Protecting Your Child online

There are several precautions you can take to protect your child from online sexual predators. By far, the most effective measure that can be taken to prevent occurrences of this nature is to TALK TO YOUR KIDS. The best way to protect your child from online abuse is to teach them to recognize inappropriate behavior and to take immediate and proper action.

Aside from making your child aware of the dangers of online abuse there also a few alternative precautionary measures that can be utilized which stem from the software made available to your child. When we are talking about online abuse, the most common breeding ground for sexual predators are Internet chat rooms. Utilize the following tips when appropriate to effectively protect your child.

1. Reduce your child’s administrative privileges.

There are a huge number of chat clients available on the Internet, almost too many to count. The chat programs that are most commonly susceptible to sexual predator activity are the ones that need to be downloaded and installed by the user. These applications often feature advanced searches for individuals of a specific age, sex, and location, in addition to chat “rooms” that focus on certain interests and themes. Through the use of these search features sexual predators are able to target your children. The method of prevention comes into effect when you restrict the computer’s administrative privileges for your child. Essentially you are inhibiting your child’s authority to install the chat application on the computer, thus reducing the risk of online abuse. They still may be able to download it but that’s as far as they will get. To do this, you would create an account and username for your child and set the account privileges to not allow the installation of third party programs (applications that are not trusted by you or your computer). Not only will this protect you child, but it may also show that you trust your child with his or her own password and account. The child will be able to customize their desktop, choose their own password and develop a sense of responsibility, while maintaining their privacy. As the parent and administrator, you would still have access to their account activity and password, but you would just keep that little tid-bit of information to yourself.

Restricting your child’s administrative privileges to prevent the installation of potentially dangerous applications does not necessarily mean they cannot take part in the world of online chat. When approached responsibly online chat can be very beneficial. There are all sorts