Tips for Protecting Children Online

Two men stand on the street, hands held next to their holsters as they stare each other down. Each one is itching to pull out a gun and finish the other one. Dueling had been made illegal in the early days of the United States, but there's no one to enforce the law in the Wild West, the frontier of America. Danger lurked around every corner in the raw wilderness as settlers went west to eke out a living. You might think that such days of desperado's breaking the law and preying on the weak is ancient history. Unfortunately, it is still a problem on line. There are no sheriffs lurking around the Internet, ready to stop your child from getting into a gun-slinging duel.

Numerous laws do exist to try and protect children on line, but policing all the areas of the Internet is more difficult today than it was in the Wild West. Cyberspace is still untamed, though more and more are trying to make a concerted effort to tame it. After all, stories of children being abducted after being seduced on line right under their parents' nose run rampant.

Strangers have unprecedented amounts of access to children these days, thanks to advances in technology designed to make our lives easier. Children can easily access chat rooms, post pictures on line, view filth on My Space and other social networking sites, and meet all sorts of unscrupulous people who are potential pedophiles while their parents are watching their favorite shows. Thanks to all of this access strangers have to children, law enforcement officers are hard at work developing new strategies to stop these pesky people from taking advantage of children.

It's time we take a stand and join in to stop cyber stalkers. The first line of defense is to help these law enforcement officers and officials doing their jobs. Report suspicious activity. But don't rely completely on the law to keep your children safe. You need to take active steps in keeping your children safe, just as you do when locking the door each night before bed. Here are some ideas on how to assist law enforcement while taking a stand as a concerned parent.

Buy software to filter the sort of sites your child sees. Block out chat rooms and public networking sites if your children are young. This software is generally inexpensive and remarkably effective at keeping children from meeting these criminals where they lurk.

Teach your children that talking to strangers on line is just as dangerous as talking to strangers anywhere else. Your children need to learn that cyber stalkers are generally quite good at pretending to be children as well, so they shouldn't trust anyone. Also teach your children to not give out personal information on the computer.

Communicate with your children regularly. Make sure they know it is safe to tell you when something strange happens to them. Let them know you care about what happens.

By working with our children and making an effort to help tame untamed cyberspace, we'll soon have order in our modern Wild West. Work with law enforcement and teach your children so that we can stop these stalkers from abducting more children.