Protecting children from unsuitable material

Matron recognises the importance of protecting children from unsuitable Internet content so she labels every file served with an ICRA label, even the images! Users, especially parents of young children, can then use filtering software to allow or disallow access to web sites based on the information declared in the label.

The ICRA (Internet Content Rating Association) is an independent, non-profit organisation established in 1999 by a group of leading international internet companies and associations. The ICRA's mission is to develop, implement and manage an internationally acceptable voluntary self-rating system which provides internet users world wide with the choice to limit access to content they consider harmful, especially to children.

The ICRA labelling system is the result of an extensive international consultation exercise involving senior industry figures and academics. ICRA has a small staff based in Great Britain and the USA with additional representatives in Germany and Spain.

The centrepiece of the organisation is the descriptive vocabulary, often referred to as "the ICRA questionnaire." Content providers check which of the elements in the questionnaire are present or absent from their websites. This then generates a small file containing the labels that is then linked to the content on one or more domains.

Most of the items in the questionnaire allow the content provider to declare simply that a particular type of content is present or absent. The subjective decision about whether to allow access to that content is then made by the parent.

A key point is that the Internet Content Rating Association does not rate internet content - the content providers do that, using the ICRA labelling system. ICRA makes no value judgement about sites.

The descriptive vocabulary was drawn up by an international panel and designed to be as neutral and objective as possible. It was revised in 2005 to enable easier application to a wide range of digital content, not just websites.

The ICRAplus filter

ICRA makes a free filter available for individual users. This will block or allow access to labelled sites based on the user's preferences. The ICRAplus control panel is a mirror image of the questionnaire filled in by content providers and thus allows almost direct communication between webmasters and parents. In addition parents can create their own block or allow lists, set up different filtering profiles for different family members and easily override a blocked site that they deem appropriate for their child.

However, in order to create a comprehensive filtering system that will block or allow access to websites, including unlabelled sites, ICRAplus also allows users to install additional modules that can use other methods to filter internet access.

Please visit www.icra.org for more information