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Dec 05, 2008

The number one spot to find a child predator is on web sites frequented by kids.

Category: General

Posted by: webmaster

TVO Parents.com

The number one spot to find a child predator is on web sites frequented by kids. If parents know what their kids are doing online, stopping predators is much easier. Unfortunately, most parents don’t.

“Parents don’t understand the online world so they just throw up their hands,” says Sergeant Robyn MacEachern from the Ontario Provincial Police. Instead of learning the technology, many parents put restrictions on it. “Most adults do not understand that kids won’t conform,” MacEachern says.

The gap between what kids do online and what their parents think they do is ever widening, especially with the advent of social networking sites and online gaming. A 2007 study by Symantec showed that kids actually spend twice as much time online than their parents think they do, and many kids reported that they do things online their parents would never condone.

In the study, 23 percent of children said they had encountered a stranger online and seven percent had even met someone in the real world who they met on the Internet. In the same study, 88 percent of the parents polled said their child’s online safety is one of their main concerns and yet almost half were not familiar with Facebook or MySpace.

MacEachern admits that kids can run circles around their parents when it comes to computers and gadgetry, but that doesn’t mean parents have nothing to offer. “Kids will beat us in terms of technology, but we beat them in life skills.”

And life skills are what kids need to have in order to be safe online. To teach them, parents need to know the territory. MacEachern offers the following advice to help you shrink the tech knowledge generation gap:

• Find out where your kids like to hangout online and spend time on those sites yourself. If you need help, ask your kids. They can teach you better than anyone. Or go to bewebaware, a site designed by the Media Awareness Network to help parents learn web basics.
• Put the computer in a high traffic area of your house. Do not allow your child to have a computer in their room.
• Very young kids will frequent communities like Neopets, Webkinz, and Club Penguin and, although they seem secure, predators do find ways to make contact. Make sure you are always with your young children when they are online.
• Kids spend more time with people they met online than they do with real people. Consequently, this makes it hard for them to determine who is a stranger. Remind your kids that people may not be who they seem online because when you can’t see or hear them, and it’s really easy for someone to misrepresent themselves.
• Do not let children post personal information online. Predators are very good at connecting the dots. If your son names his school on one site and the fact he likes football on another site, a predator can contact him pretending to be a football lover of the same age from the same area.
• Do not allow your child to use a web cam. Predators can hack into them, even when they are not in use, to watch your kids. If a web cam is embedded in your monitor, put a piece of black tape over the lens.
• Be approachable and do not threaten to remove the technology. Ninety-two percent of kids say they would not tell their parents if something went wrong online because they are afraid their parents will take away the computer. Talk about the issues instead.
• Kids have a tendency to believe that emails and chats are private. Remind them that nothing they say or do online is private, ever.
• Kids have a hard time authenticating what is good information and what is bad information online. Help them decipher the good from the bad.
• Predators have become much more blatant and kids much more blasé in chat rooms. Predators will say very provocative things that kids will just ignore and not talk about. It’s important for you to ask your kids if anyone has ever said anything sexual to them online. If they say yes, report it on cybertip.ca, Canada's national tipline for reporting the online sexual exploitation of children.
• Have your child sign an online use contract.
• Go to Internet101, a website created and maintained by a committee of police forces led by the RCMP, for instructive videos and more resources.

Predators spend more than 18 hours a day trying to lure children online. By embracing the technology and talking to their kids, parents can keep their families safe.

Want more? TVOKids.com has a very stringent online privacy policy making it a safe and fun site for your kids. They can watch videos and play fun and educational games like Firewall!, a great game to teach kids more about online safety.

And watch what the experts have to say about cyber predators on Your Voice.

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