Expert advises on cyber safety

Parenting expert and psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg on stage at the Moncrieff Theatre yesterday.

Scottie Simmonds

IN AN increasingly technological world, cyber safety has become a growing concern for both teachers and their students.

That is why Bundaberg and Gin Gin high schools pooled their resources to bring parenting expert and psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg to Bundaberg to speak about cyber concerns.

About 650 primary and secondary teachers from schools in the Bundaberg region attended a day-long workshop with the parenting guru which focused on how to keep their students safe in the cyber world.

“I think (cyber bullying) is a growing concern but fortunately the prevalence rates are quite low in Australia,” Dr Carr-Gregg said.

He said cyber bullying rates were about 10% to 15% in Australia compared with the United States and Britain who had rates of about 50% to 60%.

Despite the growing concern, he said that was not what teachers were asking about in Bundaberg.

“They are interested in essentially what the law says about things like Facebook and what age is the right level of maturity for children to be using it,” he said.

Dr Carr-Gregg said maturity often had little to do with age so it was difficult to judge.

“But I think, what does a child under 13 need Facebook for?” he said.

Dr Carr-Gregg also spoke to teachers about creating a school policy to deal with technology use.

“When you are creating a policy make sure you discuss it with the kids because a top down implementation is not going to work,” he said.

The parenting expert said one of his biggest cyber safety concerns revolved around the practice of sexting – where students use a mobile phone to exchange sexual images or sexually explicit messages.

“Basically every kid has come across at least one kid who has been sexting,” he said.

“That’s a problem because they never know where those images are going, who might use those images or how long the images will stay around.”

Bundaberg High School principal Raelene Fysh said students’ safety online was a growing concern among teachers.

“Young people are ahead of us in terms of the technology they can use,” she said.

“This was about trying to find out ways we can help them use it safely.”

Ms Fysh said a large amount of the unsafe technology use happened at home and could then spill on to the school grounds.

But Ms Fysh said teachers were determined to deal with it the best they could.

“Bullying has been around for a long time,” she said.

“It’s just taken on a new way for the bullying to happen.”