The Internet allowed pedophiles a whole new way to access children — by pretending to be other kids, they can specifically target children in order to lure them into dangerous situations.

And now, if that wasn’t bad enough, child predators have found a new, and more disturbing, way to get close to your children — through you.

This disturbing trend was first brought to my attention during a causal lunch date with a friend who works in law enforcement, specifically with Internet crimes against children.  I was asking about how viable of a threat predators still are considering all of the Dateline episodes and new ways to monitor activity online.  He all about laughed at me, how naive to think predators are not a serious threat.  And then he told me this… Why would a predator waste his time getting to know one child at a time when it’s much faster to meet adults (parents and teachers) that can act as a conduit to children.  If you can groom one adult and they trust you, all or the children who trust that adult will also trust the predator.

He went on to give me an example of how this “might” happen (he was not at liberty to give me specific information about open cases). I will sum up the rest of the conversation with a factious yet plausible example.

You are a new parent again, you already have a 4-year-old, and now you have a beautiful new baby who just won’t sleep. You don’t remember having this same issue with the older one (we all know how amnesia sets in), and you are desperate for sleep. It’s 3 AM and you are searching for answers on the Internet.

You come across a parenting networking site where you can ask questions of experts and get advice from other parents dealing with similar issues. A young dad logs in and sees your desperate post about sleep training. He knows the perfect person to help you. He even sends you a message through the system with the sleep trainer’s name and phone number and his personal e-mail address in case you need more support. You are grateful for the advice, log off, and wait for morning to call the sleep trainer for help.

To be polite, you send the dad a thank-you note, and after a few e-mail exchanges, you realize you two have a lot in common. Your kids are the same age; you live near one another and even play at the same park. So you set up a playdate. However, when your new friend arrives, he tells you the kids got sick but he wanted to come by and say hello in person. You are excited to introduce your new friend to the other parents at the park and subsequently your children and all of your friends’ kids too.

STOP! You may have just let a predator into your life, and because you trust this person, so will your children.

According to my source, predators are lurking in parenting networking sites, teachers’ forums, and anywhere else they believe they can cultivate relationships with adults that may lead them to children.  After my initial article on this topic was published on momlogic.com, I received an e-mail from a women telling me just how true this really is and that it had happened to her.  She told me her story of accidentally letting someone she trusted online, into her life and the lives of her children.

Once a child trusts a predator, it is easy for the predator to manipulate that child. Using the friendship and trust the predator has established with the adult can actually be used against the child. “Your mommy sent me to pick you up. Remember me? She introduced us at the park.”

Recently in Pheonix, AR two women met on Craiglist.  Both claimed to be pregnant and they developed an online friendship.  When one of the woman offered baby clothes to the other, the other woman was happy to go and pick them up.  However when she arrived at the home, the new “friend” was not preganant and proceeded to cut the unborn baby out of her.  Both the mother and the child died.

Although this is an extreme example it is a glaring reminder that we, as adults, need to be careful who we let into our lives and the lives of our children.  This article is not meant to insight panic.  We are NOT on the verge of an epidemic, we can control this situation!

It is important that we keep these few tips in mind the next time we log onto any site where we can communicate with strangers:

1. Create a screen name that does not give away personal information. Your online name should consist of random letters and numbers and not your real name or the names of your kids. Do not give anyone an opportunity to use your personal information in your screen name to strike up a conversation.

2. Use a pseudo-identity. Use a fake name every time you set up an online account for any networking site, forum, blog, or wiki.

3. Never give an online stranger the opportunity to meet you or your children face-to-face. Like I say to the kids, it’s better to hurt someone’s feelings than put you or your family in harm’s way.

4. Report suspicious behavior. Just use common sense here. If you see something on a forum that looks suspicious or makes you uncomfortable, contact the webmaster immediately!

Parenting networks, teacher forums, and help columns are great ways to get information — just don’t use them to make new friends!

There was a recent study that just came out from UCLA that said 3 of 4 children had been bullied online the last 12 months.  This was in 2008.  And of those who were bullied, 71% said they were bullied by someone they know.

Children reported not talking to their parents about the incident because they were afraid their parents were going to take away the technology.

I just worked with a family who’s 13 year old daughter was being cyber bullied.  And she went to her mom, she told her and her mom said “That’s it, no more IMing, You’re done” and took it away from her.  What happened was the girl went underground.  She started IMing at other places and not telling her mom the bullying was continuing.  And it got pretty hairy and the school found out and brought the mom back in.  When I sat down with the girl and her mother and I explained that I completely understood the mother’s reaction. As a parent, if someone is attacking my child I’m just going to remover her from the situation and do whatever I have to, to protect her.

But, no one dealt with the behavior.  No one dealt with the actual cyber bullying.  What we need to do as parents, is understand that children can possibly use the technology for evil but it is still them behaving badly.

Cyber-bullying has long-term and serious consequences because there is no safe place for a child who is being bullied online.  When bullying happens at school in the physical world, a child can go home to a safe place and be removed from the situation.  With cyber-bullying this is not the case!  Also, cyber-bullying is viral!  It can spead in just seconds as the bully forwards the message to the entire school or posts something derogatory in a public forum.  Finally, cyber-bullying is in black and white for all to see and for the victim to read over and over again.  It never goes away!

If your child is cyber bullied, they need to stop, block and report.  They need to stop and not respond to cyber bullying.  Because eventually, they will be come a cyber bully.

So they need to stop and not participate in cyber bullying.  They need to not say anything else.  Then they need to block the user.  They need to stop the user from sending them anymore messages.  And they need to report it.  They need to print out the entire conversation.  Not just the part where they got bullied.  And it is not because you believe they’re culpable.  But as the parent you need to be able to look at the entire picture and say, “You know what, my child is being very sensitive and I need to help him or her process this information. Or I need to help encourage my child to go have a face to face conversation with this bully.  Or this is really severe and the parents need to know about it. Or this is so severe I’m taking this to school or possibly law enforcement.

Your children can’t necessarily make that determination on their own they need your help and your guidance to know where this falls in the spectrum.  I’ve seen cyber bullying cases where one girl will say to another “I don’t like your hair.” And that other little girl is now so distraught that she can’t function.  Well, does that need to go to the school?  Does that need to go to law enforcement?  No.  Does the little girl need help processing this and need to know how to confront the other little girl?  Yes.  But as parents we can help them make those decisions.

As of January 2009 there is new law in California that gives school the right the suspend or expel a student for Cyber-bullying.  This is not to say that it is the school’s responsibility to take action.  But it does give them the option.  The first line of defense needs to be you.  Calm, reasonable, you.  If your child’s is suffering at school because of the cyber-bullying has moved to the playground, tell a school administrator.  The laws are different in each state but you want to bring the situation to their attention.

Kids are quick to dive into online games without paying attention to what they are playing, whom they are playing with and how long they play.  They log into websites using their real names and proceed to spend long periods of time playing.  By logging in, other players, including predators can see how long the child is online at that game.

Predators surf the net, including areas of multiplayer online gaming, chartrooms and social networking sites. An online predator is someone who seeks out victims on the Internet for either sexual or financial purposes. A screen name that continuously appears can signal that a person (possibly a child) is being unsupervised and therefore more vulnerable to outside influences.

This perception makes children more susceptible to grooming. Grooming is the term law enforcement uses to describe the process by which a predator tricks a victim into trusting him.  They will find ways to connect with the child and relate to his or her needs. Predators may seek out children that are having difficulty at school, with peers or family members.  They find things in common with the child to gain their trust.  Young children are quick to trust an adult that appears to be helping them.  This is what the predator is counting on.

Teaching children to avoid predators is essential to Internet safety. As a parent you can accomplish this by helping your child minimize their time online, steering children away from potentially dangerous sites where they can communication online with strangers, teaching children to tell an Adult they trust if contacted by an online stranger, and focusing on a child’s overall well-being.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122170459104151023.html

By the way, if your child does get a friend request like this, I would hope that they would call the university to make sure the request is real and they are not walking into a potential hoax or phishing scandal.

The second way information on the private pages is leaking out is through tagging and search engines.  Tagging means to label a website or more commonly these days a picture.  So if there is a picture of me out there in cyberspace, I could add a label to the picture with my name, Lori Getz.  Now a search engine like google has my name attached to a photograph.  So when you search Lori Getz, my picture will appear in the image section of google. When kids tag pictures of themselves in photos on these social networking sites they are making their pictures searchable.  As a web designer I tag my web pages.  I add labels in the code so that people will find me.  My website, yourcec.org is tagged with all kinds of words, so when you search for Internet Safety, google will direct you to my website. So employers need go no further than google images and search for your child’s name.

Think about it.  With a shaky economy and multiple applicants for a single job, what better way for an employer to weed out the applicant pool.  Getting online and searching an applicant’s name is a lot faster than conducting a personal interview. I have friends (whom shall remain nameless) working at large financial institutions, brokerage firms, schools, and public policy, all of whom admit they get online to vet a potential candidate because it is just so easy to do.

We can try to keep some of this from leaking out but it requires due diligence on the part of the user (meaning your teenager)!  Check privacy settings to make sure you are only letting in those you want to see your life on Facebook.  You can join a group and not allow the group to see you but you have to pay attention.  You can also set up privacy setting to make it less likely for the search engines to find tags.  But none of this is fool proof. We can only control what we do on the net and not what everybody else is doing. Also, we cannot guarantee that the technology won’t fail and someone will accidentally be able to get in when they were not supposed to!  Just last week my prom picture appeared in Facebook for all to see, and it wasn’t me that posted it!

What kids NEED to understand is that when they POST to the Internet, in essence, they give up their right to privacy.  They don’t own the places where they leave the information and therefore they cannot control it.