Internet safety, homework - and Jack the Ripper

[PermaShattered]

I have a few concerns about my daughter's homework from school - bearing in mind the of the internet for just about everything. In point form!:

1. She is 13 (yr 9)
2. Ethics homework last week: researching capital punishment, including famous murderers (amongst other things - she asked me what necrophilia is)
3. History homework (project): research everything about Jack the Ripper. Detailed instructions here. Including researching the victims, evidence.....
4. Reminder: this is for 13 yrs olds.
5. It's constantly drummed into our children - and to us parents - about internet safety, etc. We try to protect them from images and other stuff.
6. Then she gets this sort of homework.

What are you thoughts please? I'd be very interested....

f1fan: there's a lot to be said for the old-fashioned "look it up in an encyclopedia" method. not only did it encourage/require greater creativity in research, it also made it more difficult to bump into tangentially related and possibly inappropriate information and, importantly, it was necessary to physically write the information in our own words (or at least copy neatly....) rather than "copy-and-paste" from one website to a Word document. The latter bypasses the brain almost completely and so results in very little learning.
To OPs point: I share your concern and think the burden is on parents to supervise and guide internet research when children are given such assignments.

op
My dad studied this last school year in year 8. I was annoyed that at 12/13, they had access to some pretty shocking graphics.
Whether or not, it's a useful historical subject, I honestly don't know why children that age have to study it in depth.

Whether or not PPs have thought it's suitable for their age, it's whether the child herself/himself feels they want to see that stuff.

There are far less gory movies with a guidance of 15, yet here are schools showing kids graphic images of murder victims age 12/13/14. There are plenty more other subjects schools could study in History than Jack the Ripper.

Another one whose daughter is studying Jack the Ripper and seems to have been on this topic forever.Strange choice, but Dd is very interested and seems to be enjoying it.

I think it's a really odd thing to study. It's a bit creepy. You would think there would be something better.