When the virtual world meets the real world...

As a headmistress, there are many things that I have to deal with, but recently an incident took place which illustrated how the internet can catch people unawares. A perfectly normal and very bright 14-year-old pupil had taken a photo of an ex-best friend and, using some sophisticated software bought for her by her parents for an art project, had combined the head of her ex-best friend with an indecent image she found on the internet and then emailed it to all her friends. Next, the victim’s mother came into the school office with the picture. The result, a double set of horrified parents and a girl mortified that we had access to the picture.

Ironically, the week before this incident I had hosted a strategy day where my senior management team and I had discussed several questions regarding the increasing use of information and communication technologies and its dangers. And despite our firewall, anti-virus software, anti-spyware, anti malware and constant scrutiny of internet traffic within school, and the fact that our survey results indicated that 93% of us felt we had warned pupils of the dangers, this bright, successful girl had succumbed to the most common pitfall of the web: that what she did in the privacy of her own bedroom on the internet was between her and her friends. Unfortunately, she learnt the hard way that it isn’t.

One of the key discussions at our meeting revolved around whether, despite having held a ‘safety on the web’ evening last year, we needed to provide more advice for parents. While we can put everything in place within the school environment, technology is progressing so fast that even our safeguards can be skirted (for example, when pupils use their iPhones). The seemingly limitless access some girls have at home also makes a nonsense of our measures.

Facebook, Bebo, chain e-mails, myface, addys, buddy lists, Google Wave and similar software create an environment that can be more dangerous than crossing a road. None of us would allow a child to cross a road alone until we were convinced that they had learned to navigate the process sufficiently, which is why it is so important to have rules in place to protect our digitally sophisticated but still naïve children.

This article first appeared in First Eleven magazine