Childnet's "Chatdanger" Website Makes Major Impact December 2000

Chatdanger.com - Childnet's website produced following the sentencing of Patrick Green. It has had a real impact in helping parents and carers understand the safety issues of children using Internet Chat rooms.

In its first 2 weeks the site had over 20,000 unique visitors, which generated hundreds of e-mail inquiries to the Childnet team.

Childnet's goal of using a high impact negative news story to produce a positive awareness campaign worked well and the website created a phenomenal amount of media interest in Childnet's work. Most major television news stations in the UK featured the Chatdanger website and Childnet was featured in the most of the leading newspapers including The Times. Nigel Williams was featured on a special 15 minute BBC online live interview about Chatwith questions from viewers from around the world.

For the recent International Forum of Researchers Young People and the Media conference in Sydney, Nigel Williams presented a special paper reviewing the effectiveness of Chatdanger and the initial lessons learnt from this project. This paper is now available on Childnet's website.

Childnet is continuing to also challenge companies which host Chatservices aimed at children to include stronger safety information and link to the Chatdanger site. Already a number of companies are doing so and Childnet is now hoping to develop further offline resources about using the Internet safely.

For further information about Childnet see www.childnet-int.org or e-mail info@childnet-int.org.

(Childnet International is a registered charity no. 1053193)