CNET Editor’s 5 Star Rating
Version 5.05 Windows 8 compatible
An All-In-One PC/Internet Activity Surveillance and Monitor. Monitor your children's online activity and protect them from online predators. Receive automatic alerts to potentially unsafe activity. And respect your children's privacy. A must-have tool for concerned parents.
Important Facts
An estimated fifty thousand sexual predators are online at any given time, very skilled at building trust.1
Online sexual predators often use a “grooming’ process to gain the trust of a child, develop an online sexual or non-sexual relationship and ultimately leading to an in-person meeting. For more information on about how online predators operate and what some indicators are that a child may be being “groomed”, click here…
- ● 12% of children have learned that someone they were communicating with online was an adult pretending to be younger.2
- ● One out of five children age 10-17 have received unwanted sexual solicitations online.4
- ● Over 75% of these solicitations are not reported to their parents.4
- ● 70% of reported unwanted sexual solicitations occurred on the youth’s home computer.4
- ● 66% of reported sexual solicitations took place in chat rooms.6
- ● 89% of teen unwanted online sexual solicitations received via chat room or instant messaging.6
- ● 27% of online teens reported talking about sex online with someone they have never met in person.2
- ● 33% online teen girls report being asked about sexual topics while online.2
- ● 30% of online teens have talked about meeting someone they have only met through the Internet.2
- ● 40% of teen respondents said they'd "potentially" meet in person someone they'd "met online"; 12% said they'd get their parents' permission.3
- ● 42% online teens (ages 13-18) said they have posted information about themselves (personal profile) on the Internet so others can see it and contact them.2
- ● 56% online teen girls reported having posted a personal profile on the Internet2
- ● 24% of teens claim that their parents are never around when they're online; 6% of parents said they were never around when their kids were online.3
- ● 71% of parents believe their children use the Net for research; 23% of teens say they research online.3
Sources
1 NetSafe – Internet Safety Group
2 Polly Klaas Foundation survey
3 NetAlert Online Safety Body
4
Youth Internet safety Survey – Crimes Against Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire
5 Federal Bureau of Investigation – www.FBI.gov website
6
Pew Study – JAMA 2001
7 NBC Dateline – November 2005
What is “Grooming” and how do online sexual predators engage their victims?
One risk with chatrooms is that children may encounter a sexual predator who will try and develop an online relationship with the child, and perhaps later progress that relationship to a face-to-face meeting. This process of gaining the trust of a child, and isolating them from those who might protect them, is called ‘grooming’ and happens sometimes in offline and online situations of sexual abuse. Be on alert for changed behaviors that may be indicators of an online relationship warranting closer monitoring or investigation. A few examples are quickly turning monitor off, questionable gifts or money received, unexplained phone or credit card charges, new PC usage patterns, secretive or changed social behavior.
- ● Groomers often move between different cyber-technologies as they position themselves for abuse. For example, they might select a victim from a picture and profile they found online from a school website. They then might meet the victim in an open chat room and then go into a private chat room, where they start exchanging emails, messages, pictures and videos. After this, they might even send the victim a prepaid mobile phone that they can keep in secret to talk with the groomer.
- ● Groomers might pretend to be younger than they actually are, or of a different gender, especially if they want their victims to think that they might be a good potential friend or girl/boy friend. However, many groomers do not lie about their real age or gender at all, and still manage to find victims!
- ● Groomers might have online profiles on dating sites and other sites where people meet each other (e.g. penpal sites, newsgroups, gaming sites etc). These might be real or fictitious. Photos of other people can be easily used in place of their own.
- ● Groomers can hunt for potential victims by looking through personal websites. Examples of such sites include: blogs (online diaries), pictures, and sites that ‘give out’ personal information and pictures about young people, and some school and sporting club websites.