Games online in India and need for parental control in children's web browsing

If you are worried about the effect of violent computer games on your child, here's a shocker: recent news paper reports says that sex games with graphic visuals, including those which test the player's 'raping skills', are making their way here, mostly from Japan in form of pirated disks from street vendors across India as well as downloads from Internet.

The report quotes counsellors and puts the onus on families to install parental control software to block access to such sites from computers and playstations.

A big risk widely reported is luring children into pornographic sites by re-directing URLs

and other deceptive means. Therefore, parents be advised to:

• Use Parental control software that helps you select the sites your child can visit and set duration
• Search engines have settings which exclude adult material from search results.This is especially important when you allow kids to search web (say, Google Images) for their homework etc. 
• In the computer, create one account for each child without administrative privileges
• Monitor their computer usage in browsing centres, which are becoming hot spots for gaming and adult material
• Keep the computer at home in a place where everyone could see the monitor
• Listen, talk and have regular communication with your child about the danger of using adult sites, among other growing up issues you deal with.This is the most important tip for you.

Cyber laws and content filters can only have limited effectiveness.Parents must ensure that they are protected from harmful content and predators.