Protect
Your Children Online
Protecting
Our Children in Cyberspace
Protecting
Children from Unsuitable Materials from the Internet: What
Can and Can’t Be Done.
THE
BOTTOM LINE: Parental Involvement Will Keep Children
Safe On The Internet.
Protect
Your Children Online - Part 1
During our everyday life, we concern ourselves mainly with
physical security; tightening our seat belts, locking our
house door when we leave, etc. However, there is another
menace out there that is creeping into our society. This
menace is Cyberstalking, the exploiting of our children through
the Internet.
In my professional role in the
Security Industry, I preach the values of the Internet, not
only for
us as adults and
professionals, but also for our children. Our children
have almost immediate access to any kind of information available
throughout the world. Want to read A Tale Of Two Cities?
It’s on the Internet. Have a question about who
the third person to land on the moon was? It’s
on the Internet. However, want to be exposed to nudity,
pedophiles, and thousands (if not millions) of other social
deviants? You bet, it is on the Internet and just a
key touch away from your child or grandchild. So, what
do we do about this?
First, we educate ourselves. Go
to The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
website at www.ncmec.org and
download their study “Online Victimization - A Report
on the Nation’s Youth.” This report will
provide an eye-opening look at the perils our children are
under every time they access America Online, Compuserve,
or the Internet via the local Internet Service Provider. It
also provides a telling survey on how parents deal with their
children’s use of the Internet. For example,
over 85% of parents have talked with their children about
being careful talking to strangers on the Net, and 97% of
those polled check every now and then on what is on their
child’s computer screen. But, only half the parents
ever go back and actually check history to ensure the child
is indeed staying out of potential problem sites, and only
39% set a limit on the amount of time their child can be
on the Internet. Though it appears that parents do realize
the potential exposure their children have on the Net, less
than 1/2 play a truly diligent role in ensuring their child
is protected.
Second, we educate others. Gather
information from such sites as The National Center and tens
of other
child
advocacy sites (including www.pta.org),
and speak to your fellow parents in your school system about
the dangers presented
to our children on the Internet. Stay tuned for future
articles on ways to prevent your children from being exposed
to unsuitable material. Bottom line: be involved
with your child’s Internet experience. They now
have the world, literally, at their fingertips. Make
the effort to have it at yours also. Part 2 explains
the warning signs that your child is having a bad experience
online.
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Protecting
Our Children in Cyberspace - Part 2
The Warning Signs of Unsuitable Use or Contact From the Internet
The signs may be very subtle; your child seems more
withdrawn than usual, strange phone calls are ringing into
your house. In the past, these may have been perceived
as a child going through a “crisis”, or someone
too embarrassed to acknowledge that they dialed a wrong number. However,
in the days of Internet communication, it is important that
a parent pays particular attention to their child’s
activity on the Internet and takes action should they recognize
changes in their child’s behavior or in the overall
behavior of the house.
The Internet has become a vast and great resource for our
children to learn things they would never have had the opportunity
to learn otherwise. We all remember having to go to
the library to research our next term paper using the World
Book encyclopedia or the Periodicals catalog. The Internet
Age has allowed our children to receive, almost instantaneously,
information it would otherwise have taken days to receive. This “instantaneous” aspect
of the Internet is also what makes our children vulnerable
to material that is unsuitable for our minor - age children
to see.
The major Internet access sites, including America Online,
MSN, Earthlink, and others, have made it increasingly difficult
for children to receive unsuitable material through their
Internet connections. These services have also allowed
the parent to restrict even more the online experience of
their children. It is important that a parent reviews
these increased security options and determine if they are
applicable to the online situation.
However, most of these sites still allow access of minors
to sites that are conducive to chatting and instant messages. It
is these areas, as well as electronic mail, that provide
the greatest risk to our children. Unlike the typical
phone call, the Internet has no “face” or “voice” from
which to somehow identify the person our child is communicating
to. The person happily chatting with our child via
the Weather Channel chat room about cumulonimbus clouds and
the report the child is writing could just as easily be a
50 year old pedophile waiting for his chance to trap the
child into divulging personal information about themselves
and their location.
It is extremely important that we advocate to our school
communities the hazards which exist for our children on the
Internet. There are resources available to you that
will expand on the signs of abuse and the steps to take in
protecting your child from experiencing this unsuitable content
on the Internet. For starters, here are several warning
signs that may show your child is using the Internet in unsuitable
ways:
- Your child
spends most of their home time on the Internet.
- Your
child quickly turns off the monitor or shuts the computer
down
when you enter the computer room.
- You receive
phone calls from strangers asking to speak to your child.
- You
recognize outgoing phone calls, mostly long distance,
from your residence
to phone numbers you do not recognize.
- Your child
begins receiving gifts from people and addresses that
you do not recognize.
- Your child’s
personality begins to change, becoming more combative
when it comes to time spent on the computer or their ability
to
access the Internet.
- You pull
up pornographic or other unsuitable materials from your
computer’s
hard drive.
In the next addition, I’ll detail steps
the parent can take in monitoring and helping to ensure that
their child
is not being exploited on the Internet.
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Protecting
Children from Unsuitable Materials from the Internet:
What Can and Can’t
Be Done. (Part 3)
In the previous two articles related to protecting our children
from unsuitable materials received or retrieved from the
Internet, I explained the overall problem and the warning
signs children may show when they are being unsuitably influenced
from these materials or contacts. The next two articles
will explain to you what steps the Commission for the Online
Protection of Children (COPC) and the pitfalls each
of these steps presents.
There are many steps we could
take to protect our children from unsuitable materials we
see
in everyday life. We
could hide the newspaper from them so that they won’t
see any articles or advertisements, throw away the television,
trash the VCR, etc. Obviously, these are not the types
of steps we want, nor should take. The Internet is
a vast resource of good information for our children to use
and to grow by. However, those sites and publishers
of adult material know this also, and have a very powerful
weapon at there disposal to use when the screws are tightened
for them to clean up their act. That tool is the First
Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The First Amendment,
for those of you who have been out of 8th grade Civics class
for a while, gives Americans the right
of free speech. This amendment does not state that
we have the right to free, and suitable, speech; the right
to speech suitable to all Americans, the right of speech
that does not include pornography. This is what the
adult entertainment industry uses as their defense to all
encroachments on their ability to market and sell their materials. Government
has been effective in a couple areas of entertainment in
at least providing consumers with information that content
may not be suitable for children as in movie ratings and
parental advisory stickers on music. However, this
does not prevent young children from purchasing or viewing
this type of material. It also does not provide recourse
back to the seller for this material being available for
use to children.
The COPC has reviewed how other
industries handle this problem, and have incorporated these
same processes
into their recommendations. There
is currently software available to the consumer that may
be installed on PC’s that block specific content from
the Internet. This software will also provide reports
that show attempts made to access sites. Some software
will also allow access to sites to the point where explicit
material is accessed, kicking the user off the Internet when
that area is reached. This process is effective to
a point. That point is where it interferes with the
ability for a young user to gain valuable and useful information
on a topic the software may see as offensive, including research
on breast cancer (breast is a “lockout” word),
other forms of reproductive cancers, etc. This type
of material we want our children to be able to access. The
software does not make it easy to add/remove words such as
this, so it becomes a complex issue. The recommendation
has also been made to add rating designations to websites. This
presents basically the same issues experienced in the entertainment
industry, with one exception. It is hard to verify
that the person actually sitting at the computer is under
18 years of age. With the knowledge most of our children
have today, it is not difficult to circumvent the system.
The
COPC has also made recommendations to add domain names that
reflect the content being marketed or distributed by
the sites. This would include domains such as .XXX
or .SEX for adult entertainment sites. Again, the First
Amendment argument arises in that these domain names make
it easier to filter out this material which they are free
to distribute. It would also provide an unwanted designation
on the site that would make it more recognizable as an adult
entertainment site and drop the number of hits to the page. As
you can tell, any type of filtering, monitoring, or labeling
of such sites will create endless legal disputes that will
tie this issue up for years.
In the last article in this series,
I’ll state what
the commission’s final recommendation is, as well as
what other advocacy groups have to say on this issue. back
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THE
BOTTOM LINE:
Parental Involvement Will Keep Children
Safe On The Internet.
As I wrap up this four part series on keeping children safe
from unwanted materials and contact on the Internet, I cannot
stress enough how critical it is to get the word out that there
are indeed perils lurking for not only children but for anyone
who commits the mistake of divulging too much information
to strangers. Though these articles are geared towards
protecting children, the adult reading these articles can
also pay heed to the recommendations. As you visit
friend’s or acquaintances homes, look for a computer
in the home and remind the customer of these facts.
The
bottom line to protecting children from unwanted materials
or solicitations from the Internet, as recommended by the
Commission for the Online Protection of Children, is to increase
public education of the Internet as well as providing parents
with the necessary tools and information to be actively involved
in their child’s experience. The Commission feels that
government and the private sector should undertake a major
education campaign to promote public awareness of technologies
and methods available to protect children online. The
campaign should “stress the importance of involving
caregivers in a child’s online activity; the availability
of both offline resources and one-click-away Internet technologies;
access to child friendly sites; information about the range
of technologies available to protect children; and information
about testing and assessment of new technologies.”
The
key to making this type of policy work is to put the method
and means of protecting the children in the parent’s
/ caregiver’s hands. Allow the parent / caregiver
the opportunity to pick the style and substance of protection
for their children without a government mandate on what software
or what acceptable use can be undertaken. This flexibility
will allow the parent / caregiver to tailor their financial
abilities to purchase any filtering or monitoring software
with the balance of providing hands-on care with their child. The
Commission, as well as a number of parent and child advocacy
groups, support this position.
The Commission also
supports increasing the programs and penalties available
to law enforcement for the prosecution
of those who use the Internet to traffic unsuitable materials. The
offender who stalked a 13-year old girl in Texas through
the Internet, subsequently molesting her, received only 1
year in prison and is now back on the streets. The
Commission recommends a list similar to that for dead-beat
parents and child molesters that identify these cyber-stalkers,
as well as the ISP’s that provide hosting for the content. This
list would be readily accessible on the Web. Finally
in terms of law enforcement, the recommendation is made to
provide increased funding to fight international aspects
of Internet crime, including obscenity and child pornography. This
would involve agreements with countries addressing the extradition
and gathering of evidence in cases involving international
distribution of obscenity and child pornography over the
Internet.
As seen recently in the U.S. Supreme
Court’s
decision to review the constitutionality of the Children’s
Online Protection Act of 1998 in this coming fall’s
Court session, this matter will continue to be argued and
defended
in our court system. Though we need strict laws and
punishments for those who prey upon our children, this alone
will not prevent our children from being victimized. It
will only be with the attention and care that we as parent’s
give our children as they venture out onto the wide expanses
of the Internet to gain knowledge and insight into millions
of bits of information that will enable us to make this a
safe venue for them. Parent involvement. The
real bottom line.
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