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.