Safer Internet Day 2009 in Prague The Safer Internet Day became the traditional starting point indicating the topic of a Europe-wide campaign and setting the pace of subsequent activities of national projects from the European programme “Safer Internet”, a part of which is the Czech Saferinternet.cz project.

SID 2009 was launched at a press conference at the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic. Mr. Kitzberger, the Deputy Minister of Education and Mrs. Ptackova-Melicharova, the Deputy Minister of the Interior attended the press conference together with Pavel Vichtera, the coordinator of the Saferinternet CZ project.

The topic of this year’s Safer Internet Day is ‘combat cyberbullying’. In that respect we created the Combatbullying.cz web site, which is linked to a successful project with the O2 Foundation - Minimalizacesikany.cz (Minimization of Bullying) which has been helping to schools to effectively minimize bullying among children since 2005. The Protisikane.cz site is the main communication channel of the campaign and will contain an e-learning course developed together with the Minimization of Bullying project specialists while technically supported by IBA CZ.

It goes without saying that we are aware of the urgency to enhance the media literacy of both children and adults. We are very grateful for the support we have been getting in this respect from Microsoft, which prepared and provided an attractive explanatory manual called Safe Internet with Donald Duck and his Bunch. The Safe Internet Family Package, which we prepared together with UPC, was designed to enable parents and their children to learn together. We are very grateful to UPC for their support.

One of the more engaging forms of teaching more responsible on-line conduct is the traditional creative contest for the youth - Mobilstory. Whereas last year contestants were asked to send their videoclips and the previous year, pieces of writing, this year they were asked to address the topic “Friendship against cyberbullying” in any form – as a story, comics, video, multimedia or work of art. Cyberbullying can be, under certain circumstances, even worse that traditional forms of bullying and may even lead to a suicide, as evidenced by the widely discussed case of an American girl Megan Taylor Meier.

Our project was granted a subsidy from the European Commission for another two years. Not only will we be able to continue to organize one-off, though important, actions, such as the Safer Internet Day but we will also be able to focus on finalising important system activities. In particular, the issue of content classification and rating that was discussed at the international SIC 2008 conference. The acceptance of the draft Declaration published at the conference was generally positive, however, no concrete commitments have followed for the time being. We are going to try to lead the discussion on content classification standards that we initiated and hope that this will lead to concrete proposals that will be enacted by the amendment to the Media Act.

In this project period we plan to re-organize and restore our Hot Line (Horkalinka.cz), which is part of the European INHOPE network and works in cooperation with the Czech Police to fight against cyberbullying, child porn distribution, racism and other form of extremism. The helpline Pomoconline.cz is helping children who are in trouble on the Internet and will focus more on on-line signs of traditional child problems – i.e. bullying. At present, children, parents and teachers can contact the specialised Internet consulting portal Minimalizacesikany.cz for information on bullying.

Our work would not be possible without the support of our reliable business partners: Microsoft, mobile operators Teléfonica O2, T-Mobile and Vodafone and cable operator UPC. Our thanks also to our experts from the Faculty of Education, UK Prague and University of Palacký, Olomouc.

Further pictures are available at the SI Photo-gallery. For further information, please contact:

Saferinternet CZ (www.saferinternet.cz)

The Czech Safer Internet project (Saferinternet CZ) was given support from the European Commission as part of the Safer Internet 2009-2013 programme. In compliance with the programme objectives, the project strives to enhance Internet users’ awareness of possible on-line threats; to establish a Hot Line for the notification of illegal and harmful content, especially child sexual abuse and bullying (www.horkalinka.cz).

The project supports self-regulation initiatives, the commitment of children to create a safer on-line environment and to learn new things about latest trends in the use of on-line technologies and their impacts on children’s lives. The Safer Internet Institute becomes the content provider and hosts the best practise repository platform of the project.

The project includes the assistance Help Line for children who are in trouble on the internet (www.pomoconline.cz) operated by the Safety Line Association.

Contact person: Zdenek M.Zalis, Phone No.: +420 602262582, zalis@saferinternet.cz

The Minimization of Bullying Project(www.minimalizacesikany.cz)

The Minimization of Bullying project has been run by the O2 Foundation since 2005. The O2 Foundation focuses on the issues of bullying in Czech primary schools on a long-term basis. The project is coordinated by Aisis Association.

In September 2008, a vast educational campaign was launched and more than 1 million posters informing students, their parents and teachers about bullying were distributed to all 4200 primary schools in the Czech Republic.

Contact person: Ivana Satrova, Director of O2 Foundation