Family Online Safety – Saida, Lebanon
Reading Time: 2 minutes For the first time in Sidon, a city characterized by social and intellectual diversity, I grasped the chance of presenting a one day workshop to social workers, teachers and parents.
My aim was to raise awareness for family online safety to promote best practices, tools and methods in the field of family online safety.
The need for a safe and responsible online experience for Sidon’s society is growing as more and more young people in the area continue to integrate technology in their lives, at the time their parents or the old generation are more conservative and still captivate the wrong and distorted image about the Internet.
The one day workshop took place in the Association of sympathy and social services center in Saida in the presence of twelve scholars from different educational institutions and the IT manager of association, Mr. Akhdar. He considered that the Online Safety session was very important, interesting, and consistent with the needs of our society and the Internet is no longer dangerous unless we use it in the right way.
The session intended to provide a full insight into the challenges that children face online and the means that offer them a safe online experience. As such, the workshops were designed to be hands-on, pushi
ng participants to challenge their way of thinking about the Internet, controlling their children’s use of computer, and providing practical safeguards. Moreover, the sessions highlighted the risks affecting children- risks by interaction such as cyberbullying, invasion of privacy, file-share abuse, sexting in addition to the risks by technology, like Spams, Trojans, phishing, and hoaxing.
After presenting the ‘Risks by interaction’, focusing on the need for a culture of responsibility away from fear-based techno-panic; and the ‘Risks by technology’, the session concluded with the attendees sharing their experiences on the subject and expressing the importance of building awareness on Family Online Safety in Lebanon.