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The best of findings?

By Lelia Green - posted Wednesday, 30 November 2011


While Australian children were 2.5 times more likely to have 'been bothered' than the average child in Europe, and while Australia was the most bothered of all 26 countries, there was a range of countries that approached similar levels. Denmark (28%), Estonia (25%), Norway and Sweden (both 23%) followed Australia in the ranking.

Interestingly, like Australia, many of these countries also have children who go online comparatively early. In this respect, and in a number of others, Australian children's internet use aligns more closely with Scandinavian and Baltic nations than it does with the English-speaking countries of the UK and Ireland.

As well as going online early, Norway and Australia both had comparatively high numbers of children able to access the internet using smart, handheld, mobile devices. Australia was first in the 26 nations, with 44% of child participants using these devices, and Norway second, with 31%. Using mobile media to go online is more likely to indicate children who are accessing the internet in a social group, possibly away from adult supervision.

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The child that feels bothered by what they see online may not have experienced harm, but insofar as some children may have been harmed by online experiences, these are likely to have indicated being bothered.

Of the six risks investigated, four are particularly responsible for Australian children's high experience of feeling bothered. These four high-scoring risks are:

 

  1. Misuse of personal data (where Australia is ranked second out of 26 countries);
  2. Exposure to online bullying (where Australia is ranked third out of 26 countries);
  3. Seeing sexual images (where Australia ranks fourth);
  4. Accessing potentially harmful user-generated content (where Australia ranks sixth).
  • Only one of these, 'seeing sexual images', potentially involves professional content services, since the majority of concerns about personal data use (13/17) involved misuse of a password or someone online pretending to be the child. The other risks are likely to involve children's peers or young people in the child's age group.

This indicates that a high policy and intervention priority should be given to developing social expectations and tools around children's acceptable online behaviour, as well as focusing upon regulatory mechanisms and parents' adoption of technological tools, such as filters, for children younger than teenage years.

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Recommended strategies for promoting safe and sociable online activity, and responding to peer-related negative events, should be age-appropriate and should address children's online use from the youngest ages. Given that it is other children who seem to be primarily responsible for most of the experiences that bother the AU Kids Online respondents, effective self-regulation by content services – or external regulation of content services – will only make an impact on a minority of the areas of internet experience that most bother Australian children.

The research findings around skills, opportunities and internet use and access, align Australia with other wealthy developed, smaller population nations, particularly those in Scandinavia.

Whilst it is important to investigate what bothers children online, how much and for how long, it remains the case that 70 per cent of Australian children, online for an average of 99 minutes per day, say they have not come across anything online in the past 12 months that bothered them.

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About the Author

Lelia Green is Professor of Communications, School of Communications and Arts, Edith Cowan University and co-Chief Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Lelia Green

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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