Please note: The reports in this section are not product reviews or tests; they're meant to spotlight options for you to consider, as well as milestones in children's online-safety technology development. Comments from readers on their own experiences with these products and services are most welcome - and, with your permission, we publish them. Do email us your own product reviews anytime!
Safe chat for kids: i-SAFE America and one of its young safety experts (Oct. 15, '99 issue)
We recently ran into an online-safety organization that truly practices what it preaches. It not only teaches kids how to chat online safely, it provides a place where kids and teens can chat safely. I-SAFE America made its chat area safe by harnessing two kinds of expertise: technical and human. (We propose that few services are truly effective on the Internet unless they employ both of those.)
In an interview, i-SAFE president Teri Schroeder elaborated on that for us. Please note: These are criteria you can use to check on the safety level of other chat areas your kids go to. On the technology side, i-SAFE has its chat servers configured so that:
- No participant can create a private chat room.
- No one can follow a fellow chatter around (into other chat rooms) - no cyberstalking.
- No one can upload or download pictures (such as nude photos) from a chat room.
- No one can access a chatter's IP address and see his/her physical location or check a fellow chatter's identity.
On the human side, i-SAFE has a secret weapon: kids. Yes, the kids' chat rooms are monitored by grownups trained in chat safety (STATs, for "Safety Trained Awareness Team"), but they are also monitored by a team of kids and teens called Junior STATs. JrSTATs are volunteers who are interviewed, trained, and tested before they join the monitoring team (here's the JrSTAT mission). JrSTATs have rules, and one of them is "School first!", so they are generally "on the job" only three hours a week. A highlight of our week was interviewing one of their leaders, 11-year-old Graeme McNaughton, so keep reading!
As we talked to Teri about all this, we wondered why safe chat is attractive to the some 300,000 unique visitors (600,000+ visits) who come to the site each month (we know why it's attractive to their parents and teachers!). Teri told us that, on the Net, kids don't have the signals or context they have in a physical encounter which tell them when they're in danger. "We have found that kids/teens wander over to i-SAFE because they know that no matter what, if there is an abuse issue, it will be dealt with, and this allows them to feel safe and have the assurance that someone cares about their activities online." Teri added that she's found that some children enjoy chat more when the "mystery factor" is removed. She's referring to the phenomenon in online chat where people are not always who they say they are (e.g., adults with bad intentions can pose as children). One can never be totally sure of fellow chatters' identities, but we can see that it helps when familiar "faces" are in the chat room, such as i-SAFE's STATs, and especially peers - JrSTATs.
* * A young safety expert
To complete the picture, we interviewed JrSTAT co-director and sixth-grader Graeme McNaughton and his dad, Jim. Their family has been online a little over a year, at Graeme's initiative. He'd been online at friends' houses, he told us, and it seemed like a good idea for the McNaughtons, too, he said. We asked him what he does most online, and chat clearly tops the list, with a little surfing, research, and interactive gaming on the side.
We asked Graeme how he got involved in i-SAFE. "I asked my parents if I could try chat. We went onto a search engine and looked at a few of the options. We picked i-SAFE because the description in the search engine said it was for kids." Why did you pick one for kids? we asked. "My parents encouraged me, and it was also my own idea." His dad added, "When our kids first started going into chat, we were with them for the first while to see what the basic talk was in the chat area - what people were saying. We tried various chat areas…. His sister goes on Yahoo! Teens, but we're not as happy with that one. It doesn't have as strong controls, and it's wide open."
We asked Graeme how i-SAFE compares with other kids' chat areas. "I tried FreeZone, but there are so many people on there I didn't really feel comfortable. No one ever listens to me. At i-SAFE, it's unusual to get a group over 15 in a chat room [all at once], and STATs and JrSTATs will talk to people and really answer their questions."
To continue his story, we asked Graeme how he came to be a JrSTAT himself, and he said that as he chatted with the JrSTATs he just got to wondering about their job and asked them what it was all about. He told us the name interested him, as did "being able to keep the place safe. I wanted to help out, I wanted to be a part of it."
And what has he learned in the process? we asked him. "It's helped me have a better personality. I can be more nice in my real life because of spending time in chat." We asked Graeme if he means that online chat shows him how people's behavior affects others. "Yes, you learn from that…. The way you act can determine who you can be in your life. Without a good personality you may not have as many friends. If you have a happy personality you can have a really good life, get married, have a lot of good friends." (This is a wise 11-year-old, we thought.) We asked i-SAFE's Teri Schroeder the same question - what the JrSTATs learn - and she added "responsibility." "We have them sign up for a schedule to teach them responsibility," she said. "So they take this very seriously and treat it like a job."
Finally we asked Graeme what advice he'd give parents about keeping their kids safe online (not just in chat). "The first thing is, carefully pick out where you're going," Graeme said. "Find out what chat actually is, and when you pick one out, be sure you know what you're getting…. Don't go into any areas that say 'free pictures,' because they're usually nude pictures…. Look for safety guarantees…. Telling people your age, sex, and closest city are ok, but don't describe what you look like, and don't ever give out your phone number or address. In chat, don't let people follow you, and don't go into a private room with anyone. If they put you in a private room, sometimes you can't get out."
If you and your kids check out the i-SAFE kids' chat area, do tell us what you think - via feedback@netfamilynews.org.
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