What you don’t know can hurt kids

"I don't think the Internet has created more pedophiles. It's removed the societal stigma that kind of kept people in check. Before the Net, pedophilia was a lonely business. Now 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you can validate yourself, find hundreds and hundreds of people who will tell you there is nothing wrong with having sex with children.

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Source MSNBC

Parents must understand online tools to protect their children

Many safety guides for children using the Net read as if they were written by Robert Fulghum. Everything I ever needed to know to stay safe in the virtual world, I learned in the real world. Don’t go scary places by yourself. If someone is making you uncomfortable, just leave, and tell your parents. Don’t look at pornographic pictures, and you won’t have to worry about them. But most important — don’t talk to strangers, and never give them personal information.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

If it were simple, you wouldn’t hear repeated stories of FBI raids collaring dozens of pedophiles who swap files — and hunt for children — online. There wouldn’t be thousands of cases of Internet-related child luring tracked by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. And 1 in 5 children wouldn't be telling the Justice Department that they'd received an unwanted sexual advance in surveys.

It’s not simple because strangers online are hard to identify, since the Net is the land of make-believe. And just as kids are often better than their parents at playing make believe, they’re often better at keeping up with technology, too. They speak a language -- the text message language -- their parents can't understand. And so, they can get away with murder, and, tragically, so can Internet predators.

What to look out for
Some parents are tempted to dismiss the problem as no different from your teen-age son sneaking a peek at Playboy — on paper, or online. It's just a chance to see explicit images. No big deal.

Partly true, experts say. The problem is not nudie Web sites. Most of those require credit card numbers, anyway.

“Pictures don’t hurt kids,” said Parry Aftab, author of “A Parent’s Guide to the Internet.” Aftab also runs WiredSafety.org. “People hurt kids …. As long as parents think the only real risk is the kids will see adult sex content, they won’t do anything.”

The real threat to children is people who lurk in chat rooms and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels who hope to lure your child into having online sex or a face-to-face meeting. It’s impossible to say how many pedophiles there are lurking on the Net, but if you doubt the severity of the problem, log on to almost any IRC channel. You’re unlikely to last 60 seconds without being propositioned.

Former U.S. customs agent Marcus Lawson once pretended to be young boys or girls for a living. He arrested about 30 pedophiles a year — as big a caseload as he could handle. When MSNBC interviewed him, he was working an IRC “dad-daughter sex” channel. There were 73 users. (“Hmm. He wants to know if my daughter has breasts yet. I’ll tell him no.”)

“I don’t think the Internet has created more pedophiles. It’s removed the societal stigma that kind of kept people in check,” he said. “Before the Net, pedophilia was a lonely business. Now 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you can validate yourself, find hundreds and hundreds of people who will tell you there’s nothing wrong with having sex with children.”

So the real trouble for your kids begins not with information coming into your computer but with what goes out of your computer. The problem is what your child says in e-mail, posts to a bulletin board or writes in a chat room.

And Aftab says parents have an entirely new set of online issues to worry about. She calls it cyber-bullying, and it works like this: a vengeful classmate might sneak a compromising photo of someone else -- perhaps illegally drinking at a party -- with a camera-equipped cell phone, then threaten to put it on the Internet unless some form of payment is made.

In other cases, Aftab says, victims of real-world bullying turn the tables, and publish explicit materials about others online. In one situation, Aftab consulted with a mother who found pictures of her 9-year-old twin daughters posted on a sex-related Internet site. The poster was angry at the mother and seeking revenge.

"It's the kind of thing we used to do on bathroom walls, only this bathroom is seen by 700 million people," Aftab said.