SUICIDAL thoughts and depression, viewing pornography and searches to buy or sell drugs are the most common incidents detected by a global online program used by eight WA high schools to monitor the computer use of about 9000 students.
The WA schools have signed up to UK-based company eSafe Global’s software, which homes in on “early warning markers” — tens of thousands of “red flag” words, phrases, abbreviations, euphemisms and colloquialisms — typed or searched for by students from Year 7-12.
In the past two years, more than 8000 incidents were identified by “behaviour specialists” in the UK and deemed legitimate for intervention.
By far the most prevalent has been students’ mental health — anxiety, depression and self-harm risk — at 38 per cent of all identified incidents last year followed by pornography (20 per cent) and drugs (11 per cent).