Working to keep kids smart online, safe offline

This week is National Child Protection Week, an annual event to raise community awareness of child abuse prevention. There are many things we can all do to help prevent abuse and neglect of children - here are some tips from the National Association for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (NAPCAN).

Today is also the 14th annual national awareness and fundraising campaign for White Balloon Day, which highlights the work of Bravehearts - an organisation dedicated to combating child sexual assault in Australia. We share Bravehearts' belief that new technologies and new media are a vital way to educate children and parents about family safety, and recently assisted Bravehearts to deliver their child sexual assault prevention education program to 5,000 disadvantaged children in New South Wales. The Bravehearts Ditto education program has been seen by over 100,000 children across Australia, and an independent evaluation of the program suggests that the delivery of the principles embedded in the program can reduce the prevalence of not only child sexual assault, but also other forms of abuse including family violence and bullying, in a range of settings. To find out how you can get involved in White Balloon Day, visit this website.

Part of teaching kids to stay safe ‘offline’ involves teaching them how to be smart ‘online’, and we work with a number of child safety organisations to teach Aussie kids these important skills.

For example, last year we partnered with NAPCAN on Smart Online Safe Offline (SOSO), a unique social initiative that brought together community, government and the digital media industry to educate Internet users aged 9-15 years about potential dangers in their online environment. YouTube was a big part of SOSO's 2009 Cyber Bullying Affects Real Lives campaign, speaking to the video-savvy target audience in their own language and encouraging them to take a stand against cyberbullying and sharing harmful material online.

We also work with Reachout.com, a web-based initiative that offers information, support and resources to help young people improve their understanding of mental health issues, develop resilience, and increase coping skills and help-seeking behaviour. The service aims to break down the stigma attached to seeking help, and connect young people so they can share their stories and keeping themselves safe online and in everyday situations - from sex to partying, to driving. We’re working with Reachout.com to make their services more widely available, via different technologies like SMS.

We look forward to continuing our work in this space, with organisations who share our goals of seeing Australian young people be smart online and safe offline. This week we applaud the tremendous work of these organisations, and many others, who are working hard to achieve this every single day.

Posted by Ishtar Vij, public policy team, Google Australia