The following information comes from the Virginia Community Policing Institute, which has studied the growing problem of online sexual solicitation.
Do you know who your child is communicating with on the Internet? If you were standing next to your child while they were chatting online with someone, would you know what was being said?
There are more than 250 abbreviations and emoticons, which are a series of keyed characters used especially in e-mail to indicate an emotion, such as pleasure [:-)] or sadness [:-(], which are used to communicate over the Internet. Here are just 12 examples:
• CTN - can't talk now.
• TTYL8R - talk to you later.
• POS or P911 - parents over shoulder or parents are coming.
• J&K - just kidding.
• SA - sibling alert.
• GFETE - grinning from ear to ear .
• OLL - online love.
• WU? - what's up?
• :-*) - kiss.
• :~/ - confused
• :@) - pig
• ?-( - sorry, I don't know what happened.
People who desire to prey upon children know how to communicate in a manner that appears they are a child as well. The predator may be seeking their next victim or may desire to use the child as an unwitting accomplice in perpetrating a crime after convincing a child to reveal their parent's credit card number online.
Here are some stats
• More than 45 million children were online in 2002.
• 32% of 16 to 17-year-olds are online for five or more hours a day.
• Pedophiles run more than 10,000 web sites, and hundreds more are created monthly.
• Internet activity is implicated in nearly 20% of cases of missing children age 15 to 17 years.
What would your reaction be if, when walking by your 10 to 15-year-old daughter's bedroom, you found a mysterious grown man sitting on the bed? This is exactly the effect that could be occurring when your child is online.
When chatting online, no one really knows whom he or she are chatting with. The hip 14-year-old boy who is into skateboarding and Spider-Man could in reality be a 43-year-old predator who has mastered adolescent-speak.
A federally-funded website called Mousetrap is available at: www.vcpionline.org for more information or filtering software.
- By Lincoln County Sheriff
Dennis Dotson
