Access and use, risks and opportunities of the internet for Italian children. Preliminary findings

- Italian children access the internet mainly through their smartphones: 84% of children aged 9-17 (ranging from 51% of 9-to-10-years-old children to 97% of 15-to-17-years-old teenagers) use their smartphone at least once a day to go online. - Most Italian children, and especially teenagers, possess operational and social skills; - Overall, the number of children who have felt bothered (upset, uncomfortable or scared) by something they experienced on the internet has more than doubled, raising from 3% in 2013 to 13% in 2017. - 51% of 11-to-17-year-olds have been exposed to at least one form of Negative User Generated Content (NUGC) in the past year, including violent or gory images of people harming animals or other people (36%), hateful content (33%) and websites where people discuss ways of physically harming themselves (22%). The number of children who have been bullied and/or cyberbullied has remained stable (10%) - but bullying is one the most harmful experiences for a child, with 79% of those who have been bullied who felt very or fairly upset. - Sexting is also on the rise, with 7% of Italian 11-to- 17-year-olds having received a sexual message in the past 12 months. Girls (67%) and 11-to-12- year-olds (56%) are more likely to be very upset by the sexually suggestive messages they have received, compared to boys (14% very upset) and older teenagers (23% very upset). - Among enabling mediation practices, parents tend to favour those practices that promote safer uses of the internet: 43% talks to children about what they do on the internet often or very often; 52% suggests ways to use the internet safely; 38% help children when something bothers them on the internet. - Teachers tend to engage more in restrictive mediation rather than enabling mediation: according to children, 39% of teachers made rules about what pupils can do on the internet at school; 26% suggested ways to use the internet safely, 22% helped children when something bothers them on the internet, or encouraged them to explore and learn things on the internet. Similarly to parental mediation, teachers’ mediation decreases as the age of children increases. (Mascheroni & Olafsson, 2018, p. 5).