Parents must protect kids from online perils

By Whitney Hancock

October 18, 2007 | The dangers of the Internet are very real and will always be present. This hazard will quite probably only get worse with time. But the Internet is not the real danger here. The real danger is a negligent parent.

The only power and control we have over the threat of the Internet is the discipline we instigate in our own homes with our children. If we fail to exercise this power, we leave our helpless children in the open doorway, with the Internet world and its predators lurking just outside our homes.

Imagine if you will a fourteen-year-old girl. She is smart and has lots of friends. She has a stable home life with parents who love and care for her but are a little lax in their enforcement of rules. She spends much of her time on the computer in her bedroom doing homework and managing her iTunes. One day, she finds herself drifting from the task at hand, and she wanders into a chat room where she is immediately engaged in conversation with a flirty stranger. It seems an innocent exchange.

"If you put your teenager and four of their friends in a room, chances are, one of them has been solicited for sex online." This study, conducted by the Crimes Against Children Research Center, also found that less than 10 percent of these incidents were reported. Also, only one-third of surveyed homes had any kind of filter or blocking system in place on their computers.

Now imagine that this same fourteen-year-old girl is sexually solicited by a 27-year-old male. She is your sister, your daughter, your neighbor, your niece. She is every naive seventh grader who unknowingly gives her innocence away on the Internet, through any number of means from chat rooms to MySpace. She represents the large percentage of today's youth utilizing this latest popular communication tool. Many users like this young girl tend to include a great deal of personal information they may consider ambiguous.

According to Rob Stafford of Dateline NBC, this means that "MySpace.com [and other means of Internet communication] is one-stop shopping for sexual predators, and they can shop by catalogue." Wired News reported that this particular fourteen-year-old girl was posing as a nineteen-year-old college freshman on her MySpace page and agreed to meet in person the man she had been chatting with on the site. After their initial meeting, the aforementioned relationship took place -- even after her real age was discovered -- and this time, though rare, charges were filed shortly thereafter. The man was sentenced to three years in prison.

Clearly, the dangers of the Internet are ever present. And in reality, there is little we can do to eradicate this danger. The Internet is and continues to be an incredibly vast well of information and possibility. But it is also a pit that children today can fall into, and they will become prey to whatever horror lies below. It is the job of the parents to take the necessary precautions to ensure their children's safety. We must build the guardrails around the pit.

Too many parents today think that it is so important to be the child's friend. We forget that we are the parent first -- this is our first responsibility. When that is forgotten, disciplinary action becomes less than critical, rules become obsolete, and children are ultimately put at risk.

The bottom line is this: What, as parents, are we not willing to do to protect our children? We owe it to them to simply establish rules for Internet use, teach them how to be safe on the Internet, and enforce these policies in the home.

There are countless ways to keep our children safe on the Internet. Something as simple as installing a filter system on your computer can make a big difference. It is effective to limit the amount of time a child is allowed on the computer. More importantly, parents must talk to their children about the potential dangers of the Internet. Children and teens that adequately understand the dangers they can put themselves in through their actions will use more discretion and prudence online.

Perhaps the most crucial thing parents can do to protect their children is to establish rules and enforce them. We cannot worry about being on our child's good side. We are the parents. We owe it to them to be the parents. We have the responsibility to keep them safe.

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