Responsibility for managing children’s access to inappropriate content on the internet

When all participants in the Digital Australians survey were asked which groups they thought were responsible for preventing children from seeing content with too much sex and violence on the internet, they clearly indicated that most responsibility for this lies with a parent (this was in line with the qualitative findings).

Half (50 per cent) of all participants also felt that industry had some responsibility, while almost four in 10 (39 per cent) also nominated the government. While these views were broadly held across the sample, about half (48 per cent) of participants with children under 18 felt government had a role, and women were more likely to report that they felt parents and industry had a role to play.

Table 21 Responsibility for preventing children from seeing too much sex or violence on the internet

Source: ACMA, Digital Australians online survey, 2011.
G1 ASK ALL: In your opinion, which of the following groups are responsible for preventing children (under the age of 18) from seeing content with too much sex or violence on the internet? M/R RANDOMISE
Note: Blue numbers represent differences that are significantly higher and red numbers significantly lower
Furthermore, when asked who they felt had most responsibility for this, 80 per cent of respondents indicated that they felt parents did. Twelve percent said industry and eight per cent said the government. While there were some significant differences by age and gender, the overall pattern of the results (that is, the order) was consistent.

Table 22 Who is most responsible for preventing children from seeing too much sex or violence on the internet?

Source: ACMA, Digital Australians online survey, 2011.
G2 ASK THOSE SELECTING CODES 01-04 AT G1: Who do you consider to be most responsible for preventing children from seeing content with too much sex or violent on the internet? S/R RETAIN ORDER FROM G1
Note: Blue numbers represent differences that are significantly higher and red numbers significantly lower.
Base: Respondents who thought that anyone was responsible for preventing children from seeing certain content on the internet, n=1,223.
From the qualitative and quantitative findings, there appeared to be a need for ongoing education to assist parents ‘keep their heads above water’ as they try and keep up with the changes in media availability and access.

However, the key challenge in this is that parents often struggle to be proactive in keeping abreast of the changes. They are often looking to be educated after an incident in which their child accesses inappropriate content. This is when the provision of resources for parents would be extremely useful.

In line with attitudes to community standards, group participants found the idea of applying some content regulations to professionally generated Australian online media content to be entirely reasonable. Such regulation was not seen as limiting individual expression, learning and choice, as users would still be able to access the material from overseas. Instead, it was perceived as reflecting broader community standards in a manner that would apply to similar professionally produced content offline.

More about attitudes to, and expectations of, media regulation is contained in chapter 5 of Digital Australians.