As I speak with parents (as I did two weeks ago when I spoke at St Mark’s Anglican Church on the topic of ‘How to keep our children safe online’), one thing continues to stand out - many parents have very little idea about what their children are doing online: both the opportunities and threats that the internet presents.

I was pondering why this is, and concluded that to a large extent, this is due to the particular point in history that we inhabit. 

Parents, who played under the sprinkler, borrowed books from libraries and read documents on micro-fiche, have given birth to children who spend their holidays in front of screens, Google anything they don’t know, and are in constant contact with their friends via Facebook, SMS, MSN - or whatever else has caught their attention this week. Children are living in a different world that their parents know virtually nothing about.

In his submission to the Joint Select Committee on Cyber-Safety, Internode engineer Mark Newton made this point:

“We are currently in a state of flux:

On one hand we have a generation of people who have never known a time without ubiquitous Internet access, who have integrated it fully into their lives, using it fluidly and naturally, barely considering whether it's even possible to perform certain tasks without it.

On the other hand we have a generation of people brought up in the legacy of previous communications systems, who often don't understand the technology or the new social environments it is enabling.

Between the two extremes we have an amorphous mix of people with both attributes, who, in relation to the internet, are either fluent or foreign depending on the situation before them. Overlaid on top of the whole mess is a media environment which seems purpose-designed to produce befuddlement for the uninitiated.”

The difference in knowledge between parents and their children about the internet goes to the very core of the issue of internet filtering, and indeed parenting in 2010.

The people who are legislating, and the parents who are parenting, don’t understand the technologies that are so familiar to their children who have grown up using them. This affects how they seek to address the issues the internet presents our society with.

Parents hear a lot about the risks - porn websites, cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking, addictions (internet, gaming, porn), identity theft, etc. and are rightly concerned. So, when the government proposes a filter, and the Australian Christian Lobby says, “Mandatory ISP level filtering of Refused Classification material [i.e. the company that provides internet to your home will be required by law to block access to certain pages of the internet] will make the internet safer for our children”, it’s understandable why this suggestion would attract mainstream support. Measures that protect children from some of the worst content online have got to be good, don’t they?

I thought so, and supported the idea of a filter for some time, despite opposition from just about everyone except the Australian Christian Lobby and Minister Conroy! I received tweets and emails and blog comments (as well as face-to-face conversations!) from people explaining why the filter is a bad idea. Just about everything I read about the filter was similarly negative. But I was sceptical. Lots of people oppose the filter for bad reasons (I wrote about 13 of the most common objections last week). I also thought that to reject the filter was to reject a basic measure for protecting our children, and when the average age a child views porn is 11 years and teenagers are lured to their death via Facebook, care is what our children desperately need.

But I’ve come to see that the proposed filter isn’t the way to do it. Basically, this is because the proposed filter is akin to cleaning the ocean with a bottle of detergent.

There is so much content on the internet that is unsuitable for children and teenagers. The proposed filter will block very little of it, for a very limited period of time, for a very small number of people, searching for a very specific type of content, while simultaneously lulling the non-tech savvy (i.e. most Australians) into a false sense of security about how safe their children are online. And our children need more than this.

A report for Microsoft Australia nailed this on the head:

"Most Australian parents are concerned about the safety of their children online. But new research shows that parents don’t back up their concerns with meaningful actions, and that in any event they might well be concerned about the wrong risks."

Research by “For Safety’s Sake” for Microsoft Australia found that while 64 per cent of parents were concerned about cyber-safety, 65 per cent don’t use any parental control software and 62 per cent allow their kids to access the internet unsupervised.

Parents perceive their kids to be more at risk accessing the internet from friends’ homes than their own, and rate the risk from online predators as being more dangerous than exposure to pornography. In turn that’s seen as more dangerous than bullying, which is seen as more dangerous than identity theft. Few parents knew who their children’s friends were online."