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Protecting children from the dangers of the Net
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Protecting children from the dangers of the Net
?For those of you who have never seen an image of child pornography, be grateful that you have not and please keep it that way, for the image is too gruesome to the mind and never escapes your memory.? South African minister of Home affairs.
After the ?Show? episode, parents are increasingly worried about what their children can get up to when they are not around. Seeing their 16 year-old daughter having sex on screen and knowing that this ?movie? has gone round the country on mobile phones must have been a very hard experience for them. But parents of viewers may actually have realised they had no control on what their children could see on the Internet or any other technological device. Ammar Oozeer, acting senior state counsel for the ministry of Justice and Human rights, held a talk at the British Council on ethics and child protection on the Internet to answer some of these questions. The fact that his talk was so well-attended proved in itself how preoccupied Mauritians are by this problem.
Moral harm</B>
The cyberspace has a number of specificities compared to the real world that make control more difficult. On chat forums, for instance, adults may pass themselves off as youngsters and it is not possible for children to know to whom they are really talking. Even though it may be difficult to physically approach the child, adults can cause moral harm to these children ? or even use pictures a child has innocently sent to pornographic ends.
As identity can easily be hidden on the Internet and acts perceived as anonymous, people might feel less inhibited. ?They might actually forget the consequences their words may have in the real world,? explains Ammar Oozeer. In fact, people tend to lose their capacity to differentiate between what is real and unreal. An Internet user is unable to use all his senses ? for instance, eye contact does not exist ? and it becomes difficult to assess the motives and general behaviour of the person talking to you.
According to the specialist in computer and communications law, the best way of preventing children from being faced with pornographic scenes ? or even be involved in such scenes ? remains education and control. Of course, regulations are there: if an adult uploads the picture of a child, he will be prosecuted. But what would happen if a child uploads his/her own picture? Nothing can prevent them from doing so and this is the reason why children have to be carefully informed of the consequences of their actions.
As for Ammar Oozeer, Internet service providers should be responsible enough to provide filtering. This could be done through rating software as is done in the case of games for violence or vulgarity. An age check could also be a good way of controlling access to some sites with a personal number given for an adult verification system. Internet service providers could even make sure there are protection measures either with a warning page, a visual or a sound signal.
Parental control</B>
Whichever way is chosen to control access, there is one certainty: there are methods for ISP to reduce the risk that children have access to harmful content on the Internet. It is only a matter of responsibility?
In Mauritius, the Internet service providers have no code of practice. Of course, the law forbids adults from using children to pornographic ends. However, there is no strict control to make sure children do not have access to a certain number of sites. There are not even clear statistics for Mauritius. ?Hopefully, there will soon be guidelines to make sure multimedia is not used with a pornographic aim for children,? he said at the end of the talk. We should adopt a multiple approach - through awareness by parents and stricter regulations by the government. But in the absence of such guidelines for the moment, there is no doubt that the best way of preventing children from being faced with pornographic or violent content is education by parents who should first make sure ?children are not always alone with the Internet? Parents should be able to move around and check where their children are surfing,? he concluded.
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