Teadus ja haridus

In order to prevent children from accessing the wrong sites in their surfing forays there are special search engines for children.

"Meeting up with friends" and "playing outside" are still children's favourite leisure-time activities. Yet two-thirds of the six to thirteen-year-olds use a computer regularly – mainly at home, but also at school or at friends'. Nowadays almost every household has a computer, about one-sixth of the children have their own PC, and four-fifths of all households in which children are growing up have access to the world wide web. For younger children, under eight years of age, the internet is still of relatively minor importance, but this increases rapidly as they grow older.

First steps in the internet

There are already offers for the youngest ones. For nursery-school and primary-school children it is mainly games that are of interest: memory games, puzzles, pictures to be coloured in or dexterity games, which usually function without internet and which emulate the "offline games". Yet early contact with the internet encourages thought processes and cognitive development. Children learn network thinking, how to deal with medial contents and how to assess these correctly.

Safe surfing in the world wide web

The internet becomes more exciting for children when they are able to read well. More than half the twelve to thirteen-year-olds go online every day or several times a week. ( With the 14-year-olds, the youth group, it is already over 80 per cent.) They seek information on a regular basis for school or for their hobbies and interests.

In order to prevent children from accessing the wrong sites in their surfing forays there are special search engines for children. For transposed letters in the input box, "de" instead of "com", a forgotten dot or hyphen can lead straight to violent or porno sites, as can ambiguous search keys whose ambiguity is not clear to the children.

Advertisements in the internet are not as frightening and unsettling for children, but youngsters in particular lack the competency of being able to differentiate between advertising and informal contents. And it can become very expensive if young surfers land on so-called dialler sites and, without anyone noticing, send their parents' online bill skyrocketing. Yet there are search engines such as Blinde Kuh (Blind Man's Bluff) which are geared specifically to children's needs.

Blinde Kuh, founded in1997 as a private initiative, has been sponsored since 2004 by the German federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. Here the search takes place not in the entire internet but in a manually compiled keyword catalogue. Each web site that appears here has been checked to see whether it is interesting, understandable and suitable for children.

The sites found are listed with an age-group recommendation and with a brief index of its contents. Children's search engines take into account the children's logic when putting in keywords, correct spelling mistakes and they can even deal with some colloquialisms. With some 600,000 visits per day blinde-kuh.de is one of the most frequently used sites for children in the net.

Good children's sites

Yet the mere absence of pornographic contents or advertisements cannot be the benchmark for a good children's site. Good children's sites prepare contents in such a way that children like to delve into them, they are topical and can still be accessed a week later. And there are many good children's sites. Klick-Tipps, a project of the foundation MedienKompetenz Forum Südwest and jugendschutz.net, has compiled a list together with young surfers, it evaluates and comments on sites. The project thus aims to support the providers of good sites, supplement existing networks and promote the right of children to information.

The Erfurter Netcode also seeks to ensure and improve the quality of children's sites. This initiative of the regional media authorities, the churches, the Karl Kübel Foundation, the Deutscher Kinderhilfswerk (German Children's Charity) and many others awards a seal of approval for good web sites. The Netcode seal is intended to offer guidance to the providers as to the best possible format of their sites, but also to offer parents and children more safety in the net.

Chatting? – Yes, but safety first!

But children want more than just information from the internet. They want to meet friends, they want to talk about things. They want to get to know new people, and under the mantle of anonymity they also want to be "someone else": they want to chat. Yet it is in chatting that children are most exposed to the dangers of the internet: ranging from verbal abuse in the chat forum and insults to sexual harassment. The great majority of chatting children experiences these forms of molestation which can even lead to sexual abuse in real life. In an online survey in Blinde Kuh 160 of 200 children said they had already been confronted by this kind of harassment. Here safe forums for children are particularly important so that they are not humiliated or disturbed, but can learn to move freely and competently in the internet. Since 2004 "Chatting without risk?", a project of the Landesanstalt für Kommunikation (Regional Office for Communication) in Baden-Württemberg and jugendschutz.net, has been monitoring numerous chats and instant messengers in order to assess possible risks for children and young people. As an guidance aid a chat atlas has been produced, which contains detailed information about opening times, access conditions, target age groups, topics of the chat and the general atmosphere and awards labels from "no risk" to "high risk". A chat is regarded as safe if a moderator is present who can intervene in the dialogues, or if each contribution is viewed before actually going online.

To help children deal responsibly with the internet and to enable parents and educators to support them competently the Erfurter Netcode and the project "Chatting without risk" are, for example, seeking a dialogue with providers and users, also commercial ones, of chats and web sites. For safety in the net for children can only be achieved as a joint effort.