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 4.51 (Highly recommend) from 123 votes (3996 Visits) |
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children and internet safety |
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In this day and age, it is impossible to keep kids away from the internet. If they don't surf at home, they will in school, at the library, at a friend's house. And the internet can be a valuable resource, supplying access to different cultures, opinions, creativity. Many schools are even using it as a means to dissemanate homework assignments and require it for research.
But as I'm sure we all know, when you use the internet, you are exposing yourself and your history to anyone else online. The internet community is as public as a billboard or a television show. With this understanding, we as adults are very careful about what information we allow ourselves online. Kids may not understand this. That is why it is very important to educate them early and develop good habits on internet safety and etiquette.
Statistics from protectkids.org
- By the end of 1998, more than 40 percent of all American homes had computers, and 25 percent had Internet access. This trend is expected to continue. Children and teenagers are one of the fastest growing groups of Internet users. An estimated 10 million kids are online today. By the year 2002, this figure is expected to increase to 45 million, and by 2005 to 77 million.
Youth Internet Safety Survey
- Only 1/3 of the households with Internet access are proactively protecting their children with filtering or blocking software.
Center for Missing and Exploited Children
- 75% of children are willing to share personal information online about themselves and their family in exchange for goods and services.
eMarketer
- About 25% of the youth who encountered a sexual approach or solicitation told a parent.
Youth Internet Safety Survery
- One in five U.S. teenagers who regularly log on to the Internet say they have received an unwanted sexual solicitation via the Web. Solicitations were defined as requests to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk, or to give personal sexual information.
Crimes Against Children Research Center
- One in 33 youth received an aggressive sexual solicitation in the past year. This means a predator asked a young person to meet somewhere, called a young person on the phone, and/or sent the young person correspondence, money, or gifts through the U.S. Postal Service.
Youth Internet Safety Survey
- 77% of the targets for online preditors were age 14 or older. Another 22% were users ages 10 to 13.
Crimes Against Children Research Center
- 75 percent of the solicited youth were not troubled, 10 percent did not use chat rooms and 9 percent did not talk to strangers.
Crimes Against Children Research Center
- Only 25% of solicited children were distressed by their encounters and told a parent.
Crimes Against Children Research Center
- Only 17 percent of youth and 11 percent of parents could name a specific authority, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), CyberTipline, or an Internet service provider, to which they could report an Internet crime.
Youth Internet Safety Survey
Talk to your child about online dangers.
There are people who try to take advantage of the naivete of very young children and the curiosity and restlessness of older kids. Some of these people are after personal information so that they can use your identity for their own purposes. Some of them are sexual predators with more sinister intentions. They may gradually win the child over with friendliness and gifts, spending large amounts of time online with your child. They may seem like a kid themselves, being up on all the latest music, fashions and trends. They may not begin to gradually introduce sexual content into their conversations until a long time has passed and your or your child's guard is down. On the other hand, they may introduce sexually expicit conversation and ideas right away. Some predators collect and trade child pornography while others will try to arrange a meeting with your child. From the FBI information sheet: "It is important for parents to understand that children can be indirectly victimized through conversation, i.e. "chat," as well as the transfer of sexually explicit information and material. Computer-sex offenders may also be evaluating children they come in contact with on-line for future face-to-face contact and direct victimization. Parents and children should remember that a computer-sex offender can be any age or sex the person does not have to fit the caricature of a dirty, unkempt, older man wearing a raincoat to be someone who could harm a child."
Keep the computer in a common room in the house where you can easily see the screen if you walk by. Not in your child's bedroom.
Surf together, and let your child show you his or her favorite sites.
Make sure you have access to all of your child's accounts, including e-mail, blog and chat sites. Check them regularly. These are favorite ways for predators to contact your children privately.
Investigate and use parental controls and blocking software provided by your carrier. While these are not fool-proof, they are a help.
Find out about other locations your child may be using the internet. Do they have monitors or blocking software at school? at the library? at a friend's house?
Make sure your children understand these basic rules of thumb:
- Never arrange a meeting with someone they meet on-line
- Never post pictures of themselves to people they do not know or in a place with public access
- Never give out their personal information like names, address, phone number, school, birthday
- Never download pictures from an unknown source - they may contain objectionable materials or viruses
- Never respond to harrassing or suggestive messages or postings
- Things you hear on-line may not be true
Adolescents may need more guidance than younger kids. (Again from the FBI guidelines) Children, especially adolescents, are sometimes interested in and curious about sexuality and sexually explicit material. They may be moving away from the total control of parents and seeking to establish new relationships outside their family. Because they may be curious, children/adolescents sometimes use their on-line access to actively seek out such materials and individuals. Sex offenders targeting children will use and exploit these characteristics and needs. Some adolescent children may also be attracted to and lured by on-line offenders closer to their age who, although not technically child molesters, may be dangerous. Nevertheless, they have been seduced and manipulated by a clever offender and do not fully understand or recognize the potential danger of these contacts.
Warning signs:
- Increased time on the internet, especially in the evening or at night
- You find objectionable material on the computer. Predators often use photos to open a line of discussion or to establish "normalcy".
- Your child makes or receives phone calls to or from people you don't recognize - especially if they are long distance.
- Your child receives mail or packages from people you don't recognize.
- Your child prevents you from seeing what he or she is looking at on the screen.
- Your child becomes withdrawn from the family.
- Your child is using an on-line account belonging to someone else.
Then what steps can I take?
- Talk to your child in a non-accusatory way about what you think is going on and about the dangers.
- Check on what is on your child's computer, check histories and junk folders as well as the trash.
- Check the caller ID. Check the redial. Call the phone company about call blocker if you need to.
- Monitor on-line chats and e-mail. At least do "drop-ins".
When do I need to contact the authorities?
(Local or state law enforcement agency, the FBI, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children)
- You find child pornograpy.
- Your child has received a sexual solicitation from someone who knows they are under 18.
- Your child has received sexual materials from someone who knows they are under 18.
If one of these scenarios occurs, keep the computer turned off in order to preserve any evidence for future law enforcement use. Unless directed to do so by the law enforcement agency, you should not attempt to copy any of the images and/or text found on the computer.
More information:
For parents of younger kids:
http://disney.go.com/surfswell/index2.html
http://www.safekids.com/
http://www.ikeepsafe.org/
For parents of teens:
http://www.fbi.gov/publications/pguide/pguidee.htm
http://dmoz.org/Kids_and_Teens/Computers/Internet/Safety/ |
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| ADVICE RATING |
4.51 (Highly recommend) from 123 votes |
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Re: children and internet safety
Internet safety is a real sore point in my house....well for my kids.
We have our computer is a common area, with no doors or screening. We make sure our kids leave their passwords with us at all times and we have the chat programs like msn, etc recording conversations between the kids and their friends. We never look at the recorded conversations, with the exception of one week where our eldest daughter begun acting very strange. After a few weeks of acting strangely towards us, we were asked if she could stay at a good friends house. So after chatting with the friends mother, we allowed her to go.
The next afternoon when we picked her up, she was a mess. Sick, looked very much like a hangover to me......and considering our daughter was 14 at the time..we were a little concerned. After asking her about the night, we were given no answers that helped us understand why she was in such bad shape....then I noticed the alcohol on her breath......
Remembering the way she had been for a few weeks, I decided to look at the chat logs and see what she was up to...as she plans everything with her friends over the silence of the Instant message programs she uses. Well upon inspecting the chat logs we found that for 3 weeks she had planned a drinking session with a few girls she knew as well as a few boys that bought the alcohol for her. The met at a local park and drank themselves into a stupor. Her mobile phone had all the video evidence we needed to ground her for a spell. This drinking was particularly dangerous because she is also diabetic.......
Ok, on to personal blog sites like facebook, gabbly and myspace...
After having a look at my daughters Myspace and facebook accounts, I discovered that she had so much freely available information about herself on her public profile..that anyone could track her down and find her in real life. She had her full name..address, school and year level, sports clubs she is connected with, local parks she goes with friends, her date of birth and even her mobile phone number....The photo's she and her friends share are also way too racy for a girl of her age...
All of this can lead to a person deciding to find her in real life and possibly attack her. To show her how disturbing this was to me...I decided to show her where the racy pictures that she and her friends end up.....after 10 minutes of searching, I found a website full of teenage porn oriented pictures. There were pictures of people there that were stolen from facebook and myspace, as well as personal videos of teens in their underwear. No big surprise.....a few of her friends pictures were there...
I then showed her how her profile could lead an attacker straight to her....she was totally shocked and changed her profile and removed certain pictures. Now she has talked her friends into making their personal information disappear, and making their profiles and pictures viewable by invited friends only.... We use no personal filtering software, instead I have set up a site blocker on my router, so no unwanted sites are loaded. No computers in my house (not even the PS3 with it's web browser) can load these sites. We walk past the computer while our kids are on it (we don't actually read what is on the screen....as walking past lets them know we are about), and if we notice a deliberate move to cover or minimize a screen we simply pull the power lead and tell them time is up! We also limit our kids to 1 hour per day, and no later than 9pm finish on the pc. This way we can make sure that our kids don't get into too much trouble, and that they are aware that at any time we might walk past and see what they are up to.
Educating our kids is the big key here, younger kids (5-12 year old), need much more supervision and need to have us constantly explaining the do's and do nots. The older kids (13+) need a little less henpecking, a little more freedom, but need to be taught about appropriate behavior, and how to set up an online profile so it makes it impossible for an unsavory person to track them. Education and Prevention is better than picking up the broken pieces after something goes horribly wrong......
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Re: children and internet safety
These are absolutely abysmal. It mixes in good advise with absolutely insane and overbearing actions.
Tell your children to not give out personal information. Tell them that meeting people they talk to over the internet is stupid, and that it could be dangerous. And for the love of god, try to give them common sense.
I can't believe how many parents are scapegoating to parental controls and invasion of privacy instead of actually being decent parents. It is almost enough to make me support any ban on having children, if one were to ever exist.
Parental controls? Watching your children online? Content filters? Access to their accounts? Spying on where they use the internet?
If ANY of these sounded good to you, step back. Think about how you are being a parent to your child. You should be ashamed. Immediately, you should see that you are candy-coating the world, making it into all rainbows and sunshine. When they grow up, they will have no idea how to handle things, because YOU kept them from the knowledge. Not only that, but you are completely destroying a hope for a close relationship with them. You are debilitating them, destroying their free will and their desire for knowledge and adventure. They will learn to resent you, because they will associate the word "limiter" with "parent".
You should feel ashamed now. If you read through that and thought I was crazy, chances are you are a horrible person. A horrible person that rather keep your children in a tightly wound security blanket than let them be human beings. I can't wait for the years to come when their entire lives are secret, and they grow distant, because you couldn't use common sense.
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This advice is great
we have a filtering program on our PC, which is no longer connected to the internet due to upgrading, but when it was connected I found this filter which actively filters web pages and blocks them before pictures and things could be downloaded, I looked at net nanny and on quite often occasions any pictures you didn't want your children to see were on your computer before the filter kicked in. The program I found would completely close Internet Explorer if you found something inappropriate, best of all it is FREE, this program also blocks peer to peer like Limewire. You can control it, by turning it off if you require too. Our filter was always on especially when our children were on the net and turned off if we needed to. If it was turned off when the computer was shut down, when it was turned on again it would be reset and filtering again right after start up. This program is called NAIOMI and I recommend it to all, I don't know the web address, but of you google it, you will get the address.
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KIDS AND COMPUTERS
IN A CORNER OF OUR LIVINGROOM SITS A DESK WITH OUR COMPUTER, THIS IS WHERE EVERYONE IN OUR FAMILY USES IT, AS WE ONLY HAVE ONE IN THE HOUSE, THE RULES ARE SIMPLE
1) USE IT TO CHECK E-MAILS FROM FRIENDS AND FAMILY
2) USE IT FOR SCHOOL WORK OR JOB HUNTING
3) USE IT TO PLAY GAMES OR LISTEN TO MUSIC
4) NO DOWNLOADS UNLESS I SAY OK
5) I HAVE THE PASSWORD AND I CONTROL WHERE YOU GO AND WHAT YOU SEE AND WHAT YOU HEAR.
SINCE I AM IN THE ROOM FOR THE MOST PART, I CAN EASILY CONTROL WHERE MY SON GOES. SINCE HE DOES HAVE E-MAIL ADDRESS'S I CHECK THEM AS WELL. i DO NOT READ HIS E-MAILS, i JUST CHECK TO MAKE SURE THAT HE IS NOT RECEIVING THING I WOULD NOT APPROVE OF
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(July 2006) (
