“Parents are unaware of internet filters,” according to the headline on a government press release that’s landed in my inbox.
This claim is (apparently) based on an Ofcom report, which certainly makes for interesting reading, but which doesn’t entirely back up that headline. The disconnect is clear from the first sentence from the DCMS release:
Around one in eight parents that do not have family friendly internet controls did not know they existed or did not know how to install them, says a new report.
Let’s unpick that, since the headline will clearly be parroted in news stories elsewhere.
If you read not only the DCMS press release but also take the time to skim through Ofcom’s report, you’ll find that at the time of the research, parental control systems were used by 43% of parents with children between the ages of five and 15 who go online.
That means 57% don’t use filters. And, as we’ve established, one in eight of the non-filter crowd are confused by the technology or unaware of its existence. By my maths, that’s about 7% of the total number of parents surveyed.
So the DCMS release should read:” 7% of parents are unaware of or intimidated by internet filters”.
While that’s certainly worth addressing, it hardly supports the headline implication that most parents have trouble with parental controls.
Proper parenting
It also doesn’t necessarily mean that the children of unknowledgeable or nervous parents are left to do as they please with their PCs and mobiles. Ofcom found that eight in ten parents talk to their children about what they get up to online, and half either supervise their children directly or regularly monitor their activity. So those who aren’t using technical measures may well be looking after their kids’ online welfare in other ways.
Conversely, the research found that 15% of parents admitted to doing nothing to protect their children online. We know that only 7% of parents avoid technology because they’re intimidated by it, or unaware of it. So even if none of those 7% did anything else to protect their offspring, that would still leave a larger proportion of parents who do nothing for other reasons – the main one being, according to the report, that they trust their children.
This doesn’t mean that the 7% should be ignored. If parents aren’t aware of filters or are intimidated by them, that needs to be addressed – as I’ve written before, no-one should be intimidated by a parental-control filter, as they’re very, very simple to use. But it’s clear that this isn’t a problem for the majority of parents overall, or even the majority of parents who don’t use filters: many simply don’t find them necessary.
Low baseline
This report is intended to establish a baseline, letting the government measure the success of compelling ISPs to force customers to make a decision on filters, and was conducted before such controls were rolled out; indeed, Virgin still hasn’t rolled out its system.
Hopefully the shrill cries from government about the need for such controls, paired with the Daily Mail headlines and ISPs hassling customers about filters, should quickly reduce that 7% to zero — it’ll be interesting to see what the headline is for the next report, and whether takeup of filters significantly changes this time next year.
In the meantime, it’s worth noting that Culture Secretary has herself stressed that filters aren’t “a silver bullet” that can keep kids safe online. She said in the press release: “Parents have a central role to play in protecting their children, including by talking to them about how to stay safe online.”
She’ll be happy to know, if she’s read the Ofcom report, that most of Britain’s parents are already aware of this.
