Online Violence: Listening to Children's Online Experiences

When Risk Lives In The Child’S Pocket

In a world saturated with attractive possibilities enabled by the online digital technologies, and where time is money, we don’t get all that surprised when we find parents using digital devices to entertain their children, while they keep on distracted or worried with their busy lives. We often observe this picture, in gatherings with couples, in restaurants or malls. Though imagined, designed and built by adults, technologies, that favour the interaction and communication between people, won the attention of children and young people through the last decades, taking a central role in their daily life (Huesmann, 2007).

Interesting is that society seems to accept that these digital devices babysit children but then get all surprised and suspicious when young people choose the computer instead of having fun outdoors, or when they use the online devices to: i) talk with strangers; ii) learn about sex; iii) involve in sexual experiments; iv) engage in self-harm practices or unhealthy eating behaviours¹; or v) harass others. The so-called ‘digital natives’ or ‘net generation’ are growing in a wired rapidly changing, complex and ambiguous world and their digital trends reinforce the generation gap between adults and children. Therefore, despite entitling themselves experts in digital matters (Ponte & Cardoso, 2008), we are not all that sure they are using the online digital opportunities wisely. But, certainly they are using them differently.