Atlantic County Sheriff's Office

Safety in Cyber-Space

How to Protect Your Children "On-Line"

by Capt. Joseph F. Bruno, Atlantic County Sheriffs Office

Along with the many benefits of the computer age, such as instant access to information through on-line services such as Prodigy, CompuServe and America On Line, we have also picked up another area in which crime can flourish.

Computer Crime is a broad area encompassing a variety of "specialties" as well as just routine record keeping, but what we want to advise you about today is how to protect your children when they access on-line services.

When your children log on to a service or local bulletin board, they are talking (in most cases) to strangers. In addition, the stranger looks like or is whatever he (or she) tells them.

There have been cases where children have been abducted through deceit, by making friends with what they thought was another 14 or 15 year old only to find out when they met in person, that it was a 37 year old child molester.

In raids of child pornographers, home photographs and pictures of children have been found, which were sent to the perpetrator by the children themselves who believed they were sending them to a friend of about the same age.

Does this mean that you should not allow your child "on-line." No, but it does mean that you should exercise a little bit of caution.

Talk to your child, and explain what to watch out for. Follow some basic, common-sense rules.
Don't allow your child to give out a home address, phone number or last name without permission.
Don't allow your child to meet with any-one they meet on-line without your permission.
If your child comes across or is sent any inappropriate language or material have them notify you immediately, you can in most cases save this and register a formal complaint with the service and/or legal authorities.
Your child is always in control of the on-line action and can always log off or exit at any time. As long as your child has not given out a last name, address or phone number he/she is safe.
Get to know what areas your children are going to on-line so that you can effectively discuss issues that come up and warn them away from potential danger.
Monitor you children's on-line activity as you would monitor their television viewing. Most services and terminal programs have an option to allow you to log your entire session to view again later.
Remind your children frequently about the rule of not giving out last name, address or phone number.
As a parent you should know the terms of service of your on line provider and the kind of rules it enforces. For instance, Prodigy has a "Dirty Word Scanner" that automatically kicks back to the sender messages with offensive language. You can also block your child's access to certain areas of the service -- however Internet groups are not scanned for content -- and some of those contain text and graphics that many adults would find offensive (although there are now programs such as Net Nanny which perform the same function).

America On-line allows you to restrict access to certain areas as well as block Instant Messages, their chat areas are also monitored by "Guides" and anyone can call a guide at anytime to register a complaint.

CompuServe doesn't normally monitor forums or chat areas, although the people who run those forums (called sysops or moderators) may check messages on a case-by-case basis. On CompuServe, unless you and your children have separate accounts, there is no way to block your child out of certain areas and still keep access for yourself. You can only lock out an entire account by writing a note to the sysop and asking that your account not be allowed to access that area. On most local boards, many of which are run by teenagers, you can log on yourself and see what type of material is on them. You can request from the sysop that access for you children be restricted to areas you designate or that your child not be permitted to "log-on" to the board at all.

With a little common sense and some reasonable precautions your child's on-line experiences can be both fun and rewarding. In the unlikely event that your child does get access to or is sent inappropriate material and you need to know what action to take, you may feel free to call the Atlantic County' Sheriff's Office for advice.

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