Can I be 12 Forever?

As adults we understand that there are risks to all individuals on the Internet, and especially our children. However, adults remain unaware of the true perils that children face on the web today. Blocking offensive sites does not necessarily protect children. Danger lurks on even the most moderated and innocent sites. I think that adults should go online posing as a child to understand the risks lurking there for adolescents. Only by doing this can they gain the understanding needed to monitor their activities and address the hazards. Then, we can educate children how to prevent and deal with different unsuitable and dangerous situations.
My realization of the importance of going online posing as a child came about quiet by accident. My daughter was 9 years old when we got our first PC. I gave her a quick education about safety online and let her pick some sites to put on her favorites list. She was only to go onto these sites after they were pre-approved by me.
Club Penguin was a game she wanted to play. It is a virtual chat room for children. You are a penguin and get to waddle around talking to other penguins, play games, and members can get extra goodies. According to Clubpenguin.com they are committed to children's safety. They have moderators and "sophisticated chat filters" to protect the children. They have won several awards and are endorsed by NetSmatrz, an organization that works with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I was convinced that it was a safe place for my daughter and it looked like so much fun that I made myself a penguin and started playing with her.
It wasn't long before I saw flaws in the "sophisticated chat filters" and moderator system used to protect children. I saw penguins using words like "dan" or "ship" as wanna be curse words. There were incidents of bullying, and most shockingly of all I was cyber-raped on 3 different occasions. I know it sounds funny, but, it's really no laughing matter. Unless I had experienced these things for myself I would have been unaware of what children were getting away with doing on Club Penguin.
As a result of playing CP I decided to make a blog about the game. I guess you could say that I lured the children there. I wrote stories about my penguin buddies and used tags with their names that could be searched on Google. All I had to do was tell them they were famous and to search their names. It wasn't hard at all. They flocked to my web page even though they didn't know if their search would lead them to a Club Penguin Blog or a porn site. The Internet Technical Task Force made by the States Attorney's General did research on Youth Internet Usage for the last 5 years and found that 40% of youth were exposed to sexual material as a result of searches. It's scary to think of what their searches might have led them to if I was a pervert.
After visiting chat rooms where children were cursing and exposing themselves to unsuitable content I decided to make a chat where I would try to prevent these things from happening. The first day I made the chat I was sitting in the room to see what would happen. Within minutes I had my first visitor who began making sexual suggestions and obscene comments to me. According to the Task Force "1 in 7 Internet users have received unwanted sexual solicitations or approaches on the Internet in the last year". I had just had my first encounter, but not my last. I almost deleted the chat right then, but decided the kids needed somewhere to chat that could provide a better environment than the one they were currently using. I'm semi-successful, but the chat will never live up to my standards.
Although I requested that no personal information is revealed the children constantly put themselves in jeopardy. I have many friends there that have posted their picture, told me there full names or included their full names in email address, told where they live, and have given other personal information that makes them vulnerable to predators. The Task Force found that 49% of children have posted their photos online. 44% have profiles posted. 39% of those kids are female. There are all factors that "predict a greater likelihood of online contact by a predator".
Harassment and bullying are the most frequent threats that minors face both online and off. Research indicates that 32% of teens have been cyber-bullied. I was not prepared for the gang of at least 8 children that cyber-bullied me on my chat. They attacked me with insults, name calling, and foul language. They even said they wished I was dead. I sat in front of the screen crying because I could not understand how these kids could treat me like this when I had done nothing wrong to them. I probably felt the most violated I had ever felt in my life and spent days in a funk. I finally got over the attack. But some kids aren't as lucky. "Cybercide" is a word that has been coined for suicides that happen after online harassment.
Ryan Patrick Halligan was 13 when he encountered bullying on and offline by his friends. It was so bad that he ended his life by hanging himself. His parents had tried to address the problem, but didn't realize how detrimental it had become for Ryan until it was too late. After the "cybercide" his father accessed his accounts and found out what had really happened to push his son so far. On Ryanpatrickhalligan.org he says, "I realized that technology was being utilized as weapons far more effective and reaching than the simple ones we had as kids... It's one thing to be bullied and humiliated in front of a few kids...But it has to be a totally different experience than a generation ago when these hurts and humiliation are now witnessed by a far larger online adolescent audience."
It is up to us to go online as a child to find out what dangers children like Ryan face. Mary Kay Hoal, founder of Yoursphere is such a lady. She went online posing as a teen to try and find out why her daughter wanted a MySpace account so badly. What she saw horrified her. 90,000 registered sex offenders on MySpace was more than she wanted to let into her home. She took her knowledge of web site design and Internet safety to develop a site exclusively for children. No adults allowed. Yoursphere is a place where you have to prove who you are, and that information is verified by an outside firm before you are allowed an account. She was kind enough to grant me a telephone interview.
In our interview she said that she felt protecting our children online was "the responsibility of everybody in the community. We need to educate, inform, and remind our children about Internet safety. They need an ethical education that what is not okay offline is not okay online. Parents need to teach, the community needs to do its part, and our kids need to engage other kids in maintaining safe and ethical online practices." She also said that we "need to do whatever it takes" to learn about the dangers our children face and educate them "one family at a time". She suggested that if you don't have children in your immediate family it is still your responsibility to be informed of what dangers they face in the cyber world and be an advocate for online safety.
Like Mary Kay, I realized that children face a different and far more dangerous and harmful world on the Internet than I ever envisioned. You can not know just how bad it really is until you experience it for yourself as a youngster. So, become young again. Log onto the Internet with your adolescent profile and see what children face on the web today. Only then, can you truly begin to protect them. Statistics sometimes mean little...until you become one.

The Issues That Children Face With Technology

The Internet has allowed our children to have access to more information than I ever thought possible when I was a child. There is no limit to the information that they can fill their developing minds with. Unfortunately, their searches might lead them to sites that are misinterpreting the qualifying tags. They are accidentally exposed to unsuitable content. They might be led to blogs, photos, and chats where inappropriate material is shared.
The responsibilities of parents and the adult community have increased. In the past it was easy to tell our children to beware or to stay away from strangers. Now, almost everyone they might come in contact with on the Internet is a stranger. Even on sites like Club Penguin our children meet a collection of strangers. The kids have been taught "stranger danger" and love to shout it out when a new penguin is introduced to their virtual world. They sometimes become falsely complacent that the 100 buddies they are allowed to have are represented by people that are their true friends. Therefore, it becomes our responsibility to not only teach our children that their comrades may be their enemies, but also how to respond to potentially dangerous situations.
According to Missingkids.com in their publication Blog Beware the number of visitors to My Space went from 4.9 million in 2005 to currently over 67 million. There are many implications of this social networking. Our children can be exposed to other peers with many of the same goals and interests. However, their blog posts are usually intended to reach these compatible people and end up reaching a far bigger population than the youngster has intended. The blogger should use extra caution on the content of their personal sites to prevent the unintended visitors access to personal data.
Special attention should also be given to appropriate cell phone usage of our teens. They are more likely to have unsupervised cell phone time than when sitting in front of the keyboard at home. Parents need to be cautious of the technology that can be accessed from their cell phones. The web, text messaging, and picture taking capabilities are the perfect environment for a predator to gain incites into the child's where-abouts and habits. They might upload photos or videos of themselves that may contain more than just a record of their visual appearance. Innocently they may have included backgrounds that might inform a stranger of their exact location. The teens need to be reminded and instructed that they should not post their cell phone number to strangers. The also need to be aware of what they should do when they receive unwanted or threatening texts or calls.
These are just a few of the areas that parents need to take an active role in providing their children with facts and limitations to insure their safety. I will be posting more informative in depth insights into them later.

What Cyber Caution is About

Hello, and welcome to Cyber Caution. This will be an informative site concerning the safety of our children on the Internet. As an adult, with an 11 year old daughter, my concerns for her safety while enjoying a host of Internet games, blogs, chats, and other sites has led me to a realization that most adults only THINK they know what their children are facing on the Internet.

I started playing Club Penguin a little over a year ago. It all began when Alyssa, my daughter, showed me the site and asked if she could make a penguin. It looked like it would be fun so I also decided to make a penguin and try it out. I found that I really enjoyed playing the game. I made both of our penguins members for a small fee and we started looking forward to our nightly visits to the game world of Club Penguin. Sometimes Alyssa and I like to play together on different computers. It became a way that we could share time together doing something we both enjoy.

When I started playing I had one goal in mind. That was to dress my penguin and decorate her igloo. However, before I knew it I had started to make friends with the many children playing along side of me. I found that I enjoyed their personalities and I found that I was gaining knowledge of what my daughter was like when playing with her peers.

Before I knew it I started really caring about the children I had befriended. They were so sweet, unique, intelligent, and creative that I couldn't help but enjoy their company. They also had really taken to my penguin. I became bffl with many of the kids. I was amazed how many of them were beginning to love playing with me as I loved playing with them.

One thing started to lead to another and I decided to make a blog about Club Penguin. My Club Penguin blog started out as a tribute to the friends that I had made there and has also developed into an informative site about Club Penguin in general. Many times on Club Penguin their filters wouldn't allow us to say basic things and we found it frustrating. So we would hop over to another site called Penguin Chat. There you are allowed to say anything. There are no filters in place to prevent children from giving personal information. The children there invent horrible names for themselves and they speak with foul language. I hated going there as an adult and felt that the children should have a safer place to be able to say things so I also created a chat room. I quickly made rules for my chat and eventually created monitors that would honor the rules and ban people that refused to follow the rules.

I was amazed how quickly my penguin friends found my blog and my chat room. Immediately I became concerned about how they trusted me as someone that posed no threat to them. They had no idea that I was an adult. They were clueless that I might not be the friend that they perceived me to be. They began telling me their names (I requested only first names be used). They also would innocently tell me where they lived or other personal information that I realized could be used against them in the wrong hands. That was when I realized that I had taken on a huge responsibility to keep them safe.

I frequently remind them that they don't know that they can really trust me or other people that they have met in the cyber world. I remind them that I probably am not the person they think I am. They know that I'm older than them but they have no idea that I'm a 49 year old. As I continue to interact with these children I continue to see how they need guidance in Internet safety. That's why I have decided to start this new site for parents and their children to increase their computer safety practices. I will report on my observations as an adult impersonating a child on children's games, chats, and blogs. I think for anybody that follows this blog it will truly be an insight into being cautious on the world wide web.