What are the dangers facing children online?
I’ve wanted to write about this for a while as it is a subject that is important to me. A good chunk of my police experience was working to protect children online and investigating sexual exploitation offences. The RCMP has a great unit working on this, the Internet Child Exploitation team (ICE). I worked with them as an investigator and later supported them as a digital forensic examiner. I have done a lot of public talks on the subject and I want to share what I have learned here. So what are the dangers? There’s basically 4 different dangers or threats children will face online.
- The threat from sexual predators, also known as child luring
- The threat of sexual exploitation, also known as child pornography
- The threat from “regular” pornography
- Everything else
The threat from sexual predators or child luring
This is the one every parent fears, that their child will meet someone online and get kidnapped. It’s a real danger and it does happen, but not as often as people think. That being said, according to the website protectchildren.ca the numbers have been increasing in the last few years. As we will see in the next section, the biggest dangers unfortunately are from people that your child already knows. Yes, that includes family members.
Mr. Creepy
But there is no denying that there are a lot of weird people out there. Or as my friend Dana Mantilia likes to call them, Mr. Creepy. The truth is that there are people that are sexually attracted to children. About 2-5% of the population and overwhelmingly men. I want to say 99% but that is not scientific. What is scary is the fact that since 2 to 5 people out of 100 are “creepy” then that means that… you probably know one!
What is child luring
In Canada child luring is defined in the Criminal Code under section 172.1. When I make presentations on internet safety I point out that the most likely victims of this are girls. Boys too but to a lesser degree. Sexual orientation plays a part in this as the majority of offenders are males. There is a ton of material on the subject of protecting kids online. I don’t need to repeat lists here but I will point out what I think are the most important.
What’s that app?
First, just be aware of what your kids are doing. No need to check all their contacts or micro-manage them. Just know which apps they use and have “some” familiarity on what they do. Some years ago the chat app “kik” was infiltrated by predators. The way the app functioned and was designed made this easier than with other apps. There is still news about it online. So just do some research and be aware of what your kids are doing.
It’s all about the passwords
The second thing I recommend is that you need to know your child’s passwords and passcodes. Yes all of them. They will say “you don’t trust me”! You can simply answer, “yes, I trust you. I just don’t trust everyone else”.
Kids understand more than you think
I like to point out to parents that they would never allow their kids to go to a sleepover at someone’s house unless they knew who it was and where it was. Would you? I don’t think so. Kids understand and accept rules when we explain the rules to them. The other benefits is that if your kid goes missing, or runs away, you will have something to help the police investigate.
The threat of sexual exploitation
This is the threat children face about having images or videos of them posted online. Yes I am talking about sexual images or videos. It could be from sexual abuse, which would be the worst kind. But it could also be from what is called “self-exploitation“. It could also happen if someone was to share intimate images or videos with a partner and then that partner would share the images and videos with others. This could happen with or without the originator’s consent, but most likely without.
Use the resources online
The Government of Canada has a webpage here with some additional information and definitions. Cybertip.ca is Canada’s national tip line for reporting abuse. You can report by clicking here. The sexual abuse of children is a large topic and I want to stay focused on internet safety. The sad truth though, is that 90% of child victims knew the offender, and in 30% of the cases, it was a family member.
Sexting gone wrong
Unfortunately, incidents of “sexting” gone wrong happens too often in today’s schools. One thing that kids need to know is that it is illegal to send sexual pictures of persons under the age of 18 (themselves included). It could be “distributing child pornography”. It is not an offence if the image(s) are only shared between two persons involved in a relationship and the the age difference is 5 years or less. Even if your children are not involved, they may “know” about it. Encourage them to report it to the school or tell them that you will report it and ask the school to keep your child’s identity anonymous.
The threat from “regular” pornography
Parents are usually surprised when I tell them that the biggest threat to their boys is online pornography and not the threat of kidnapping. Everyone know there is a lot of pornography on the internet but they don’t necessarily think it’s “that bad”, or that it is just a “boy thing”. When I was a kid, cough cough, it was very hard to find ANY pornography. You would be lucky if your friend found his dad’s stash and was able to do a show-and-tell. These days it is way to easy to find and not just naked images, hardcore videos too. There is some research that has shown that this is having a negative effect on young boys and worse, it will have a lifetime effect.
The negative effects
You can read an interesting article here about the negative effects of porn on boys (and girls). I mean most people reading this probably think kissing should happen BEFORE oral sex right? There is a lot of information online about this, including 8 negative effects of porn on young boys. One of the most serious effect is the possibility of developing a pornography addiction. Most people are unaware of this and many probably think it is not possible. This is a growing problem that can follow them into adulthood.
Everything else
Kids are humans and just like adults, they are at risk from everything else, scams, frauds, phishing attacks etc. The most important thing here is to be “cyber aware” as a parent ourselves. And then to share this knowledge with our kids and have discussions about it. My first goal is always to help people. Be safe out there and keep an eye on your kids!
If you have any questions, contact me on LinkedIn. It is the best place to reach me.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alain-filotto