Crime survey raises safety concerns over online activity of children

Only 13 per cent of parents are providing their children with information about staying safe online, new data from the Office of National Statistics reveal.

The findings in the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) for 2022-23 highlight worrying trends about contact with strangers and sexual messages.

More than third of children accepted a friend request online from someone they did not know and 8.5 per cent shared their location publicly.

Nearly a fifth (19.2 per cent) spoke to or exchanged messages with someone online who they had never met in person, including other children, and 4.4 per cent met up in person with someone they had only spoken to online. 

Boys were more likely to do this than girls (5.7 per cent compared with 3.1 per cent).

Almost one in ten (9.5 per cent) of children aged 13 to 15 years received a sexual message in the last year with just over three-quarters of these (76.7 per cent) receiving them more than once.

Most parents knew about their child’s internet use, with 26.1 per cent of children saying that their parent knew “a lot” and 53.4 per cent saying they knew “a fair amount” of what they did online.

But 3.3 per cent said their parents didn’t know anything about what they were doing online, raising concerns about internet security. Fewer children (88.4 per cent) said they had received information about staying safe, down from 94.8 per cent in 2020. 

Schools are the most frequent source of information on internet security for 83 per cent of the ten to 15-year-olds questioned in the 

The survey also revealed how much time children spend on the internet.

Nearly a third of children (30 per cent) said they were online “almost all the time” and 92.6 per cent of children went online daily or almost daily.

More than half (58.1 per cent) of ten to 15-year-olds spent three or more hours a day online on an ordinary school day, up from 47.6 per cent from 2020.

The most common activities children used the internet for were watching videos online (80 per cent), messaging (77.6 per cent) and playing online games (75.3 per cent).

Most children (86.6 per cent) used a smartphone to go online, with 54.7 per cent of using a games console. 

The survey also showed the prevalence of bullying in England and Wales. It found more than a third (34.9 per cent) of children have been bullied in the past year.

An estimated 1,544,000 children aged ten to 15 years experienced in-person bullying and 847,000 children (19.1 per cent) experienced online bullying.

Online bullying in the year ending March 2023 was higher for girls (486,000, or 22.5 per cent) than boys (361,000, 16 per cent). 

More than half of children told their parent or guardian about the bullying they experienced, but 18 per cent who experienced online bullying and 14.7 per cent who experienced in-person bullying did not tell anyone.