Israel on Monday will begin marking national online safety week, sponsored by the Education Ministry, the goal of which is to raise awareness about the dangers of the internet and how to cope with them.
To mark the week, the Child Online Protection Bureau published disconcerting figures on Sunday whereby 7,655 cases of online abuse were reported in 2019.
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Children spend many hours looking at screens, on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and WhatsApp groups, among others, but instead of serving as the modern-day "tribal bonfire" – they instead pose considerable dangers. More than one-third of the reports cite online abuse of a sexual nature. The leading categories of online abuse are bullying, badgering, shaming, peer pressure and sexual harassment of minors and other sex crimes.
The majority of victims are between the ages of 12-14, while the largest number of victims is in the age 13 group (16%). Most of the perpetrators of the abuse are between 13 and 16 years old. Some 70% of those who commit online abuse are minors. A clear majority of the offenders are male (77%). Among the victims, 69% are girls or teenage girls, while 31% are boys or teenage boys.
The hotline number for reporting online abuse is 105. Some 38% of the reports to the hotline come from parents, 28% from victims and 10% from school staff.
Online abuse, however, doesn't only pertain to children and minors. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2018 around 195,000 people aged 20 and older said they were the victims of online abuse of other offenses, although the majority of these cases (89.2%) weren't reported to the police.
Meanwhile, a new study about the influences of screens on the family cell concludes that some 50% of parents aren't interested or involved in their children's online activities.
The study also found that the less interest parents take in their child's online activities, the more he or she is susceptible to distress stemming from online activity. These children are also likely to develop a greater dependence on screens.
Conversely, the study shows that when parents are actively present in their children's digital world, they are able to minimize their time spent online during the day by some 50% and time spent online at night by around 65%.
"We found that parental involvement raises the probability of a child turning to their parent when facing online trouble by 25%," said the person behind the study, clinical psychologist Dr. Yaron Sela. "Essentially, the parent is perceived as relevant in times of distress," he said.
