Opponents to online gambling have for years argued that online gambling presents a danger to children. These same opponents maintain that the regulation of online gambling and mobile online gaming will lead to more under-aged gamblers…
Anyone involved or even semi knowledgeable about the online gambling industry knows this is nonsense. Online gaming operators go to great extents to detect and prevent under-aged gamblers from even being able to access and gamble on an online gaming site. A bigger threat to children online is cyberbullying.
Provinces like Ontario have enacted laws against cyberbullying in their schools, interestingly, Ontario is also a province that is educating students about online gambling, but there are many other places where cyberbullying goes unchecked. The damage that cyberbullying does to a child can be immense and even lead to suicide and its something that opponents of a largely self regulated industry like online gambling, should instead focus their efforts on.
Here’s the other thing, for old school guys like me it’s really hard to understand how cyber bullies are causing so much damage. I say this because, I’m picturing the kid that was bullied back in my high school days, and the way he was bullied, I feel like he’d be laughing at the cyberbullies, saying kids have it easy these days. He had to hide under the bridge at lunch hour just so he could make through the day without his underwear being wrapped around his neck… If he could have avoided bullying by just turning off the computer…
Well, it goes to show the just how digital the world we live in is these days and just how pervasive it has become. More and more people are realizing that online gambling should be at the bottom of the list of threats to society, and really shouldn’t be on the list at all considering what else is out there.
