Getting Parents Caught Up
Internet safety forum aims to warn youths and narrow "disconnect in knowledge."
By Mike DiCicco
April 2, 2008

"The Internet is the portal to the world," Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell told the parents and children gathered in the auditorium of Potomac Falls High School on the evening of Tuesday, March 25. While the Internet had "revolutionized American life" and brought many advantages, he said, "It has also changed the nature of crime." With this new technology have come hackers and a proliferation of identity thieves and sexual predators.

The audience that more than half-filled the auditorium had come for a forum on Internet safety for children and teens, convened by U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-10). Last October, Pennsylvania resident Alicia Kozakiewicz, now 19, testified to the House Judiciary Committee about her kidnapping and rape six years ago by a Herndon man she met on the Internet and the meeting began with excerpts from the video of her testimony.


MCDONNELL SUGGESTED that parents should use parental controls to limit their children’s access to the Web, put the computer in a well-traveled part of the house and warn their children not to give out any personal information to anyone they don’t know. Most importantly, he urged the young people present, "Don’t go to meet somebody that you’ve only known in a chat room."

One difficulty parents face is that they tend to be far less knowledgeable on how to use the Web than their children, said McDonnell. "We’ve got this great disconnect in knowledge between parents and kids."

John Shehan, a deputy director for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, suggested that parents educate themselves by visiting a site called NetSmartz411, created by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The site has been operating for about a year and has pages of detailed tips on Internet safety and how to limit and monitor their children’s Web access. "Every time a question is asked, we add it to the library," said Shehan.

He said his office receives 2,289 reports of possible crimes each week. The vast majority — almost 2,000 — are related to child pornography. However, the third most common crime reported is online enticement of children for sexual acts, with 178 reports each week. One in seven children, said Shehan, receives some unwanted sexual solicitation online. This is down from one in five children in 2000, although he said the number of "aggressive solicitations" remains the same. Teens ages 15 to 17 are the minors most likely to receive online enticements.


HOWEVER, SAID SHEHAN, the incidents are rarely reported. He encouraged children and parents to report questionable online contacts via the CyberTipline on his organization’s Web site. "You’re guaranteed that someone in the law-enforcement chain of command is going to look at it," he said.

He showed the crowd an example of a teenage girl’s Web site that gave her full name and age and told the viewer that her family had recently moved to Virginia and would soon move to Greece. A potential predator, said Shehan, could infer from that information that she probably did not have a lot of friends in her area and may be lonely. He also advised the young against posting anything they wouldn’t want the world to see. "You need to protect your online identity and reputation," he said. "We’ve turned away [potential employees] because of stuff they posted online."

"This is an example of a teen having a lapse in judgment," he said of a censored picture of a girl sending a sexual photo over the Internet. In this case, he said, the recipient blackmailed the girl into sending more photos by threatening to show the picture to her parents. Because the girl was afraid to tell her parents, her blackmailer succeeded, although he was eventually caught.

Shehan warned parents against overreacting to their children’s indiscretions. "If your reaction is to rip the modem out of the wall, you’re never going to hear about these things again," he said.


CAPT. TIM EVANS, commander of the Virginia State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigations, urged the young people present to share with their friends what they had learned that evening. Most efforts to stop crime, he said, take a three-pronged approach, focusing on education, suppression and enforcement. While enforcement is up to the police, and suppression is what parents can do, children and teens can educate each other, said Evans. "It’s the peer-to-peer network of you guys that’s going to spread this," he said.

"It would not be a bad idea if there were a group of students in Loudoun County who could take this school to school," Wolf suggested, to a round of applause. He said he would contact the school system and the Sheriff’s Office about the idea.

When a parent asked if a page that was set to "private" on Facebook or other social networking sites could possibly be accessed by someone who wasn’t a "friend," Shehan said the private setting would make it much more difficult but that friends’ pages that were not private could provide a backdoor. He advised against such sites for children under 14, regardless of the setting.

Another parent, whose 12-year-old had received a death threat on the Webkinz Web site for children, asked whether there could be any hope of tracing that message.

Evans remembered talking to her previously. "Retention of information is a huge problem," he said, explaining that online chat messages "are there and they’re gone, for the most part." He said the effort to push Internet service providers to hold onto such information was an ongoing legislative issue.

One legislative battle that had been won was that the e-mail addresses of sex offenders had been turned over so that they could be blocked from social networking sites, said McDonnell. Now, he said, a group of state attorneys general was working with MySpace and Facebook to make their networks safer and MySpace was creating a task force to figure out a way to verify its users ages. "Others will follow the industry leaders," he said.