At a regular meeting on January 14, 2011, the Public Council on Safer Internet Use approved the 2010 annual Public Report of the Bulgarian Safer Internet Centre (SIC), operated by the Applied Research and Communications Fund. The annual report informs about an increase in the effectiveness of the Bulgarian Internet Hotline, but also a rise in the number of the received reports about online child grooming.
Despite the overall decline in received reports by the Hotline (from 1227 in 2009 to 857 in 2010), the percentage of the actionable reports has increased: from 142 in 2009 to 398 in 2010. The Hotline undertook 527 actions on the received reports: 11 cases were transferred to the appropriate law enforcement authorities; 121 were sent to partner INHOPE-member hotlines; and regarding 96 cases the Bulgarian Hotline directly contacted website owners.
Several alarming trends have been noticed in 2010:
– while in 2009 the Hotline received only 3 online child grooming reports, in 2010 there were 17 such reports;
-every eighth signal concerns illegal or inappropriate content or behavior in the Bulgarian virtual environment.
The Annual Report registers a significant enhancement of the international activities of SIC. In 2010 SIC trained 7 experts from Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Macedonia in combating web-facilitated child pornography and abuse.
Furthermore, the SIC’s educational activities have considerably expanded: the school psychologists of all public schools in the city of Varna have been trained and started implementing the “Real and Virtual Violence: Prevention through interactive education” methodology. This program has already been taught for 3 years in 20 schools in the capital city of Sofia.
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Download SIC Public Report 2010 (320 kB, pdf)
