A Japanese education panel said it is concerned about the numbers of children who can use mobile phones to gain access to 'harmful sites' on the Internet.

The advisory council on education have told Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to limit the use of mobile phones by children to prevent them from accessing 'harmful' information on websites.

It is worried that children will become more prone to crimes involving dating websites and cyber bullying. It wants parents, schools and other people concerned to stop elementary and junior high school students from using mobile phones. It also wants to make sure that they are only used for phone calls.

Fukuda seems to have agreed with the report and pondered if there was any real need for children to have mobile phones. After all when he was a kid they only had bean tins tied together with string.

More than a third of Japanese primary school students own a mobile and more than 96% of High School kids own one.

Only about one percent of them have any parental blocks on them so they could be accessing harmful material, the panel said, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, here. X