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Archives > Volume 8 Issue 1 - January 5, 2010 "Porn" is the fourth most popular search term for kids under 7...According to Symantec, the fourth most popular search term for children 7 and under is "porn" - just ahead of kids' networking site Club Penguin. CNN News story here 
Symantec recently released the anonymous results of 14.7 million searches run by users of its OnlineFamily.Norton service in 2009. The service allows parents to monitor web activities and supposedly blocks questionable sites, so let's hope the toddlers searching for "porn" were unsuccessful. It's understandable that "sex" is one of the top searches for teens, but I was surprised to see that children as young as 7 were familiar with "porn." While services like OnlineFamily.Norton may filter most inappropriate content, they are not perfect - and are no substitute for parental supervision. Other search terms popular with children included social-networking sites, celebrities and online games. Sleep deprived teens more likely to have suicidal thoughts... A new study shows that teens who don't get enough sleep are more likely to suffer from depression and have suicidal thoughts - in some cases - much more likely. CBS News story here 
Researchers at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York found that earlier bedtimes can help protect adolescents from such tendencies, reports CBS News Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton.
That flies in the face of the common perception that teens need less sleep than people in other age groups. It's been estimated that adolescents need a little more than nine hours of sleep per night. Those in the study whose parents set bedtimes of midnight or later were 24 percent more likely to suffer from depression and 20 percent more apt to have thoughts of suicide, compared to those with bedtimes of 10 p.m. or earlier, the researchers report in the January 1 issue of the journal Sleep. And those who got five hours of sleep or less per night were 71 percent more likely to report being depressed, and 40 percent more likely to think of suicide. The study's lead researcher, James Gangwisch, Ph.D., told CBS News the study "bolsters the argument that a lack of sleep can cause depression." Parents, he adds, should "try as much as possible to sell teenagers on the importance of getting enough sleep - even if it seems they don't need as much as younger children. Parents should be working with the adolescent on how much sleep they should be getting. It should be an open discussion....how important sleep is, even if they try for a few nights to get more sleep and they see how much better they feel. Research shows that adolescents still need (those) nine hours of sleep a night to be at their best." See eGuide/teen suicide for more information on teen suicide. In other news... 
Two more Irish bishops have said they will offer their resignations to the Pope, bringing the total number of church leaders to quit after a damning report into child sex abuse by priests to four. Reuters story here Bishops Eamonn Walsh and Raymond Field, the only two serving auxiliary (assistant) bishops in the archdiocese of Dublin, said they had informed Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of their decision. "It is our hope that our action may help to bring the peace and reconciliation of Jesus Christ to the victims/survivors of child sexual abuse. We again apologize to them," they said in a statement. Like Bishop Jim Moriarty who resigned last week, both bishops had said the report had shown that they had done nothing wrong. Moriarty admitted that he should have challenged the "prevailing culture" that allowed criminal acts against children to take place. Earlier, Bishop Donal Murray became the first bishop to quit since the publication of the report, which said Church leaders in overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland had covered up widespread sexual abuse of children by priests for 30 years. The report, issued on November 26, said the archdiocese had been more preoccupied with protecting the Church's reputation than safeguarding children and had "obsessively" hidden child abuse from 1974 to 2004. See vol7_iss77 for more on the report. For more information on clergy abuse, see eGuide/clergy abuse.
For the second year in a row, the birth rate among teens increased in 2007, raising concerns that efforts to curb teen pregnancies are not working as well as they once did. CBS News story here Teen births increased 5 percent between 2005 and 2007, following a 34 percent drop between 1991 and 2005. In 2007 - the last year for which figures are available - the birth rate among teens rose by about 1 percent, with 42.5 babies born for every 1,000 teens aged 15 to 19. The overall birth rate also increased by 1 percent between 2006 and 2007, with a record 4.3 million babies born in the U.S. The record number of births is the result of the growing population and is not indicative of a new baby boom, says CDC chief of reproductive statistics Stephanie J. Ventura, MA. Among the other trends highlighted in the new report by the CDCs National Center for Health Statistics is that the percentage of births to unmarried women increased from 38.5 percent in 2006 to 39.7 percent in 2007.
A child-abuse activist group is pushing for the Who to be dropped from the NFL Super Bowl, citing Pete Townshend's 2003 arrest for accessing child pornography online. The Guardian news story here The classic-rock band is scheduled to perform at the halftime show, on February 7th. "The Who [are] a great band. Pete Townshend is the only issue here," wrote Child Abuse Watch founder Evin Daly in an open letter to the National Football League commissioner. Townshend was charged by British police in 2003, four years after he used his credit card to access a Texas-based child pornography website. He pleaded guilty, claiming he had been revisiting childhood memories of sexual assault as research for his autobiography. Townshend received a police caution, but was cleared on charges of possession of indecent pictures, as no images had been kept on his computer. Townshend's name remained on the UK sex offenders' register for five years. "Inviting Townsend to play is a blatant disregard to the values of American families and a slap in the face to victims of child sexual abuse," wrote Daly. The same sentiment was expressed in a letter by another US group, Protect Our Children, which wrote to the US department of immigration and Florida's attorney general, asking them to reject Townshend's visa. "We acknowledge he was not convicted, but he was on [the UK] sex offenders' list," wrote Protect Our Children president Kevin Gillick. "In the United States, you're on a sex offenders' list for life."
A federal lawsuit filed on behalf of 500 juveniles in New York state detention seeks to ban violent physical restraint and to require better mental health treatment. AP News story here Children and Family Services Commissioner Gladys Carrion promised reforms after scathing federal and state reports this year. But Legal Aid Society attorney Tamara Steckler says abuse continues despite some retraining and a revised restraint policy. Legal Aid's class-action lawsuit lists nine juveniles to represent all those held in intake and "limited secure" facilities. Steckler says they want a court order from U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty in January. 
The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned. The Guardian news story here Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to "virtual strip-searching" and have called for safeguards to protect the privacy of passengers involved. Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff does not commit offenses under child pornography laws. They also face demands from civil liberties groups for safeguards to ensure that images from the £80,000 scanners, including those of celebrities, do not end up on the internet. The Department for Transport confirmed that the "child porn" problem was among the "legal and operational issues" now under discussion in Whitehall after Gordon Brown's announcement on Sunday that he wanted to see their "gradual" introduction at British airports. A 12-month trial at Manchester airport of scanners which reveal naked images of passengers including their genitalia and breast enlargements, only went ahead last month after under-18s were exempted. The decision followed a warning from Terri Dowty, of Action for Rights of Children, that the scanners could breach the Protection of Children Act 1978, under which it is illegal to create an indecent image or a "pseudo-image" of a child. Dowty told the Guardian she raised concerns with the Metropolitan police five years ago over plans to use similar scanners in an anti-knife campaign, and when the Department for Transport began a similar trial in 2006 on the Heathrow Express rail service from Paddington station.
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