Conversations of a sexual nature between adults and young people online may be a pre-cursor to a face-to-face meeting between teh adult and child or young perosn in the real world for sexual purposes. These conversations are referred to a online solicitaion or online grooming and are illegal.
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There is some evidence that violent content may play a role in justifying and reinforcing appetites for violence and encourage violent behaviour in real life. However, other research findings suggest that exposure to and engagement with violent content is unlikely to have negative psychological and social consequences for those not predisposed to seek out violent content or behave violently.
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Happy Slapping has received extensive coverage by the media in recent months as a number of cases have resulted in serious physical assault and injury. Although the concept of filming a crime is an old one, the use of video cameras in mobile phones means that such attacks need not be planned carefully beforehand and are more easily watched and circulated afterwards.
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There have been a number of cases of online grooming reported in the media in the last two or three years in which children or young people in the UK have had have met face-to-face with an adult with whom their first point of contact had been in a chat room. These cases came to the attention of the media largely because they involved serious sexual assaults.
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It is important to realise that when you are interacting with others online as in real life, you have basic fundamental rights under law such as the Human Rights Act 1998 which ensures that you are entitled to live protected from abuse, discrimination, have a right to privacy and are free to express yourself.

With Rights however also come Responsibilities! As a parent you have a duty to guide your children as to how they should exercise these rights. It is very important to talk to them about what they do online affects others, therefore they have a responsibility to make sure that what they say, publish or do online does not hurt other people or stop them from enjoying their rights.

It is essential that they learn to recognise how others unfairly target particular groups of people because of their gender, beliefs, religious, cultural, ethnic or social background and that they often use methods to try and encourage others to participate in this. It may be useful to get your child to read the Media Literacy section of this site and then discuss ways in which others can use false or misleading information online for example by presenting untrue or incomplete testimony, evidence or reports.

This section gives some examples of types of web content which can be harmful others and issues relating to this.