I'm not easily shocked, but this has floored me.

[LynetteScavo]

Don't know where to start with this one, I'm just feeling so awful!

I had a phone call from the head of DS1s school today, informing me that he, and some other boys, had googled certain words, and had been able to access pornographic site.

I was told the words which had been googled, so, wanting to know what he had seen, googled it myself. What came up on the screen was seriously hard core, infact it was so awful, I turned the computer straight off.

When I talked to DS about it, he said he loooked away immediately because he didn't want to see it.

I just feel so dreadful my "baby" - (he's 9, and in Y4 has seen this).

The head is investigating how they could have accessed the site on the school computer.

sorry but pmsl at naked grannys diva, what an ODD and completely random phrase to search on! Thanks, I did REALLY want to know.

He'll be ok, really.

Schools can patrol this sort of thing fairly easily if they know what they are doing but the problem is many schools have jumped on the tech bandwagon without doing it properly.

This is wholly the schools fault. I would be incandescent with rage. Boys of that age - and older - will google all sorts of things to raise a laugh with their peers and the school should be one step ahead.

My eight year old was on the home computer the other day. She really likes Pink the singer and so googled 'Pink videos'........

She says she didn't look because she was shocked, but she saw enough to get an idea of what porn is.

I used it as an opportunity to talk about what a nasty industry porn is, and that as a child it's not emotionally healthy for her to see that sort of stuff.

But yuck - I hate the thought of my children looking at porn. It's horrible. It's not so much the issue of nudity - it's the nasty sexual stereotyping of women and explotative nature of it all......

It's remarkable easy to come across these sites. I have anti-porn software on my PC but even so, during my second pregnancy I was doing some research about a condition I thought I might have, googled some key words - harmless words, not rude. You won't believe what came up, I'll leave it at that.

I would take take this opportunity to point out to your son that the school's rule about how they are to use computers are there for a reason. He didn't like what he saw, did he? All the more reason not to be doing any illicit googling in the future. Stress that his family and his teachers are people who care about him, and that their rules are based on experience.
In a way, if he found it unpleasant, you may end up thinking of this as a bit of a blessing; there are far more dangerous things out there which are not, on the face of it unpleasant... This may drive home to him that computer use needs to be guided by adults.

Yes, his computer use needs to be guided by adults. At home the computer is set so we (dh or I) have to give parental permission almost constantly when he's using the internet. On a school computer this shouldn't have been able to happen, full stop. He was in luch club, and had been playing "ztwinky dress up girl/boy", which is a totally inocent game.

Ds didn't break any rules, he googled some stupid words, and was exposed to seriously hard core porn, clearly showing penetration, and violence.

I'd just calmed down, and I'm getting angry about it again.

I feel I need to go back to the head with this. Any advise on how formal I should be would be most welcome.

Bumping this for myself, as i need some advice on how heavy to get with the school, if atall.

This is a really hard one...
When I was teaching aI asked my yr 4's to research teeth sp they typed it in and came up with 'Vampire teeth' sites. (It was a catholic school to...) I spoke to the lea computer lady and she said it is impossible to block everything as some sites are accessed by seemilngly innocent words. She handed her laptop to her teenagers and asked them to 'do their worst' to see what they could find and then added the worst ones to the list of banned sites.

We also took our yr5's to use a university's computer suite and they told us the day before a boy in another class accessed a seemingly innocent Marilyn Munroe site that unfortunately had the skirt flying up picture that was annimated and the you can guess what was under the skirt... He had then printed it off (how, they don't know) got back to school and photocopied it and handed it out to his mates after school -and this was a university that had children in frequently.

It's very difficult it all depends on the words he used. Find that out before going in all guns blazing. If they are well known 'baddies' then I would get push to know what filters, if any, are in place.

Please excuse the spelling, I'm in a rush and wanted to reply!

Oh adn btw our gym has turned off the computers in the play area as a child acessed terrible porn due to a powercut resetting the filter. Could this have happened in the schools case?

I'm not any sort of authority on this at all but it does seem that schools face the choice between having either (i) incredibly stringent filters which do not allow pupils to use the internet effectively and gives them very ability to use their own initiative in research etc and (ii) less stringent filters which allow children to use the internet effectively but which run the risk of encountering porn etc. It's also worth pointing out that even very stringent filters will still let dodgy stuff through if the pupils are so-minded.

Whilst this sort of thing is deeply unpleasant, the sad truth is that if we want our kids to use the internet they will encounter porn sites (amongst other things) whilst they do. There's virtually no way to avoid it short of monitoring your child on a minute to minute basis or allowing them access to only certain pre-approved sites. The best we can do is put in place what filters make sense and to ask our kids to be sensible and if dodgy links come up under innocent searches, then not to access them - there should and must be some responsibility on the child I mean, let's face it, even if you type in "bird spotting" and the first link is "XXXX Dutch Girls", your kid isn't obliged to hit that link.

I'd take the same approach in your case. You should ask the school what measures it has in place to prevent this, but provided these are reasonable, they shouldn't be so strict as to make using computers impossible. I'd also be inclined to use the opportunity to speak with your son about sensible use of the internet.

I find filters often don't make any sense. The parental controls keeps asking for permission for the most harmless of games, yet the other day my ds(6) ended up on a gory bloody games website, where things like kill that b* were shouted at him unchallenged. It just makes no sense.
I must say that I agree that it's difficult to filter all bad sites out, especially if you want your dcs to use the internet effectively.

Lots of sympathy.

I googled 'Grand Canyon' once for an assignment... what came up was truly shocking...

Have only read op, not whole thread, but surely the school computers should not have allowed this? Even my own computers at home have 'high security' selected on the google page, but maybe the kids know how to switch that off?
I work in a school and am always finding the opposite problem - I am searching for something innocent, but the computer server denies access as it deems it unsuitable.