01Apr2016
Uniformed Approach in Protecting Children on the Internet is Required
Policy brief "Child Safety on the Internet in Serbia: Exposure without coordinated care" was presented today at the Public Policy Research Centre, while all major media broadcasted its main results and recommendations.
"The Internet is now an integral part of education and life, especially among children and youth, who are often unsupervised and unaware of potentional online risks," said the author of the policy brief, a CENTRE's researcher Jelena Sapic at the presentation. Farida Bassioni-Stamenic (UNICEF), Miljana Jovanovic (Net Patrol), and Katarina Jonev (DCAF) took part in the follow-up discussion.
Although children as "digital natives' are surrounded by the Internet from an early age, with a lot more knowledge and skills to use it than their parents, they are also one of the most vulnerable groups when it comes to safety on the Internet. The most prevalent risks are accepting friend requests from unknown people (43% of primary school and 71% of high school students), leaving personal data on social networks (29% of primary school and 39% of high school students), and online communication to strangers (27% of primary schoold and 47% of high school students). These figures demonstrate how important it is to include the child safety on the Internet in the future Strategy of development of information security of the Republic of Serbia.
"By the enforcement of the Law on Information Security and by the creation of a govermental body for coordination of information security affairs conditions to unanimously address children's exposure to online risks have been created. Likewise, these conditions have provided an opporunity to launch a national raising awarness campaign that would inform children, parents and teachers about safe ways of using the Internet," said Sapic.
This and other recommendations outlined in the policy brief will be forwarded to the relevant decision makers.
"The recommendations will be forwarded to the decision makers in order to contribute to solving the problem of lack of children's protection on the Internet," underlined a director of the Public Policy Research Centre, Svetlana Djurdjevic-Lukic.
This is the first in a series of briefs that the CENTRE will present in the coming months and was published under the organizational development grant from the Think Tank Fund of the Open Society Foundations. The policy brief is available in Serbian here.
Media reports are available in Serbian under the following links: Tanjug, B 92, Alo.rs, Studio B, Radio Televizija Vovodine, HappyTV, Vesti.rs, Naslovi.net,