Internet Safety, Is there Protection for Children?

In today’s society little is being done to help teach children and parents about internet safety. More and more children are being abducted because they are telling people their address or other personal information or they decided to go meet that person, to find out the person they thought they were talking to wasn’t some one their age but some one way older than them. These children are being taught in schools how to use the computer, to surf the net, to play games, but they are not being taught what not to do, what not to say. In April 2002, a law went into effect called The Children’s Internet Protection Act (AIPA) also known as Child Online Protection Act. This Act says a school or library must have some type of blocking or filtering technology on all of its computers from which there is access to the Internet. Both patron and staff computers are affected. The technology must protect against access to visual depictions described as obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors in the Act. CIPA does not require the blocking or filtering of text. The law does not address the question of laptops brought in by staff and patrons, but a consensus has emerged that these need not be blocked or filtered. Also a school or library must have an Internet safety policy and hold a public meeting to review the policy.  Ok great, the school is protected they don’t need to worry about teaching children the safety of the net. What about parents do they know how to protect their children? Is the information easy for them to find and set up some security at home on their personal computers?

     I-Safe American, Inc. (http://www.isafe.org) is a nonprofit foundation that “incorporates classroom curriculum with dynamic community outreach to empower students, teachers, parents, law enforcement, and concerned adults to make the internet a safer place” (Keeping Cyberteens Safe, Thomas Pack, QCC library). I-Safe was founded in 1998 and is endorsed by the U.S Congress. The goal of I-safe is to teach students how to avoid dangerous, inappropriate, or unlawful online behavior to do this they have created virtual classrooms. To use these classrooms you need to create an account which is free of charge. First you choose the category that you fall in for example parents/fifty+, kids& teens, educators etc. Then fill in some personal information I set up two separate accounts one for myself and one for my daughter to see the difference in needed information. As an adult they ask for name, address, email, phone number, then create a password to access the account your e-mail is the user name. For the kid & teen registration asks for first and last name, state, email, then it has you make a user name and password. You then can access the classrooms and informative articles. I found that these articles are very informative.

Officials say 750,000 sexual predators have been identified on the Web. One in five children between grades 7 and 11 has been contacted on the Web by someone asking to meet, according to Rob Nickel, author of "Staying Safe in a Wired World: A Parent's Guide to Internet Safety." (Why mom enlisted an online sleuth to keep tabs on child, Wood, Daniel B. QCC Library.) After reading the article “Why mom enlisted an online sleuth to keep tabs on child” I learned of some software to help protect an internet savvy child, SafeEyes, ( http://www.safeeyes.com/ ) a program that limits on line usage, you can also see what your child is saying,  when they are instant messaging their friends as they are typing ( if there are more than one computer in your household) or have it saved and then one is able to view at a later time. A feature I thought was really nice is that if you are not home or your child is surfing the net and tries to access an unapproved site the parent will receive notification at the very moment it is happening via, phone, e-mail, text, etc. This program has a free 15 day trial. A few others I learned about are eBlaster (http://www.spectorsoft.com/ ) and K9 Web Protection (http://www.k9webprotection.com/ ) which is a free service.

After visiting SafeKids.com (http://www.safekids.com/ ) I was overwhelmed with the information I found. This site covers everything, has many links to other sites to numerous to list to help you protect your children. The site has an open forum so if you have any questions you can ask.

In conclusion I have found many sites that would be useful to parents to not only educate them but, to educate the children also. Some of the sites have games the kids play to make learning this information fun, the games start at the preschool levels. There are sites that you can set up safety settings were they don’t even have to be home to know what the child is doing on the internet, or the instant messaging. All that the parents have to do is key child safety online, my search brought up 77,500,000 different sites to investigate. The information is there for them to access but why aren’t they using it?