Nine out of 10 children aged between eight and 16 have viewed
pornography on the Internet. In most cases, the sex sites were accessed
unintentionally when a child, often in the process of doing homework,
used a seemingly innocent sounding word to search for information
or pictures. (London School of Economics
In the case of the eleven year old girl it appears that the alleged rapist was a friend of the family, trusted by the child and that he had been sending her porn on emails, showing her child porn on his computer and finally molesting her on hikes and other places..
What are we doing to protect our kids from this kind of thing. Do we as parents know who our kids are interacting with on email, Facebook and chat rooms? Did you know that filtering programs like Wisechoice have features that will allow you to view online conversations of kids? Is this an invasion of their privacy? Absolutely! Are we giving privacy rights for eleven year old to interact with predators? If we are then we are misguided.
It is our job as parents to protect our kids whether they think they need it or not. I don't know of any kid worth his or her salt who doesn't think they are grown up enough to make their own decisions.
Tools such as Wisechoice can allow you to have password protected times in which kids can use the computer but make the computer out of bounds at other times. You can track their messaging and restrict the types of websites they go to. In the case of the children who have accessed porn by mistake while searching for things regarding homework-that cannot happen with a good filter. If they inadvertently click on a porn site the filter will block access.
Filters for the most part cost about $50 per years and protect as many as three computers per household. Some will work on both Macs and Windows based computers. To paraphrase a hospital advertisement- of you don't get help from Wisechoice...then get help somewhere.
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