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About Kidshield Europe
Kidshield Europe was started by Angela Fagan in early 2007
to find out more about educating her children in both on
and offline personal safety. She was soon joined by other
concerned parents and so Kidshield Europe was born.
Our surveys and research amongst other parents revealed the same
story time and time again - parents didn't really know where to look
and most survived on the portions of information they had learned as
children. Most did not actively seeks out the sites which
provided the information and almost 98% couldn't name a child safety
education site! (Based on 512 respondents)
Most parents presumed that online safety was part of "safety
teaching programmes" in the school curriculum and were reasonably
happy to leave the education of their children to schools and their
child's own sense of right and wrong.
Recent figures from the EU commission show that only 1 in 10 of
parents have installed any sort of child safety software on
computers their children are using to surf the net. That means
absolutely no parental control and children being able to view some
pretty horrifying sites. We aim to change that.
Our aim for 2008 is to dramatically increase the amount of parental
control filters installed, to ensure our children can surf online
safely and securely.
"... why concerns
about potentially harmful content remain significant whilst the use
of the existing tools — which are widely available, generally
effective at filtering, and are relatively easy to configure —
remains very low (some estimates are as low as 10% of households
with parents)."
Extract from Microsoft's
response to the EU Commissions consultation “Safer Internet and
online technologies for children”. 2007
What parents wanted to know about Child Safety
When we started research for Kidshield we wanted to know the answers
to the following questions:
- how to protect our children?
- how to educate ourselves?
- how to teach our children to protect themselves?
- how to raise our children's awareness of the dangers lurking
online and offline?
- what the education authorities were doing to raise the
profile of online dangers?
- how the sex offenders register works, and why couldn't we be
trusted with the information it contains?
- why megans law was considered good for the US but unworkable
in the UK and Europe?
- how many children really go missing every year - and how
many are found?
- how do internal police forces share information on predators
and missing children?
Most of the adults (97%) we spoke to during a survey before
Kidshield was created, stated that although they were interested in
teaching their child about personal safety, they were often unclear
about how to deliver the message. Although there is a huge
amount of information online, parents often struggled to find what
they were looking for - and even more alarming almost all quickly
gave up!
Kidshield Mission
Kidshield Europe missions are:
- To reduce the number of children who are subjected to any
sort of online and offline abuse
- To raise awareness and empower both parents and educational
authorities throughout Europe to consistency deliver personal
safety training to children
- To consistency champion and lobby on behalf of child
protection charities to ensure that they continue to receive
funding. (Some major childrens charities have been on the
brink of closing due to funding difficulties - see
Press Release)
The Team at Kidshield
Educate and Protect our Children
Join our community at the
Kidshield Forum, we
want to hear your views
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Name
and Shame
illegal content
The Internet Watch Foundation
indicates that the USA and Russia between them appear to host the
majority of illegal child images.
Megans Law
How the US manages it's sex offenders.
Read More
Are your children's photographs safe on
the Internet?
Read More
Nannies, Au Pairs and your children's
safety...
Read More
Child Tracking Tools
Read More
Sex Offenders Register
How does it work? Do it's powers reach far
enough?
Read More
EU Guidelines to Prevent Sex Offenders from
working with children.
Read More
Your children's safety on holiday.
Read the Australian report
Read More
The opinion of Downing Street on
paedophiles in your community
Read
More
Child Sex Tourism.
Each year, more than one million
children are exploited in the global commercial sex trade.
Read More
NSPCC Briefing on sexual abuse.
Read
More
Paedophile Ring uncovered in the UK
Read More
Stranger Danger
How great is the danger
of “playing out” in an unsupervised public place?
Read More
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