A study conducted by the Institution of the Ombudsman for Children in the Republika Srpska (RS) during the current school year showed that every third child received a call, message, or even a proposal to meet in person from an unknown individual, Ombudsman Gordana Rajic said in Banja Luka.
Rajic stated, during a break at a roundtable on children’s safety in the digital environment, that children as young as eight already own their own digital devices, which places them at potentially greater risk of exposure to harmful content and inappropriate forms of communication.
She said that the Ombudsman for Children conducted the “Safe Click” study during this school year in educational institutions across RS, with the aim of examining to what extent children know the rules for using digital technologies, recognize online risks and ways of protection, and how they perceive their safety in the digital environment.
Rajic noted that the study included pupils from the second to the sixth grade of primary schools, with parental consent, as well as secondary school students aged 15 to 18.
“On average, about 2.000 pupils aged eight to 12 were included in the study, who, together with their parents, answered the same questions and participated in the research,” Rajic said.
She pointed out that in their responses, some children stated that they spend seven or more hours a day on the internet, while parents believe that it is on average one to two hours.
“Every third child had a message, call, or even a proposal to meet in person from an unknown person,” Rajic said, adding that every third child encountered a video with harmful content, and that the worrying fact is that a large number of them answered that they would not report this to anyone.
Rajic noted that it is also worrying that the internet is no longer just entertainment, but that it directly affects children’s mental health, since at some point, the unavailability of devices, networks, or content they consume on a daily basis leads them into a state of frustration and nervousness, all of which affects their concentration, school performance, and psychophysical development.
She stated that children are very good at finding ways to avoid certain parental restrictions; some of them use their phones at night, keep them under their pillows, and when parents think they are sleeping, they are actually on their phones, which leads to reduced concentration and nervousness.
Rajic also pointed out that parents are not aware of the risks, since one of the questions was whether there are limits or rules for use, and a certain number of them answered that they do not have clear and strict rules.
Referring to the initiative to ban access to social networks and certain applications for children under 16, Rajic said that almost all social networks and platforms had certain age limits for opening profiles, which were not respected.
“I am afraid that raising that age limit, if we do not resolve this problem systemically, will once again not produce the expected results. Above all, we need to move toward increasing the responsibility of platforms to conduct more adequate age verification of users,” Rajic said.
The director of the association “Nova generacija,” Sasa Risojevic, said that in the past three years, 35 reports of violence related to the protection of children in the digital environment have been received via the “Blue Phone” hotline.
Risojevic stated that, in addition to those reports, they conduct five to ten advisory conversations per month related to online violence.
“Before the coronavirus pandemic, there were no such calls. The number of children who need to seek help on these topics is much higher, and our task is to further promote the service and work on helping them recognize all the risks in the digital environment,” Risojevic said.
He emphasized that online violence is often linked to mental health and added that 35 percent of calls to the “Blue Phone” concern mental health.
“Problems with mental health never come on their own; there is always some form of violence in the background, and increasingly it is actually violence on the internet,” Risojevic concluded, Srna news agency writes.
