There are so many great things about your kids using mobile phones. Mobiles are really important to help get your kids to and from school and after school activities and they give parents confidence to know your kids can reach whenever they need to. And don’t forget mobiles are fun to use, from texting, to surfing the web, taking pics and playing games.
Unfortunately, there are some negative aspects to the technology available via mobile phones which kids use. Mobiles can be used to:
- bully others by sending insulting or threatening messages and pictures
- access adult content that is beyond the age/ maturity of the child
- enter social and chat sites where predators may lurk
- Additionally, the vast services now available on mobiles can lead to high bills
It is clear that we need to adapt our approaches around the use of mobiles by children via a combination of:
- dealing with bullying or dangerous on-line situations early, before they get out of hand
- taking advantage of the tools available such as mozone to blocking numbers, have visibility of bullying messages, web browsing and so on
- and the commitment from parents, schools, anti-bullying and cyber safety groups to educate and make solutions available to help deflect unsafe behaviour via mobiles
PREVENTION: Minimising your child’s exposure to bullying or dangerous on-line situations via a mobile
- Encourage your kids to tell you if they are being bullied or feel threatened on-line. Many children are afraid to openly discuss instances of bullying because they may be scared of getting in trouble or worse, have their phone taken off them.
- Educate your kids to give out their phone number, and email address and personal details or pictures only to friends and people they trust.
- Make your kids feel comfortable to let you know when anyone that you don’t know contacts them.
- Help your kids to understand what safe and unsafe on-line behaviour means and how to know the difference.
- Review who the contacts are in your child’s phone book. Use the mozone allowed list to add only those contacts you know are trusted and block all others
- Use mozone to block the camera in school hours so that incriminating or hurtful footage cannot be taken when your kids are not in your care
- Block any web content you don’t feel are appropriate for the age or maturity of your child such as adult, gambling for example via mozone.
- Keep ‘bill-shock’ under control by blocking expensive mobile services such as premium SMS, streaming and so on via mozone.
- Maintain visibility – use mozone reporting to see the web browsing activity and blocked messages
REACTION: Suggestions to help if your child is being bullied or engaged in risky or unsafe on-line behaviour
- Bullying: understand who the bully is and how the bullying is occurring and together with your child think of strategies to practically deal with the situation. Some suggestions include:
- Add any mobile number of the person/ people bullying to the mozone blocked list so their text (SMS) or picture (MMS) messages are blocked
- If you do get unwanted calls or messages, it’s best not to answer or respond, other than to let them know you have blocked their contact.
- If the bullying is occurring in school hours, make the school aware there is a problem and understand how the school policies around mobile phones usage may help. Work with the school to ensure that your child is safe, that effective consequences are applied and that monitoring at the school is adequate.
- Show the message to a parent or teacher, get them to view and record the details of the message. If the message is disturbing, don’t leave it on the phone so that the child can see it, knowing its there can be upsetting – before deleting the message show it to an authority and/ or take an image of it (and time and date it was sent) as evidence.
- It’s a criminal offence to use a mobile phone to menace or harass or offend another person. Bullying via mobile phones is not anonymous:
Calls can be traced through your mobile phone carrier
Messages from numbers which are blocked via mozone, are visible in a report, this includes the content of the message, date and time it was sent and the mobile number it was sent from
You can change your phone number.
If you feel physically threatened, you should contact the police in your state.
- Dangerous on-line situations. If unwanted contact is repeatedly made you can block the social network website or chatroom which the contact is coming from via mozone website blocked list. If your child requires access to the social network, only allow when supervised.
- 3 Exposure to web content which is inappropriate. Block any web content which is inappropriate for the age or maturity of your child such as adult, gambling for example via mozone. Or add any specifically offensive sites to a blocked list.
- 4 If your phone is stolen, you can block it so that it cannot be used. You simply need to contact your mobile carrier to do this
- There are many support groups who you can seek support and advice from including:
Cyber safe kids Online: www.cybersafeworld.com
Stop text bullying: www.stoptextbully.com