The frightening fact that one in four children aged between seven and 10 have met face-to-face with strangers who had contacted them online was revealed in the Internet Safety Group survey released on Monday.
The survey of more than 2500 New Zealand school children has resulted in a warning to parents and teachers alike to be vigilant when it comes to what our kids are doing online.
While there are plenty of choices when it comes to filtering software programs to control what sites children can visit, no program is 100 percent safe.
Cyber Angels offers advice and help for those who have become the target of the unwanted attention of someone online, while SafeKids has tips and suggestions to boost online safety, including a page of guidelines for parents.
Sites such as Ask Jeeves for Kids and Yahooligans are child-safe search engines that filter out sexually explicit, violent or hateful content. You’ll find a more comprehensive list at the SafeKids site.
Online safety is an important issue for both children and adults and cyber stalking seems to becoming more prevalent.
Stop Net Abusers is dedicated to the victims of the stalkers who frequent chat rooms and internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels and includes transcripts of some of the online abuse. It also has information on how to protect yourself, tools and useful links.
Sometimes, the stalking and abuse moves offline and into real life, often with tragic consequences.
Probably one of the most widely known crimes with ties to the internet is the murder of United States 20-year-old Amy Boyer.
Type her name into any good search engine and you’ll find links to hundreds of archived news articles and sites about her.
Her killer, Liam Youens, spelled out his plan to murder her on websites dedicated to Miss Boyer and used the internet to buy her social security number and access personal information to make his stalking easier.