Teens Can Find Trouble on the Internet
Teens can find trouble on Internet February 25, 2006 Safety tips A few online safety guidelines for parents and children: Never give out identifying information -- home address, school name or telephone number -- in a public message such as chat or bulletin boards. Be sure you are dealing with someone both you and your child know and trust before giving out information through e-mail. Get to know the services your child uses. Never allow a child to arrange a face-to-face meeting with another computer user without parental permission. Never respond to messages or bulletin board items that are suggestive, obscene, belligerent, threatening or make you feel uncomfortable. If a meeting is arranged, make the first one in a public place. Should you become aware of the transmission, use or viewing of child pornography while online, immediately report this to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children by calling (800) 843-5678 or visiting the CyberTipline online. You should also notify your online service. Remember online users may not be who they seem. Remember things you read online may not be true. Set reasonable rules and guidelines for computer use by your children. Discuss these rules and post them near the computer as a reminder. Be sure to make this a family activity. Source: Safekids.com Online Parents looking to protect their children or who believe their child may be a victim of Internet crime may find the following site useful: www.caddosheriff.org. www.cybertipline.com. www.missingkids.com. www.safekids.com. www.netsmartz.org. www.safeteen.com. www.getnetwise.org. www.incredibleinternet/onlinesafety. By Joel Anderson joelanderson@gannett.com As the parents of seven children between the ages of 14 and 18, Clinton and Vicky Cates are constantly trying to stay a step ahead of their increasingly Internet-savvy teens. The Cateses have invested dozens of hours and thousands of dollars to monitor the online activities of their children, and even that might not be enough. Always trying to stay ahead of the curve, the Cateses were part of a small crowd earlier this week at a Shreveport library to hear Lt. Bill Duncan, of the Caddo Parish sheriff's office, advise parents how to protect their children from Internet predators. "You can't just sit back and hope things work out," Clinton Cates said afterward. "You have to be proactive." That has become particularly difficult with the proliferation of social networking Web sites like MySpace.com, hi5.com and xanga.com, which many children -- especially teens -- use to keep in touch with friends and make new ones. All too often, however, these youngsters are posting provocative pictures and personal information, including phone numbers and addresses, that are a jackpot for online predators, law enforcement officials say. That means parents must be the first line of defense for children who are not quite mature enough to understand the global reach of these Web sites, Duncan said. "Our kids don't need another friend," Duncan told parents at the seminar. "They need someone to get them where they need to go." "It's a changing landscape, and we've got to try to keep up with our children," said Jeff Kuhlmann, who brought his 7-year-old daughter, Madison, and 4-year-old son, Ash, to the meeting. The numbers suggest finding trouble on the Internet is as simple as flipping the power switch on the computer. According to a recent U.S. Department of Justice study, one in five children, or 20 percent, between ages 10 and 17 have received unwanted sexual solicitations online. In the same survey, one in four children, or 25 percent, reported unwanted exposure to sexually explicit material. Another way to analyze the heightened threat is the increase in reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's CyberTipline. In 2001, the first year the center started keeping these sort of statistics, there were 1,540 reports of online enticement of children for sexual acts; in 2005, there were 2,669. "The danger remains the same, but the threat keeps changing," said Larry Magid, founder of Web sites like safekids.com and blogsafety.com. "The kids need to understand what they say on the Internet can be used to harm them." Magid was working as a technology journalist in the early 1990s when he happened to watch a TV news segment about a child who had gotten into legal trouble over something he wrote in a chat room. At the conclusion of the segment, Magid said, the interview shifted to an officer who was working the case. Asked what parents could do to protect their children, Magid recalled, the officer ripped the modem of the computer out of the wall. "It was all very dramatic and absurd," Magid said. "There needed to be a way that parents could have their kids use the Internet safely without ripping the modem out." From that day, Magid was at the forefront of the movement to educate children about protecting themselves while using the Internet. Magid got support from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to develop a brochure called, "Child Safety on the Information Highway" in 1993; he has since updated the brochure several times and put out a version for teenagers, too. Those updates can't come fast enough. Sites like MySpace.com have added another social outlet for teens and another source of concern for parents. MySpace touts its 41 million subscribers -- with 90 percent of them between ages 14 and 30 -- and draws about 150,000 more every day. That kind of cyber traffic has brought MySpace the sort of headlines that are usually bad for business. Police in Middletown, Conn., are investigating recent reports that seven girls were sexually assaulted by men they met through MySpace. And a 16-year-old Colorado boy was arrested Wednesday after allegedly posting pictures of himself on the Web site holding handguns. In New Orleans, a 29-year-old California man was sentenced to 10 years in prison earlier this month for luring a 13-year-old girl he met online from her Zachary home to have sex with him in Dallas and Houston. "That's what got me to thinking that this stuff was a lot closer to home than I'd realized," Duncan said. MySpace officials did not immediately return a request for comment, but Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp. who owns the site, recently told Newsweek magazine that a third of the company's staff monitors the site. Meanwhile, the Cateses have decided to handle the monitoring themselves. They said they have bought software filters and a surveillance program that can "record everything the kids type" and has the ability to take a picture of the computer monitor every few minutes. They also remind their children once a week about appropriate use of the Internet. "It's not about privacy," Vicky Cates said. "It's a matter of protecting your children." But some law enforcement officials, like Hugo Holland, who handles sex crime investigations for the Caddo Parish district attorney's office, wonder if some parents are too worried about the threats outside their home and not worried enough about those closest to it. "The people who are the biggest danger to your child are the people who have routine access to them," Holland said. Magid agrees, saying more old-fashioned methods of parenting could help ward off the newer threats. "Parents have to be in touch with their kids -- and it only gets harder as they get older," Magid said. "The most effective filter isn't the one in the computer, it's the one between the kids' ears." http://www.shreveporttimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060225/NEWS01/602250352/1002/NEWS