Parents Must Teach Kids How to Avoid Internet Predators

COMMENTARY | Parents will be reeling over the latest case of "sextortion" in the news. Sextortion is blackmailing a person over sexual pictures or videos that are on the Internet. A 10-year-old boy put a nude video on YouTube for a few minutes. He thought emails requesting nude videos were coming from girls his own age. After taking it down, he received more emails for more nude videos. When he put them off, they said they would turn him into the FBI. One email threatened to send the video to all of his friends. He sent no more videos and his mother discovered the emails and contacted police.

Similar cases of sextortion have popped up over the last few years. An Indiana teen girl flashed her breasts on a webcam with her two girl friends. Someone emailed her back and said if she didn't send explicit sex pictures, he would post the pictures of her breasts to her MySpace friends. She posted a couple of more times before the police and federal authorities got involved.

Adults who want to see teen porn are usually the culprits of sextortion. Young kids truly believe that they are swapping nude pictures and videos with kids their own age. Once on the Internet, the pictures and videos cannot be retrieved. Kids aren't thinking about tomorrow or the consequences of their actions. At 10 years of age, they aren't thinking about adults fooling them on the other end of the emails. Kids are easily duped and easily intimidated by their blackmailers.

The easiest way to avoid sextortion is simply not to have pornographic pictures or videos taken of you. Don't post anything on the Internet that you wouldn't want everyone to see. Parents and teachers need to teach kids the pitfalls of going online. They also need to teach consequences that follow bad decisions. Adult predators aren't the only ones who get kids into trouble. Boyfriends often post nude pictures and videos of their girlfriends online after they break up or get into a fight (and vise-versa).

Keeping track of what a child is doing on the Internet is crucial. While barring computers from the bedroom may not be feasible, disabling the web camera is. Hackers are a growing concern too. They hack laptops and computers and obtain private pictures. Again, nothing is sacred on the Internet.

If people, driven by perversion, are sick enough to blackmail a 10-year-old boy, they will blackmail anyone.

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