An Education Ministry survey of 16,700 pupils shows that 2/3 of them have no parental supervision over their internet surfing habits. Educators both in and out of the Ministry intensify their push for “Family Internet Control.”
Students in the 5th, 8th, and 11th grades in 234 schools around the country filled out the questionnaires, in a survey overseen by Dorit Behar, the Education Ministry’s national supervisor of information science and internet ethics. It found that nearly 3/4 of the youth say they prefer to spend their free time surfing the net, and that in fact half the students - 45% - spend 6-12 hours a week doing so; 20% spend even more than that.
Particularly disturbing to Behar is the fact that 67% of parents allow their children to surf their net with no time restrictions, and more than half of them do not supervise their children’s internet habits. “It is of utmost importance,” Behar said, “that parents cooperate in supervising their children. It is incumbent upon them to know that the internet is a genuine arena of events for their children. They may close the doors of their home to the dangers outside, but parents must know that the internet opens other doors to the [dangers of the] entire world, with all that that entails.”
Yona Pressburger, a producer of children’s movies and media documentation, and his wife Aliza, of Mitzpeh Yericho, lecture widely on the dangers of internet dangers. They say that filters such as Rimon and Moreshet are important - “Internet in the home without a filter is a crime!” says Yona – but not enough.
“What we need is not only filtering and awareness,” Aliza says, “but a full-scale war against the culture of the internet. Yes, many people need it for work, or to do banking and the like, but do they realize that their children are using it for totally different purposes?”
A recent article in Britain's The Guardian quotes government-report author and psychologist Tanya Byron as warning of a "digital divide" developing within families as children mastered the internet and video games while their parents and grandparents often had little clue about the material they were looking at.
53-62% - Parents Show No Interest
The survey found that 53% of the parents do not show interest in their children’s surfing habits, and that 62% do not discuss what they find on the internet with their parents. This, together with the fact that 78% of the homes do not have internet filters, paints a dangerous picture for children in Israel.
Two-thirds of the children say they use the internet, among other things, for chatting, instant messaging, forums and email. Just over 70% say they do not use their real names and are aware that the internet is “not a safe place to find new friends.” However, the Education Ministry report authors write, “it is known that even when nicknames are chosen, they are liable to be ones that invite danger.”
One-seventh of the young surfers say they enter sites that are designed for adults only.
The Education Ministry runs many programs throughout the school year, including lectures from soldiers of the IDF’s C4I (Command, Control, Computers, Communications and Information) Corps, workshops for teachers, activity kits for safe surfing, and more.
The survey results were released in honor of National Safe Internet Day, this Tuesday, Feb. 17. This entire week will feature many Education Ministry activities promoting safe internet surfing. Parents and students alike will be targeted for increased awareness of the internet’s dangers and how to deal with them.
Yona Pressburger, having just completed one of “hundreds of lectures that I’ve given on this topic,” told IsraelNationalNews.com on Sunday some of the many stories of internet damage he has heard or encountered: “For instance,” he said, “we recently heard from an 11-year-old girl about an internet game she had been playing, involving the killing off of nursing home residents in order to make room for new ones… We immediately contacted the site, as well as the police and the Council for Children’s Welfare, and the game was removed. Parents have to be very aware in order to be able to fight this type of phenomena.”
Yona has established a non-profit association called Netivei Reshet [Paths of the Internet]. “The goal is to promote better internet awareness, provide aid and counsel to youth and adults who have been harmed by internet addiction or violent, sexual or other negative content, and serve as a lobby to fight against negative content,” he explained.
Parents: "They're Old Generation, They Don't Get It"
Explaining why parents tend to be permissive in terms of internet, Pressburger said, “Parents usually belong to the old generation, and really don’t understand the full depth of the internet. When they surf, they generally look for a particular kind of information on the internet, while children often have more curiosity and find other things. The parents often simply don’t grasp how perfectly easy it is for a simple search to end up on a site that they would never want their children to visit…”
“Not that I am minimizing the problems that adults can have,” he said. “Many young couples come to us with internet issues, such as young husbands who continue their habits from before. There are spouses who meet someone else over the net, internet addiction, etc…”
“We don’t advocate getting rid of internet access from the house – internet is here, it’s the way the world works - but rather to simply have it under control. We must learn how to relate to it, how to use it, and how to restrict it. There are strategies: The computer must be used only at certain times, in open areas of the house, and with a purpose determined in advance. We must sit down with our children at the computer - not as policemen, but as partners in this struggle against bad things. We have to talk with them openly about which sites they visit, how they generally surf, if they have ever seen things or entered sites that affected them badly, who they may have chatted with, etc.
“Just now, a mother called me about her daughter who has fallen in love with her chat partner – someone she [the daughter] has never met! Of course it is likely that there were problems before – but now she’s in trouble. And what about the girl who liked music and ended up on a religious Jewish site that turned out to be a missionary site – and without even realizing it, because of their influence, she began putting missionary themes in her music… In short, we must take control of the internet, not the other way around!”