Internet Governance
usually tagged as ‘stress eliminators’. The top 10 best-selling games in 2011 for different hardware platforms, including Microsoft Xbox, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, PC, Playstation, were dominated by action/violent games.44 Addressing the challenges The major challenge that educators and parents are facing in protecting children online is the fact that the ‘digital natives’ are much more knowledgeable in how to use ICT – they know more than their parents, yet they understand less. Close cooperation between peers – parents, educators, and the community – is most important for developing initiatives for safeguarding children in computer-mediated environments. To raise awareness among the stakeholders, the European Commission has launched the InSafe project45 as a European network of e-safety awareness nodes, providing numerous awareness-building materials for parents and educators in several languages free for download and dissemination. The Polish media campaign on cyber-bullying resulted in sets of video clips and an e-learning course on Internet safety for kids. The NetSafe initiative in New Zealand, founded in 1998, is among the first national initiatives on Internet safety which gathers key stakeholders including ministries, the business sector, and the media. A much-needed step beyond awareness building and training of youth, parents, and educators is capacity building in the area of Internet safety, targeted at the multistakeholder composition of policymakers: government officials, business entities, media, academia, think-thanks, and nongovernmental organisations, etc. Various international organisations are discussing possible models of cooperation in establishing such programmes, among them the CoE, the ITU, CPI, and DiploFoundation. On a longer time scale, educational curriculum updates are needed as well, to include in-school programmes Internet safety issues such as protecting personal privacy and security, minding personal and others’ reputation online, ethics, reporting abuse, transferring real-life morals and skills to the online world, etc. Several such initiatives exist worldwide, such as Cyber Smart!,46 iKeepSafe,47 i-Safe,48 and NetSmartz.49 Synchronised national and international legal and policy mechanisms are an indispensable component as well. One example is the successful panEuropean Prague Declaration for a Safer Internet for Children adopted at the Ministerial Conference (Prague, April 2009).50 The ITU’s Global 162