/November. The Bill will modernise the current legal regime in relation to sexual offences generally, and in respect of children in particular. Some of those elements of modernisation are directly down to the Internet e.g. we are going to have a new offence for grooming a child for sexual purposes. Nobody keeps any official figures about child abuse cases that start on the Internet. They just get recorded as child sex crimes, without necessarily indicating some of the key surrounding factors, e.g. that a computer or the Internet was involved. The Home Office is looking into changing the way we record these incidents but, meanwhile, we do our best to monitor cases through the local press. We estimate that in the past two or three years there have been about 25 cases (22 girls 3 boys) where children under 16 years old have met someone in a chat room, gone off to meet them in real life and been raped by them or seriously sexually abused. We know about these because in each of them the guy was caught, convicted and sent to jail. We don't know about all the others, e.g. where there was insufficient evidence to bring a prosecution, or where the child never told her parents, or where the parents never told the police, but you can be sure the number is much larger than 25.