A few days after Lizi Patch bought her 11-year-old son a smart phone, he started acting strangely.
“I noticed him becoming withdrawn,” Ms Patch told The Daily Mirror. “He became easily upset. I knew something was wrong and asked several times if he was OK. Clearly he wasn’t.”
Within a week, he tearfully confronted her at bedtime, telling her he felt like his childhood was over. Why? Because he had accidentally stumbled across a violent pornographic video that had left him scarred.
“He said he had been horrified watching a short video online but was unable to stop thinking about it,” she said. “He told me he couldn’t ‘unsee’ it, and how he felt his childhood was effectively over.
“He watched it because one of his new friends told him he should – because it was “funny” and he just wanted to fit in. He didn’t know what he was going to see.”
Many months later, Ms Patch’s son is still dealing with the trauma inflicted by that one video and she is desperate to save other children – and their parents – from the same fate.
Today, she helped launch Internet Matters’ new Protect Their Curiosity campaign, which urges parents to activate the safety filters on all devices in their homes to allow kids to explore the wed without being exposed to dangerous material.
The campaign features a series of confronting video clips that show how easily an innocent internet search – even one for a term such as “pirates” – can return shocking results.
For more information on how to keep your kids safe online, visit Internet Matters.
