How to Protect Children from Online Predators

What is Online Predators?

An online predator is an adult Internet user who exploits vulnerable children or teens, usually for sexual or other abusive purposes. Online victimization of minors can include child grooming, requests to engage in sexual activities or discussions by an adult, unwanted exposure to sexual material (email with naked pictures, etc.), and online harassment, threats or other aggressive communications that are not sexual in nature but cause distress, fear or embarrassment. Chat rooms, instant messaging, Internet forums, social networking sites, and even video game consoles have all been accused of attracting online predators. A 2007 study, however, found no cases of minors being targeted by Internet predators on the basis of information they had posted on social networking sites.

About online predators behaviour:

Online predators are usually:

• Male
• Seductive
• Introverted
• Sadistic
• Sexually indiscriminate

Some online predators gradually seduce their targets through the use of attention, affection, kindness, and even gifts. They are often willing to devote considerable amounts of time, money, and energy to this process. They will be aware of the latest music and hobbies likely to interest kids, and will listen to and sympathize with kids' problems. They also try to lower young people's inhibitions by gradually introducing sexual content into their conversations. Other predators are faster workers: they engage in sexually explicit conversations with children immediately. This more direct approach may include harassment or stalking. Predators may also be evaluating the kids they meet online for future face-to-face contact.

Some Internet Safety Statistics

SurveilStar allows you to block entire categories of websites (such as pornography, gambling sites, time-wasting sites) so that you can control your children web surfing activity to keep them away from indecent websites.

Parents, if you don’t know about the need to keep kids safe online, keep reading. These online safety statistics on children's internet habits will shock you!

* 95% of parents don’t recognize the lingo kids use to let people know that their parents are watching

* 89% of sexual solicitations are made in either Chat Rooms or Instant Messages

* 20% of children age 10-17 have been solicited sexually online; that’s 1 out of every 5 kids

* 75% of youth who received an online sexual solicitation did not tell a parent

* One third of kids have been contacted by a stranger and half of these were considered inappropriate

* 81% of parents of online youth say that kids aren’t careful enough when giving out information about themselves online

* 76% of parents don’t have rules about what their kids can do on the computer

* 65% of parents believe that kids do things online that they wouldn’t want their parents to know about

* 4,000,000 children are posting content to the Web everyday

* 15,000,000 youth use Instant Messaging

* 9 out of 10 parents will never know that any inappropriate internet contact has occurred - that’s 90%!

* 14% have actually met face to face with a person they have met on the Internet

* 1 out of 17 kids have been harassed, threatened, or bullied

* Nearly three-quarters (73%) of online teens believe that someone their age is most likely to be approached by someone unknown to them online as opposed to offline

* When asked how they responded the last time they were contacted online by a complete stranger, just 3% of online teens said they told and adult or authority figure

* Most kids will not report inappropriate Internet contact to their parents because they are afraid of losing Internet privileges

* 61% of 13-17 yr olds have a personal profile on social networking sites

* 44% of online teens with profiles like Facebook and Myspace have been contacted by a stranger, compared with 16 percent of those without profiles.

* 71% have reported receiving messages from someone they do not know

* 45% have been asked for personal info from people they do not know

* 48% of 16-17 yr olds report that their parents know “very little” or “nothing” about their online activities

* MySpace deletes 25,000 profiles weekly of users who don’t meet the site’s 14-year-old minimum age requirement

* From 2007-2009 MySpace has deleted 90,000 accounts because they were created by registered sex offenders

Tips for Parents & Kids Against Online Predators

A recent survey indicates that 1 in 5 teens have been affected by Online Predators and it’s starting to happen at younger ages. 42% of 4th-8th grade students have been online predators victims. Here are some tips for parents and kids against online predator.

Online Predators Tips for Parents

1. Talk to your kids about sexual predators and potential online dangers.

2. If your children participate in chat rooms, make it your business to know what chat rooms they visit and who they talk to. Monitor the chat areas yourself to see what kind of conversations are going on.

3. When your children are young, they should share the family email address rather than having their own email accounts. As they get older, you can ask your ISP to set up a separate email address, but kids' mail should still reside in your account.

4. Teach your children never to respond to instant messaging or emails from strangers.

5. If all precautions fail and your kids do encounter an online predator, remember that they're not to blame in any way. The offender always bears the complete responsibility for his actions.

Online Predators Tips for Kids

• Never download images from an unknown source, as they could be sexually explicit..
• Tell an adult immediately if anything happens online that makes them feel uncomfortable or frightened.
• Choose a gender-neutral nickname.
• Never reveal personally identifiable information (including age and gender) online.
• Post the family online agreement by the computer to remind them to protect their privacy on the Internet.

Surveilstar Parental Control Against Online Predators

While the Web allows kids the freedom to make friends, play games and research homework with the click of a button, it can pose a potential danger as online predators and cyberbullies. As a parent, you should take it as own business to keep the children from online predator.

Surveilstar parental control software is your fastest and easiest solution to safeguard your children's' Internet experience and maximize the efficiency of the time they spend on the computer. It is loaded and preloaded with many optional benefits and features that improve the security and the quality of the Internet your children see. Installing Surveilstar on your computer is customizing the Internet, by child, the way you want your kids to experience it.

SurveilStar is a parental control software solution and will help you track emails, IM’s, chats, social networking, websites visited, images viewed, etc. To start an all-out strategic battle to protect kids from online dangers, while still letting them safely enjoy the games and resources that are available on the Internet, SurveilStar is the perfect solution that can be used for filtering web site content and monitoring the web sites the kids are viewing on the Internet:

Surveilstar Parental Control Features:

SurveilStar Parental Control will take screenshots of your system every few seconds, and then lets you view it in a video-like display whenever you want to check up on your kid's computer activities. Besides, it will logs all computer activities including startup/shutdown, logon/logoff, hardware changes, software changes, application usages, website, document, printing, shared file logs, email send/receive, instant messages, application statistics, web statistics, traffic statistics, and more!