child pornography and sexual exploitation of children online

6.2.3 IT industry response
The recommendations made by the thematic paper from the Second World Congress
included those for the Internet industry. In particular, reference was made to Codes of
Practice with regard to minimum standards for the industry to follow, along with stronger,
clearer and effective online and offline advice and support for parents, other carers and
children on how to stay safe online in relation to both solicitation and child pornography.
As we have seen, both government and NGO organisations have worked effectively with
the IT industry in generating educational materials both as offline training events and
as online information sources. However, it is difficult to identify data within the public
arena that helps educators and those involved in child online safety to understand the
impact of educational packages (beyond attendance at training events, uptake of DVDs
and CDs and self-reports from children) and the impact of educational pages. The latter
is important given the IT industry’s investment in providing such information, yet outside
the industry we were unable to source materials that indicated data on how many children
visited the staying-safe information and for how long, and whether this was a one-off
viewing or something that occurred on a more regular basis. Given the ease of obtaining
this information and the ability to compare such data with the length of time it takes to
both read and process information given the age of the child, this is surprising.
In July 2008 Fox Interactive Media recently published a response to the European
Commission’s Safer Internet Public Consultation on Age Verification, Cross-Media Rating and
Classification and Online Social Networking, which they kindly made available to the authors
of this thematic paper (Fox Interactive Media, 2008). We can use this information to
examine some of the issues identified as being important in relation to the IT industry. In
the context of Cross Media Rating and Classification, Fox Interactive stated that, “Given
the different uses and characteristics of different delivery platforms we do not believe that
a cross-media rating system is practical or in the best interest of users. We also believe that
the current rating systems are well established and the creation of a new rating system
could cause consumer confusion. In addition, rating systems must take into consideration
cultural sensitivities which vary across EU member states. Therefore, we do not believe it is
appropriate to develop a pan-European system even if it is applied to a single medium”. The
issue of media rating is clearly more complex than might have initially been thought. It is
also the case that the available empirical evidence would suggest that media ratings affect
behaviour in different ways across populations, depending on the motivation of the media
user and their age. For older adolescents, media ratings might actually serve to increase the
likelihood that the person might try to access what would otherwise be thought to be ageinappropriate
material. Equally, the use of age verification was thought by Fox Interactive
to be more relevant to ecommerce sites (to prevent young people from buying prohibited
products or engaging in prohibited services, such as accessing adult content, alcohol and
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