By Keith Kalawsky
Unlike that plastic wrapping found on hardcore porno magazines tucked away on the top shelf or behind the counter at a corner store, there’s no foolproof way to protect computer-savvy children cruising the Internet.
Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t give anybody your name, address or phone number. Tell your parents about any suspicious characters lurking in the neighbourhood.
Worried parents usually offer this kind of advice to “street-proof” their kids and protect them from dangerous people.
But the same warnings should be used to keep children out of harm’s way on the Internet, police, teachers and safety groups say.
Instead of staking out playgrounds or schoolyards for their next victims, pedophiles can now hide behind faceless Internet technology — and exploit unsuspecting children on-line. Breezy conversations in chat-rooms can turn into dangerous real-life situations.
A man in New York had sexual conversations over the Net with someone he thought was a 15-year-old girl. He tried to lure the fictitious young female — who was actually a boat driver at Walt Disney World and anti-pedophile vigilante — to a New York shopping mall. Police were tipped off and arrested the man.
They found handcuffs and restraints in his car.
“There’s no restrictions on the Net, so anybody can be anybody and can trick a kid into giving them a lot of information,” says Elaine Goraj, director of Stay Alert-Stay Safe, an organization in Toronto that educates parents and kids on personal safety.
Child abuse using the Internet — from the distribution of pornographic images to the efforts of pedophiles to meet kids — has become such a huge problem even the United Nations held an international conference on the issue last month in Paris.
PedoWatch, an advocacy group that battles computer pedophilia and child pornography, says parents must shield their children since little can be done to stop the tide of illicit material that is flooding the Internet.
“While on the Internet your child could very easily encounter material inappropriate for children and could be engaged in conversation or correspondence by adults who mean harm,” PedoWatch warns on its web site.
Children run the greatest risk of encountering an Internet pedophile when using chat rooms, programs that allow people to carry on conversations in real time, similar to talking on the phone.
Pedophiles often pose as children to strike up relationships with kids, says Clifford Chan, director of Future Kids camp in Ottawa, since the chat programs don’t allow children to know the identity of who they’re talking with.
“I’ve met kids who’ve said they’ve misrepresented their age and then I asked them, ‘Well, how do you know the person you’re chatting with is telling the truth?’” Chan says.
Some chat rooms for kids are monitored, Chan says, but a pedophile can simply ask a child to meet him in a private or unmonitored chat room.
“Before you know it, you’ve lost any control right then and there,” Chan says.
Future Kids offers Internet training for children aged six to 13 in schools and computer camps. But when it comes to pedophilia, Chan says young women are the most likely targets because of the web sites they like to visit.
“On the World Wide Web there tends to be a bit of a gender difference,” Chan says. “Boys tend to play a lot of on-line games and its girls who tend to use the chat rooms more than boys.”
A wide variety of computer programs, such as Net Nanny and Cybersitter, are designed to screen web sites and allow parents to monitor what chat rooms and web pages their kids visit. The programs compile lists of unacceptable web sites and block out sites that contain certain words.
But Chan says he doesn’t think these programs provide airtight security against Internet pedophilia.
“I’m not a big believer in filtering software for older kids because web designers have gotten so good at getting around them and they need to be constantly updated,” Chan says. “I’ve met kids that know how to get around that kind of stuff anyway.”
Keeping the computer in a well-travelled area of the home — not in childrens’ bedrooms — is an easy way of avoiding problems, Chan says.
But the best solution is teaching kids not to give out personal information over the Internet and to be skeptical of all people and information they find.
Parents should tell their kids that the information superhighway should be treated like a real city street, says Mary Ann Turnbull, director and owner of the Turnbull Learning Centre in Ottawa, a private school which offers summer computer classes for kids and teaches Internet safety tips.
“You don’t stand out there as cars or people go by and freely give them information about who you are and where you live and what your number is.”