The Road to Cybersafety - 0 views
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Carrill is part of the Platte County Sheriff’s Office. He also leads the Western Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force. One of his primary missions is to track down and arrest online predators who trade in child pornography.And all these cameras only make his job more challenging. About 40 percent of the nation’s minors have access to Webcams, Carrill explained, devices for uploading live video to the Internet. About 65 percent of all children have access to cell phone cameras.
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erhaps the biggest issue is that fact that kids don’t understand that when a picture is posted online, it’s nearly impossible to remove.“Once that image is taken, it’s out there forever,” Shehan said. “The No. 1 issue that we’ve seen with Webcams is teenagers self-producing pornography.”
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All we can tell them is, ‘I’m sorry,’” Carrill said. “The minute the camera clicks, you no longer own that image. It has the potential to harm that person years from now.”A Webcam placed in a child’s bedroom is another bad combination, according to Shehan and Carrill. Sexual predators search for kids who use Webcams in the privacy of their own rooms, then lure or blackmail the child into providing pictures of themselves.“We see cases time after time of children who take pictures, send them to a predator and get a pornographic collage back that the predator uses to blackmail the child into providing more images,” Shehan said.
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. About 40 percent of the nation’s minors have access to Webcams, Carrill explained, devices for uploading live video to the Internet. About 65 percent of all children have access to cell phone cameras.Carrill’s team recently started a new operation to search image-trading Web sites for known child pornography in Missouri. The results were frightening, he said. More than 6,000 images were found in the state; about 700 of those pictures were downloaded in the Kansas City area.Between sexual predators who fish for images and immature decisions by kids with cameras, more children are either having their images posted online or being exposed to pornography, according to a 2006 report by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
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In the end, the best tool to defeat child pornography is parent education, according to both Shehan and Carrill. More than anything, kids need to know they can trust their parents.“It’s through that open line of communication between the parent and child that they can work through or prevent bad situations,” Carrill said.
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All parents should follow a few basic rules when it comes to cyber safety, according to experts:- Keep computers in common areas of the home.- Monitor Internet use by children.- Enable privacy protection software.- Turn Webcams off or protect them with a password.- Track what images are being uploaded by children in the household.- Talk to children about what is appropriate.