Zip It Block It Flag It

Although today is European safer internet day, I did my training yesterday to 650 secondary school pupils, as I have an event today in TVP as part of the day job.

There was stunned silence after they watched the excellent videos provided by CEOP (Child Online Protection Centre) , which are also available to teachers and parents on the ThinkUKnow website. CEOP are also providing both a Toolbar and Search add-ins for IE8 to make it easier to report abuse and raise awareness of the issues:

This is useful as not all sites commonly accessed by children have the report abuse icon that CEOP use, Facebook being an obvious example.

I heard on the way in that the Today team on radio 4, were stating that there were only 169 cases of grooming bought before the CPS, and were therefore downplaying the initiative a bit. So why do I bother with this?

169 is 169 too many
The reporting rates for this kind of crime are very low, i.e. only a few people come forward.
Grooming is only one kind of problem on the internet which can adversely affect children, and so I also emphasise the damage that cyber bullying can do and that they need to be really careful with the photos they take of themselves and their friends. And as you can see there’s quite a few other topics as well.

OK rant over, back to preparation for today’s event on the Microsoft Application Platform in 2 hours and counting!

Technorati Tags: safer internet day 2010,internet safety,ceop,thinkuknow,IE8,security