Majority of children exposed to internet have unpleasant experiences

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 25 June 2010, 00:57 IST   |    3 Comments
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New Delhi: Even when one takes various security measures for one's children's safety, the child might be still not completely safe. Even if the children stay at home, they are at a risk of facing negative and unpleasant experiences while surfing the internet. As per a new survey, it has emerged that almost eight out of 10 children in India have been through negative online experiences that include cyber-bullying, online harassment and exposure to pornographic or violent material. The statistics also show that only 50 percent of the parents know what their children go through. Experts see it as the expanding gap between parents and their 'tech-savvy children'. "The gap is wider in India compared to many other countries. However, this year we see that parents are conscious of the amount of time that children spend online (average 36 hours a month)," said Effendy Ibrahim, Consumer Business Head - Asia, Symantec, while announcing the findings of Norton Online Family Report. 2,800 children (200 in India) were covered in the studies, who are aged between 8-17 years, and the adults numbered to 7,066 (500 in India). Among this 77 percent Indian children admitted to facing negative encounters and 50 percent of parents being aware of the same. While in U.S. and UK, the figures stood at 54 and 55 percent of the children respectively and for parents it is 43 and 40 percent correspondingly. 24 percent of the Indian parents believed their children were added as a friend by some anonymous person on social networking sites while 55 percent of the children agreed to that actually happening. Similarly, 29 per cent of parents thought their child had downloaded a virus, but 40 per cent children reported this. Another finding of the study was that a majority of the parents in Canada, U.S. and Brazil exercised control on children through use of software control tools compared to India or China, where there are rules on hours of usage of internet.