Federal Government's Strategy for Internet and Child Safety

Censorship can be a good and a bad thing.  Software censorship is still not an exact science.  Sometimes it can unintentionally block important or useful content.  And the determined have found ways to bypass filters in the past, and sometimes it only helps to push the nasty elements further underground.  When it comes to strict censorship, governments need to strike a careful balance between freedom of speech, privacy and civil liberty.

But governments often miss the cause of the problem.  Like other commodities, content creation works on a supply and demand basis.  The war on drugs often focuses on drug dealers, but so long as there are people addicted to them, people will continue to sell them.  Under current legislation at least (with the exception of email spam), porn and other evils do not simply jump out at you.  As a general rule, you'd have to be searching for this stuff in the first place.  The Australian Internet Safety Advisory Board provides practical advice on applying content filters for the protection of children but unfortunately consumers have been slow to take up filtering software and this has been the main reason for shifting the target back to the supply.

We would argue that along with these great new initiatives to make the web safer for all of us, the federal government should engage more in encouraging the generation of safe  content alternatives which have genuine appeal to a young audience, thereby eliminating or redirecting the demand in the first place.  Children are safer when you know that they are getting their interaction from a safe and supervised source.  One step is by encouraging youth to actively participate in content contribution.  This is what many are already doing through their MySpace and Facebook pages, but in a facilitated and supervised environment.

We believe that with almost every website having some sort of database behind it these days, even Australian web developers should undergo police and background checks when developing sensitive sites.  This was just one of many measures taken to ensure child data protection, for example, in the Plan Australia website project, where child sponsorship presents many of these issues.

There are some great initiatives, such as the Victorian Government's Youth Central and even our own Youth Portals which have these aims in mind, addressing many of these things.  Websites such as these can be installed in local government libraries and even schools to provide children with a wide range of interesting and enjoyable content that is importantly both safe and educational.

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