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The Parental Authority to Be Involved
 By Michael Josephson

A 12-year-old girl, posing as 19, meets a 31-year-old ex-Marine in an Internet chat room, and runs away with him.

• A couple of teenagers steal credit card numbers and set up false eBay accounts to "sell" non-existent products. When they’re caught, the teens and their parents are held responsible to repay the victims, as well as all the fines and penalties.

• Two teenage girls are seduced into group sex with a pair of teachers at their school. The incident began when the male and female teachers – who were dating each other – began exchanging sexually explicit e-mails and instant messages with the girls.

These are a few of the literally thousands of shocking stories where innocent kids, looking for a new friend and some fun or, yes, being mischievous, got themselves into more trouble than they counted on.

Computers and the World Wide Web have literally changed the world by giving us access to myriad types of information, opening foreign and novel places for our perusal and letting us meet all kinds of people, almost instantly. Most of the information is useful and interesting, or at least trivial and harmless. Most of the people in chat rooms are ordinary kids simply looking for a new friend or exchanging information with old ones.

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Most, but not all.

That’s the problem – and it’s a growing one.

Chat rooms and e-mails can be a virtual fantasyland. You can pretend to be anybody or anything you want. Unseen and anonymous, you can be "cool" in a chat room. That’s awfully appealing to an awkward, isolated and "misunderstood" youth. And it’s also appealing to predators looking for children to exploit: lonely children, children looking for excitement, children looking for affection, children susceptible to a fantasy.

Insidiously, this threat most often strikes when our children are at home, in their rooms, "safe." We parents are doing the usual: talking, watching TV, or carrying out household chores. Our kids are in their rooms, and besides the irritation we might feel about the phone line being tied up, we’re pretty satisfied that they’re okay. It’s quiet, isn’t it?

The truth is that someone else has entered our home and is trying to lure our child into harm’s way.

The truth is that our child is seeing things he shouldn’t be seeing, or reading material he shouldn’t be reading, or even planning with his "friends" to do something he shouldn’t do.

And we are clueless.

We’ve rationalized. While our kids can whiz from one website to another, can master all kinds of software and know all the latest details about computer hardware and jargon, it all looks so complicated to us adults. It’s just an electronic box, after all, no more harmful to our kids than their CD players or TV. Let them have at it. It’s the computer age, isn’t it? Who knows? It might eventually help them make a living.

Well, it might. If it doesn’t get them into trouble first.

Can’t happen to your kid? That’s what every parent says - until it does.

It’s almost a cliché, but parenting is harder now. It’s harder and more time-consuming, and it certainly demands more awareness - but it’s not impossible. Our number one priority as parents is the security of our kids. There are unscrupulous people out there. But are we any better ethically if we choose to ignore them or refuse to protect our children from them? We warn our kids when they leave the house not to talk to strangers or get into a stranger’s car. Why aren’t we as vigilant about the strangers speaking to them over the Internet?

Since our children may face temptations they shouldn’t have to, are we being reasonable or prudent if we don’t teach our kids how to avoid them? If we knew someone was enticing our child into an exploitive sexual relationship, or learned that our child was stealing software from a department store, we’d do everything possible to discourage it. Why aren’t we as concerned about what they hear in a chat room, or which hacker site they’re visiting to learn how to steal the latest game software by downloading it off the Web?

Like it or not, we parents have to get involved with what our kids are viewing online. We have to find out how the Web and Instant Messaging works. We have to see what websites our kids are visiting, what files they’re downloading, what their Instant Messaging jargon, shorthand and slang means. We have to take control of how the Web is being used in our own homes. We have to, because we’re parents, and because it’s the right thing to do.

(Editors: Terry L. Harrison and Dan McNeill)

Ten Things Parents Can Do

1. Talk with your children about their online activities and the risks and ethical responsibilities of surfing the Web. Tell them you have a responsibility to monitor their Internet use and that you will.
2. Keep the computer in a common room in your home and set time limits for its use.
3. Make sure your child knows never to divulge personal information as they surf the Internet.
4. Set rules as to what sites your children are allowed to visit and which ones they are not.
5. Tell your children to let you know immediately if a stranger tries to make contact with them on the Web.
6. Install an operating system that makes you the administrator of the family computer, enabling you to control Web browser settings, content that can be viewed online, and software that can be installed. Consider installing third-party filtering software.
7. Insist your children give you their e-mail and chat room passwords. Prohibit them from having multiple e-mail accounts.
8. Make sure your children know what online activities are against the law. Illegal activities include making threats against someone else online, hacking, downloading pirated software, creating bootlegged software, sharing music files online and (for children under 18) making purchases over the Internet.
9. Go online with your kids and find out who they send Instant Messages to and/or chat with. Do not allow your children to send Instant Messages during homework-related computer time.
10. Regularly scan the files on your family computer to see what kind of material your children have downloaded and whether it was obtained legally.

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