Save the children: 'One in three children use a smartphone every day, cyberbullying and online grooming on the rise'

According to data reported by Save the children, in Italy, around one in three children between the ages of 6 and 10 (32.6%) uses a smartphone every day, a trend that has been steadily increasing in recent years (in 2018-2019 it was 18.4%) and with a clear prevalence in the South and the Islands, where the share rises to 44.4%, more than 20 percentage points higher than the 23.9% in the North.

62.3% of pre-teens (11-13 years), more than three out of five, have at least one social account: 35.5% have one on more than one social and a further 26.8% only one. And this in spite of the fact that the law (the GDPR) stipulates that 14 years of age (13 years with parental authorisation) are required to give consent to the processing of one's online data needed to open an account and, consequently, the main platforms have set a minimum age limit of 13 to open a social media account.

31.3% of boys and girls of this age are connected online with their friends through chats, calls, video calls several times a day, 5% are continuously. 82.2% of pre-adolescents use the Internet to exchange messages, just under 40% to send and receive e-mails, almost 1 in 5 (18.5%) to read newspapers or news sites, 11.3% to express opinions on political and social issues, 9.6% to follow online courses. Children who use social media may also develop behaviours such as an inability to control the time they spend on it or feelings of anxiety when they cannot access it. Behaviours that affect pre-adolescents the most. At the age of 11, 15.6% of girls and 14.1% of boys make problematic use of social media.

Cyberbullying is one of the risks that girls, boys and teenagers can encounter online. In 2024, cyberbullying cases dealt with by the Postal Police increased by 12%, from 284 in 2023 to 319 last year. The most affected age group is between 14 and 17 years old, which, with 220 cases dealt with, constitutes 68.9 per cent of all those dealt with. In the same year, 2,809 cases of online child pornography were handled by the Postal Police, an increase of 6% compared to the previous year. Also of concern is the growth in the number of cases of online grooming of minors, which amounted to 370 (a 5% increase compared to 2023). The most affected age group is between 10 and 13 (55.7% of cases) .

However, the picture of young people's digital skills in Italy presents lights and shadows. On the one hand, there has been progress among pre-adolescents and teenagers in the years since the pandemic and today - according to the Icils survey of 2023 - 14% of eighth-grade students have not reached the minimum digital skills, an improvement on the 24% in 2018 and in line with other countries such as Sweden and Norway (14%), Spain and Germany (15%). In Italy, however, significant territorial gaps emerge: while in the North West the share of eighth-grade students who did not reach the minimum digital skills was 8%, in the North East and the Centre it was 9%, in the South it rises to 17% and in the Islands to 32%. Moreover, in Italy the share of students reaching the highest skill levels (level 3 and 4) is 10.3%, lower than the EU average.