NEW! Parental Controls Product Guide: 2010 Edition

By Stacie Rumenap

In a few days, the FCC will release its’ National Broadband Plan to bring high-speed Internet to all Americans.  Chairman Julius Genachowski is hopeful that by working together, we’ll come up with innovation and technology-based solutions to empower parents and protect our children.  Stop Internet Predators couldn’t agree more. 

When FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski outlined last week how the new National Broadband Plan will benefit children and empower families, he reminded parents to think about the differences between today and when they grew up…how families of his generation probably had one television in the living room, and how watching a favorite band on the Ed Sullivan Show was a weekend highlight. 

Today, however, is a whole new world, filled with many more screens that can bring along powerful opportunities even if they do bring along dangers and pitfalls.  Families no longer gather around their one television screen to watch the news.  Instead, today’s households are equipped with multiple televisions, computers, cell phones and gaming systems that allow us to connect to one another and worlds we didn’t know existed even 15 years ago. 

As such, Genachowski made several compelling arguments that technology and safety should and can go hand-in-hand:       

• First, children are our most precious national resource who deserve to be educated and prepared to navigate today’s digital world. 
• Second, empowering parents is an essential strategy in keeping kids safe online.
• Third, the government has an appropriate, but limited

  , role to play.

• Fourth, the First Amendment is a core American value that must be honored even in a digital world.
• Fifth, markets have untapped potential to drive innovative solutions.  Therefore, government and consumers shouldn’t attempt to slow down technology, but should instead pursue strategies to unleash technology solutions to technology-related problems.

 High-speed Internet and digital technology allow new ideas and creations to be shared with anyone.  It spreads opportunity farther, faster, and more equitably than any other medium.  For our children, the Internet has the potential to improve every aspect of their lives. 

 Consider education.  With online learning, kids anywhere can have access to the best teachers in the world, and access to up-to-date e-textbooks and high-quality tutoring.  Studies show that low-income children who use the Internet more at home have higher GPAs and standardized test scores than children who use it less. 

 But of course these new technologies also expose children to new dangers from harassment to online predators.

 A recent Kaiser study found that children consume recreational media more then 7 hours a day and are consuming nearly 11 hours worth of content.  When the same study came out in 2004 and reported 6 hours of daily media consumption, experts said it was impossible for the number to go higher.  If you’re a parent of a teen with a cell phone who can send texts faster than the blink of an eye, you know all too well that number will only go higher which leaves many parents asking if they should embrace new technologies or worry about them. 

 The answer is both, and ensuring children have access to broadband—pitfalls and all—should be a goal.   

 Stacie Rumenap is president of Stop Child Predators, a national non-profit organization that combats the sexual exploitation of children and protects victims.  For more information, visit www.stopchildpredators.org.

By Amy Thienel

When I was in 6th grade, my best friend from elementary school “broke up” with me—apparently, I was too nerdy for her liking—which consisted of her spreading rumors to anyone who would listen. Mostly, she said mean things about me. Luckily, my middle school taunts were limited to the playground. Not so for today’s tweens and teens as bullies have taken to the Internet, where their ridicule can be seen by anyone with an Internet connection and can last a lifetime.

Cyberbullying is so bad that Internet safety seems to be on the mind of every parent, politician, and media personality these days. Indeed, recent stories detail the horrific impact that online peer-to-peer aggression can have on the lives of young people. These incidents are terrifying for any parent and teen alike.

Take for instance the story of Phoebe Prince, the 15-year-old girl who moved to Massachusetts from a small town in Ireland only to commit suicide after several of her classmates harassed her about everything from her accent to teen love on Facebook and through text messages. Even after Phoebe’s tragic death, her tormentors left disparaging comments about her on a Facebook memorial page.

Sadly, such incidents are not a rarity. Just last month, 15 middle school students in Oklahoma were suspended after joining “I Hate” groups on Facebook that targeted a particular sixth-grader at their school. In Washington State, 28 students were suspended in a similar case.

A 2008 study conducted by the Cyberbullying Research Center found that out of approximately 2000 middle school students surveyed, over 43% were victims of cyberbullying. So it’s no wonder that parents and educators are desperate to help children navigate the Internet safely but often feel they lack the skills to do so.

New websites and publications have come to the rescue. CyberBully411.com is dedicated to combating cyberbullying and Internet harassment. Last week, SCP President Stacie Rumenap attended a forum about online reputations, in which Federal Trade Commission staffer Nat Wood talked about the affects on people’s lives as they share more of their lives online through social networking sites, blogs and other online services, and how that phenomenon makes it more important than ever for parents to have the necessary tools to help protect their kids from cyberbullying and other online threats. Wood touted the FTC’s newest guide, Net Cetera: Chatting with Kids about Being Online. A must-have resource for parents, Net Cetera includes information and advice about talking to children and teenagers about staying safe online, protecting their private information, texting, social network etiquette and more.

Remember parents, talk to your children about Internet etiquette—it just might save your 6th grader the embarrassment brought on by a would-be cyberbully.

About Stop Child Predators

Stop Child Predators is a national non-profit organization that brings together a team of policy experts, law enforcement officers, community leaders, and parents to persuade state and federal lawmakers to enact policies to combat the sexual exploitation of children, and promote and protect the rights of victims.

http://www.stopchildpredators.org/news/pr020111.htm

As media outlets report that Super Bowl entertainer Pete Townshend of The Who was a once-registered sex offender in the U.K., a couple of items come to light:  1.)  Most Americans did not know about Townshend’s sex offender status; 2.)  They are furious that the NFL would hire Townshend for the primo family show of the year. 

The NFL and halftime sponsor Bridgestone, however, are standing behind their man, and support Townshend’s “research” excuse he used when he was caught accessing and paying for online child pornography.  Even so, the NFL and its Super Bowl sponsors have been sent disclosure documentations from our over-seas friends at Child AbuseWatch that leave them in no doubt as to Townshend’s confession of guilt which earned him his sex offender status.  That leaves them in the position of knowingly hiring a sex offender.

A recent case involving a Texas man allegedly forcing his 8 and 9-year-old daughters to watch online pornography has prompted Texas officials and parents to fight a state law that allows parents to show their children “harmful material.”

The law was originally created in the 1970s in order to protect parents who wanted to teach their children about sex education. As written, the law specifically says that parents can’t be prosecuted for showing “harmful material” to their children, but doesn’t set boundaries as to what constitutes such harmful material. Thus, the door is left open for potential abuse. In the aforementioned case, the incident came to light after one of the girls told a school counselor that her father made her and her sister watch an online video of group sex.

The mother of the children is upset that nothing can be done about her ex-husband’s actions. She’s spreading awareness about the law in hopes of changing it, recognizing that she herself wasn’t aware of the law until she tried to have her ex arrested.

With the rapid rise in the number of children with access to the Internet, parents owe it to their kids to teach them about the potential pitfalls of the world wide web, not lure them to danger.

The Internet is filled with images that children should not be exposed to, even under the supervision of their parents. For example, child pornography has become so common on the Internet it has turned into a multi-billion dollar commercial enterprise. In the decade since the FBI launched a 1996 initiative to combat online child pornography and exploitation, the number of such cases jumped by over 2,000 percent. It’s also estimated that some child pornography websites receive more than one million visits in a single month and that victims are becoming younger and the images more graphic and violent.

Let’s not forget that the broad audience for child pornography drives up the demand for child pornography to be produced—and in turn, the demand for children to be molested in front of cameras or live audiences.

Worse, showing any type of porn to kids is a common “grooming” practice of pedophiles that desensitizes victims and makes them less likely to resist further advances. This type of grooming is widely considered by child advocates to be as abusive as actual contact abuse.

Of course, sexual education is an important and laudable goal.  And parents ought to have the right to teach their children about sex in privacy without fear of persecution or prosecution. But the same law that protects the privacy rights of parents also needs to protect children from exposure to dangerous or harmful content. So while no one is accusing this Texas father of sexually abusing his daughters, let’s hope the state legislature better clarifies the intent of the law and helps protect families from this type of abuse in the future. Such action is necessary to adapt the law to better fit today’s Internet hungry environment and to better protect each and every child.

View the original blog post by clicking here.

The growth of the internet—including broadband and wireless access—has the unfortunate side effect of putting children at potential risk.  For the most part, the connections our kids make on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace allow teens the opportunity to connect to other teens from around the world—something that would not have been possible just a few years ago.

Kudos to Google for attempting to make Street View more user-friendly.  But shame on them too for not going the extra step to remove all images of kids who are unsuspectingly  photographed for anyone to see.  Why place the burden on busy parents who already feel they can’t keep up with technology when it comes to protecting their families?   Allowing parents an opt-out feature, while seemingly a helpful tool, isn’t enough – parents ought to be able to opt-in instead.  It may come as a surprise to some, but not every parent cruises the Internet daily like most teenagers…Who’s helping those parents opt out of this intrusive and potentially dangerous program?  Street View seems harmless enough.  But considering the technology allows online users to view zoomed-in, high-resolution photographs of their homes, parks, schools, and in some cases, even children playing outside, sadly, it’s only a matter of time before someone uses this site to harm a child.  It’s time Street View does more to protect our kids.