In today’s age of digital dependency and readily available
technology for all ages, it is becoming increasingly important to educate
children and teenagers on safe internet practices. With kids using the internet and social media
sites at younger and younger ages, it is vital to create a safe and smart space
for youths to avoid sexual predators.
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) works to find sexual predators
and prevent child exploitation crimes. In 2014, HSI alongside National Center
for Missing & Exploited Children's NetSmartz and the Internet Crimes
Against Children (ICAC) Task Forces joined together to launch Project iGuardian. The program works to continue the fight against online child predators
at home.
According to the Crimes Against Children Research Center, 1 in 7 teens in the US have been exposed to “sexual solicitations” online.
In addition to their web site which provides tips for kids, teens
and parents on being safe online; Project iGuardian also visits schools with
law enforcement officials to discuss cyber safety. HSI is working to tailor
their outreach programs to provide the most effective educational programs for
families. Not only do they provide age-specific programming to the kids, they
also speak with the parents in a separate presentation to discuss the
importance of parental guidance and control of their children’s internet
usage.
These presentations across the
country are done through a partnership with Internet Crimes Against Children
(ICAC) Task Forces. There are 61 of
these Task Forces across the country which allow the nation wide initiative to
have a personal local impact in communities.
Project iGuardian has created super hero characters to deliver their message to kids in a fun and engaging manner.
These mascots are
featured in trading cards handed out during presentations as well as digital
wallpapers for computers and mobile devices. These provide kids with a constant
reminder to be careful and alert while they are online.
This program is vital to providing a safe online environment for the younger generation.
The same place where kids can go for learning, creativity
and innovation is also becoming an increasingly dangerous place for
children. Unlike the generation of
college students who saw technology slowly introduced into our daily lives
through the computer and internet, children today have had such technology
surrounding them since they were born. This
inherent reliance and comfortability with technology has created an environment
where children are less cautious regarding their internet usage. Project iGuardian and HSI provide tips for safe online use such as:
- Only share appropriate pictures you would be comfortable with your family seeing
- Utilizing privacy settings to ensure you are only connecting with people you know
- Don’t share sensitive or personal information online
- Don’t make arrangements to meet in person with anyone you only know through the internet
- Report abuse to an adult you trust
The largest Project iGuardian event yet occurred in San Juan
Puerto Rico, where around 8,000 students were in attendance of the three day
event. Mayor Vega Borges of Ivelisse Rivera called Project iGuardian a unique
and necessary event and expressed his continued support of the work of HSI’s
work to both create a safe online environment as well as assist in producing
leads in sexual predator cases. While
this event reached a large amount of students on its own, in total there have
been 96 presentations which have reached over 25,000 students.
Startling Stats
Courtesy of the National Sex Offender Public Website
·
1 in 25 young children have received online
sexual messages from unknown individuals wishing to meet in person
·
Over a quarter of incidents involved an
individual asking for a child/ teen to send a photo of themselves
·
76% of solicitors met their target in an online
chat room
·
15% of teens who own a cell phone say they have
received sexually explicit (nude/ semi-nude) photos from someone they know
·
Many online sexual predators are honest about
their age when targeting youths. Only 5% tried to pretend to be
someone younger to meet youths
·
Of a majority of internet related sex crimes
involving minors, many willingly met their predator and 93% of those meetings
resulted in sexual contact
Ashley, well done! This is an interesting topic and I am intrigued about Project iGuardian. You included a simple graphic in the first paragraph as required and your data graphic is well labeled, and titled correctly.
ReplyDeleteThe headline is explanatory and I can immediately assume that you will teach me about Project iGuardian. However, because you introduce Project iGuardian in the headline, I think you need to provide more explanation of what Project iGuardian actually is much earlier on. You mention immediately that it helps to keep children safe, but don’t mention how it does this until much later. While you did provide a link to explain it, the link is actually not working.
As a suggestion, maybe you could start by saying, “Project iGuardian, launched in 2014 by Homeland Security Investigations, Internet Crimes Against Children and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's, works to continue the fight against online child predators at home.” (Each of these can be an embedded link where people can find out more about these organisations). Then follow this with your second line, “with kids using the Internet and social media sites at younger and younger ages, it is vital to …etc”, because this is a nicely written sentence and provides necessary context as to why Project iGuardian is important, it just doesn’t need to be first. Then you can more clearly explain how it works; i.e. through school visits and with super hero characters etc. After this, you did well to explain how the younger generation is more vulnerable due to being less cautious and more reliant on technology, and used the graph to show this.
Overall it’s a very interesting piece and discussed important and difficult topics of children’s cybersafety against sexual predators. For me, it opens up a discussion into how much involvement should parents have in keeping their children safe online. For children’s safety, it is vital to teach parents about the importance of parental guidance and control of their children’s internet usage, as this program does. But is it possible that parents attempt to have too much control? This reminded me about another online program called Teensafe, which allows parents to see what their children are doing on their phone without touching the device itself, or without the child knowing. This becomes a gray area between keeping children safe and a privacy breach. Earlier this year in Australia, I did a radio piece about this topic where I interviewed the CEO of teensafe, which can be found here:
http://syn.org.au/parents-monitoring-their-childs-phone-use-teensafe