NiRA States Role in Internet & Child Protection

The Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA) said it recognizes the Internet is a very exciting place for the youths, including children where they pick up skills and information easily online and now reviews its role in protecting the child (online).

With each visit to a website, NiRA said in its bi-monthly e-newsletter said, children are interacting with the largest distributed database in the world. This massive database is collectively known as the Domain Name System (DNS).

Without it, the Internet as we know it would be unable to function.

According to NiRA, “The Internet is part of our everyday lives. The Internet provides opportunities, serves as a channel for Children’s Education, a fun place to interact with the world, endless possibilities in socialising, creativity, self-expression and most importantly learning”.

“Unfortunately”, NiRA regretted, “some individuals and Organisations take advantage of the relative freedom the Internet provides. With this freedom, comes the possibility of irresponsible and inappropriate use of the Internet that can often put children and youths at risk. Without proper precaution, the Internet quickly exposes the young ones to vulgar words, sexual/explicit materials, cyberbullying, graphics violence and predators that search chat rooms for innocent preys”.

The Association said, its operations are guided by polices that relate with the nation’s Cultural values.

“For instance, NiRA does not allow profane words, certain obscene words and vulgar words for .ng domain name registration. NiRA also maintains closed domains for some of its .ng extensions (zones) e.g. gov.ng, edu.ng, mil.ng, net.ng, sch.ng. Registration under these closed zones must be verified before the registration can be done.

In addition to the above, we all have responsibilities. Some are listed below:

Advice To Parents For Online Child Protection

There are wide ranges of tools that can help parents and guardians protect their wards from Internet abuse and abusers.

Note that excluding children from the Internet because of the crimes committed online might end up depriving them from an extraordinary source of information, experience and self-improvement.

There are some basic precautions that are needed, when introducing a child to the Internet. These include:

Encouraging them to visit more of sites which combine Education with Entertainment (Edutainment) content.

Monitoring the domain names and sites their wards visit

Coaching the children about personal safety and give the children opportunities to express the safety codes in their own words

Introducing the children to websites that encourage learning e.g myschool.com.ng, a website that allows children and youths find out information about schools.

How Children And Youths Can Use The Internet

NiRA said that children and young people may use the Internet in a variety of ways, including;

Education/Research: schools are using websites to manage homework, and support study. Children and young people can also use other public sites such as google scholar and khanacademy.org for research and learning.

Chat and Instant Messaging: Instant messaging (IM) technologies often include features that make them even more popular such as having the ability to talk directly for free, to share files.

Social Networking: Social Networking websites help connect friends. Well known sites include Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and LiveJournal, which have regulations about age for access.

In addition sites such as Twitter offer information networking.  Children can also create groups on social media for team work.

However, parents are advised to guide children in the use of social networking sites.

Gaming Video: Games are amongst the most popular leisure pursuits for young people. These include Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs) which involve a large number of players interacting with one another in a virtual online world.

These games often have sci-fi/fantasy theme. Other sites, such as Moshi Monsters or Club Penguin are aimed at younger children and have social networking element.

“It is evident that we can hardly do without the Internet. It has become part of our daily lifes. But one thing we need to always have in our minds as we browse the Net is that, it is our collective responsibility to make it a better place. Help the kids and secure our future!” the NiRA e-newsletter read. 
 

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