Net Family News: Online-Safe Resources for Kids and Families

Online-Safe Resources for Home & School

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!

Kids' online safety: A police officer's update (Feb. 1, '02 issue)

A recent conversation with Officer Ken Hansen, expert on Net crimes against children, turned up three new trends developing in his field - trends parents should know about:

Strangers can intrude on a child's instant-messaging session. ("We've made a couple of arrests where we're on IM [posing as a child] and somebody contacts us. I don't know how they [pedophiles] do it, but there's a way they can see we're on IM, and they can hit us. One incident happened on Yahoo! [Messenger] and one on MSN [Messenger]." When we asked him if a child has to do anything special to signal s/he's online, Ken added that it can happen with a child doing nothing but IM-ing with a friend.)

Game chat is a new and growing trouble spot, where pedophiles find and "groom" unsuspecting kids. Chat and discussion boards can be found wherever gamers gather on the Net - in specific game sites like UnrealTournament.com or Operation Flashpoint or info+community sites like GameSpy.com, GameSpot.com, or Battle.net. Ken told us that pedophiles' most obvious way to worm their way into kids' lives is by getting them to talk about their interests. Gamers are no different. (For more on gamers and popular game sites, see our 2-part series on teen gamers, Nov. 16 and 30.)

Ken and his colleagues on Utah's Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force no longer have time to spend in chat rooms, posing as teenagers to catch pedophiles (letting the latter set up face-to-face meetings with the "teenagers" so they can be arrested for "online enticement"*). "We're at the point where we're just maxed out on cases. We can't do proactive work because we have so many reactive cases," Ken said, referring to cases they've been sent by other task forces, police departments, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's CyberTipline (1-800-THE-LOST or http://www.cybertipline.com). The bad news is Ken's team is so busy. The good news is that the Task Force is getting referrals from all over the country now - US law enforcement has become well-educated about Internet crimes against children.

Like many members of Internet crime task forces in the US (there are 30), Ken is an experienced police officer, most recently a sergeant with the Salt Lake City Police Department, supervising vice, gang, traffic, and patrol units. He told us that while he was in the Vice Squad, he started an ICAC-type program for his department. "That is the reason why I was selected by the Attorney General's Office to be the director of the Utah ICAC. The Utah ICAC Task Force started on January 18, 2000. Since that time we have investigated just over 300 cases. Most of those cases have been either manufacturing, distributing, or possessing child pornography. About 25% of our cases relate to Internet predators."
Part of Ken's work on the Task Force is educating parents and educators about how to help kids stay safe online. At meetings and conferences, he tells them there is no better safeguard than...

Monitoring/spot-checking what's happening on the kid's computer screen, and
Understanding what s/he sees on that computer screen.

"To have filtering on a computer is fine," Ken says, "but most important is knowing exactly where your children are going on the computer, and knowing yourself how the computer and Internet work."
To get him to expand on that a bit, we asked, "So technology is only part of the solution?" "It is," was the response. "It can work very well in terms of keeping kids out of certain Web sites and also providing reports [using monitoring software], but there are always ways around it, and that's why it's good to know on a first-hand basis what [kids'] interests are on the Internet - just like in real life. Parents needs to educate themselves about the Net." For example, Ken added, we should know enough about chat, IM, and kids' passworded email accounts at sites such as AOL Anywhere , MSN.com, and Yahoo.com to make sure kids don't put any personally identifiable information in their profiles (which fellow chatters can click to learn more about them). If you don't know what a profile is, ask your child or student!
And if we are going to let our children chat, ideally, they should do so with "people they already know from a face-to-face relationship," Ken said. How can parents control that? we asked him. "Actually watch the screen and ask who he or she is chatting with and make sure it's someone they already know." That's a lot of monitoring, we suggested. "It is," he said, "but it's really important."
*"Online enticement of children for sexual acts" is one of the five crimes the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and its CyberTipline really want to hear about (if you hear about such a case or even have reasonable concerns it could happen to a child you know, call 1-800-THE-LOST or go to CyberTipline.com). The other four are child pornography, prostitution, sex tourism, and sexual molestation outside the family, the operative word in all this being "child." For explanations of the five crimes, please see CyberTipline.com. The NCMEC works closely with the FBI, US Customs, the US Postal Service, and local law enforcement nationwide (including Task Forces like Ken's) in combating those crimes.

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(Very useful) related links

"Psychologist says teens need cyber boundaries" - a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article that echoes Officer Hansen's comments almost exactly. It provides the advice and observations of Robert Kraut, a Carnegie Mellon University social psychologist who studies human-computer interaction. (Our thanks the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this article out.)
"Stalking the Web Predator" - a Los Angeles Times piece about a mother and "self-styled online crusader who scrolls through chat rooms and news groups in search of sexual predators" to set them up for arrest by sending a tip to police officers. The problem is - though this woman appears to be an exception - "law enforcement, for the most part, views the Internet activists as attention-seeking busybodies" and critics among online-privacy advocates call them cyber-vigilantes, the Times reports. In Los Angeles alone, FBI agents "turn away about a dozen people a year who offer to help with online sex stings," the Times reports, adding that some "helpers" turn out to be "closet pedophiles."
How "travelers" are caught, as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette explains it (in a way that gives useful context to the recent, highly publicized case of pedophile Scott W. Tyree). "Travelers" is a term used by federal agents for people who "strike up friendships with children on the Internet, gain their trust, then travel to pick them up for sex" - or send the children money to travel and meet them for same.
The FBI's "A Parent's Guide to Internet Safety"
"A CyberCop's Guide to Internet Child Safety", a 200+-page ebook written by Detective Glen Klinkhart, who emailed us, saying he has "specialized in tracking down online predators for years." The site (where the ebook can be downloaded in pdf format) requests $5.95 or "a commitment [via email] to use the information in the book to help educate your child about how to be safe on the Internet."