Let me introduce some interesting findings

The awareness of internet threats are much lower among Czech children comparing to their Polish peers: While the great majority of surveyed children in both Poland and the Czech Republic agree that online disclosure of personal information to strangers is dangerous (74%), surprisingly enough, only 49% of all Czech children consider meeting a person on the internet definitely dangerous or rather dangerous comparing with 63% of Polish children.

This result is probably linked to the low internet safety awareness levels of Czech children: only 63% of them have ever heard or read about dangers concerning making new contacts on the internet while in Poland more than 90% declared to be aware of them. Interesting is the variety of the relevant information sources: in the case of the Czech children the main source of such information is the internet while in Poland it is respectively TV, newspapers and the internet.

When using chats and instant messenging, children often receive invitations to get in contact with strangers (66% in Czechia, 62% in Poland). While in Poland only 44% of such invitations resulted in a meeting, almost 2 out of 3 similar proposals were followed by a meeting in the Czech Republic. A high percentage of young users go to the meeting unaccompanied (50% in Poland but almost 70% in the Czech Republic). More than 20% of children in both countries do not inform anybody about going to a meeting. More than half of respondents state that they meet older people online (in 10% of cases more than 10 years older) Poland (13%) and Czech Republic (15%).

Parents are „out of the bussines”, they are usually unaware of these rendez-vous. Probably they have low authority regarding their children’s internet use: Even though they declare having talked with their children about possible implications of internet usage, they are ranked fourth in the list of most efficient channels of transmitting the message: „making new contact on the internet is dangerous”. No wonder: 22% of Czech parents did not think that the internet can be harmful for children versus 16% of Polish parents.

In conclusion we could state that there is a lot to be done in terms of awareness raising. The afore-mentioned Polish survey was conducted after a successful and efficient awareness raising campaign organised by Nobody’s Children Foundation. The Czech population is less informed – the awareness raising campaign is still under preparation and shall be launched next year by the new combined awareness node, which is expected to start the CZESICON project on January 1st, 2007.

Zdenek Zalis, CzeSI