10 Tips for Keeping Teens Safe on MySpace
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Child predators use social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to attract potential victims, but these are not the only places where parents and children have to be careful. Online predators use all the tools of the Internet to find victims, so it would be smart to be careful no matter how your child goes online.
In July 2007, MySpace removed over 29,000 convicted sex offenders from its service, and these were just the ones they could identify. No one knows how many more are still online using fake names. If your child uses a social networking site like MySpace or Facebook, he or she may be coming face to face with a predator. Banning your child from social networking sites is not enough, since potential predators can be anywhere online. The following advice will go a long way toward keeping your child safe from this kind of threat.
1. Talk with your child about the potential dangers of online child predators: What you say will depend on how mature and sophisticated your child is about the Internet and about life in general.
2. Spend time together when your child is online to become familiar with your child’s online habits: You might even try to register of the online services your child uses. As a registered user, you would have a better idea of what kinds of options your child has when using that service.
3. Arrange the computers in your home so that the screen is visible to other members of the family: While your child may need or want some amounts of privacy when online, no child should be able to go online in secret. Encouraging a child to keep secrets from parents is one way that predators groom their potential victims. By keeping your child’s computer use out in the open, there is less chance of this happening.
4. Encourage your child to tell you if he or she is ever made uncomfortable or scared by something experienced online: If your child is uncomfortable talking with you, then make sure that your child can talk about it with your spouse, partner, family friend, or other responsible adult.
5. Make sure you have the user names, passwords, and other information needed to review any of your child’s online activities: If your child is unwilling to give you this information, then you should not let your child go online. As a parent, you have to have the ability to check out what your child is doing online at any time and for any reason if you suspect that your child is at risk from an online predator.
6. Occasionally review your child’s online activities: This includes past activities on any online accounts, or the content of files and other data stored on the computer or in portable data storage devices like CD-ROMs and flash drives.
7. Occasionally review your child’s use of offline communications such as telephones, cell phones, and regular mail: Often online predators may communicate with a potential victim by phone or by mail in order to keep their relationship hidden.
8. Make sure your child understands your family’s rules for being online, and that the rules apply at home and away from home: It helps if these rules are written down in the form of a family Internet use agreement.
9. Closely supervise any risky online activities such as chat rooms, file sharing, and webcams: The FBI has found that most children who fall victim to online predators spend large amounts of time in chat rooms. Webcams and IM may be hazardous because a predator may use them as tools to profile potential victims. File sharing may be used to directly transfer inappropriate material directly from a predator’s computer into your computer.
10. Immediately report suspected child predators to the appropriate law enforcement organization: In addition to law enforcement, you may want to contact your ISP or the provider of an online service if you suspect that someone has been using their resources illegally.
The Internet is like the rest of the world in that a small number of people intend to do harm to innocent people. In spite of this kind of hazard, going online does not have to be scary for you or your child. With just a little bit of care and common sense, you can easily keep predators away from your child.
Additional Resources:
A Parent’s Guide to Online Safety: This FBI guide at http://www.fbi.gov/publications/pguide/pguidee.htm provides parents with online predator warning signs and additional advice for keeping predators away from your children.
Family Forms Pack: This downloadable document at http://forms.speedbrake.com/ contains several forms that you can print out and use to help manage your child’s online activities. Included are sample family Internet use agreements and a form that you can use to record user names and passwords, and another information associated with each of your child’s online activities.
About the Author: Dr. Todd Curtis is the creator of the web’s most popular airline safety site AirSafe.com (http://www.airsafe.com), the director of the AirSafe.com Foundation, and an expert in the areas of engineering risk assessment and risk management. He has applied those basic principles to the problem of managing Internet use, and has put many of those insights and lessons learned into his book Parenting and the Internet (Speedbrake Publishing, 2007), an easy to understand how-to guide that parents can use to manage the activities of their online children. For more information about the book and how it can help you, visit http://books.speedbrake.com
This post was written by: Erin
Tags: Inappropriate content, myspace profiles, Parental Supervision, sex and violence, sexually explilcit