Ofcom research finds most children believe they know how to remain safe online
The majority of children believe that they know how to remain safe online, a new report by Ofcom has discovered.
The report ‘Children and parents: media use and attitudes’ by Ofcom, has found that 88% of 8-15 year olds have said that they are confident that they know how to be safe when using the internet, while almost all involved in the research (97%) said that they were ‘confident’ users of the internet.
Also discovered in the report is that 13% of 12-15 year-olds admitted that they had seen something online that was ‘worrying, nasty or offensive’ in the last year, while 25% of 12-15’s also admitted that they knew someone who had been bullied online recently.
A small number (3%) of 8-11 year olds and 6% of 12-15 year olds also said that they had personal experience of being bullied through a mobile phone in the last year, while 14% of 12-15 year olds said they had undertaken one of four types of risky online behaviour, most commonly accepting the contact details of someone they only knew through online (11%).
Parental concerns were also considered within the report, finding that parents of 5-15s were more likely to be concerned about the TV content that their child was watching (31%) than online (23%), mobile phones (16%), games (19%) or radio (5%).
The main concerns by parents surveyed were over violence (20%), sexually explicit content (17%) and offensive language (17%).
The report also found ‘relatively low levels of concern’ from parents over their child handing out personal details to inappropriate people (28%) or illegal downloading (14%), with similar result found across mobile use too.
However, most parents (81%) did say that they trusted their child to use the internet safely.