Friending Stranger Danger

Here's a link worth reading:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/facebook-fears-after-sex-offender-logged-on-to-murder-1918330.html

To summarize, a 33 year old sex offender pretended to be 19 on Facebook, where he fooled and befriended a 17 year old girl, and eventually got her into his car and raped and murdered her.

Thank goodness this is a rare occurrence. For the most part, social media is harmless and fun ("most strangers are good people"), but every now and then there's a nasty person lurking. How do I explain rape and murder to my seven year old daughter? I walk around the issue carefully, sparing her most of the gruesome details, other than to say that some strangers are bad and can hurt you.

SO...

In this house, you are not allowed to have Moshi Monster friends unless they are people you know in person. I don't care what your seven year old friend's parents say she can do. There are different rules for different houses, and in this house we don't have on-line friends that we didn't already know before logging on.

It stuns and saddens me that someone who is nearly an adult (17) could be victimized this way, especially since she had a profile herself and knew how easy it is to upload a picture and insert any profile details at whim. My heart goes out to her family.

Yes we can maintain a system of monitoring the on-line activity of sex offenders, but what about the ones who haven't been convicted yet? There will always be new creeps out there.

Educating and setting limits for our kids has to be the first step. Being the "mean mom" and making the unpopular rules has to happen when they're young, and age appropriate explanations and education has to be forthcoming.  We can't just assume that the risk is low and they'll know better when they're older. The reason they'll know better is because they've been taught by us, and the sooner that starts, the better.

WebEyesOpen Home

TOTLOL and YouTube

My kids spend a lot of time at www.totlol.com. It's a website featuring kid safe videos that have been screened by viewers. Once you view a video, you can add your own rating. You can also save a favourites list of videos your kids particularly like.

Imagine my surprise when I turned my back for a moment on my then four year old son, only to look again to see that he'd left Totlol.com and was on YouTube, and about to click on a not so kid friendly video. He'd gotten there because the YouTube vids on Totlol have a YouTube link in the bottom right corner that your child can click on, that transfers you to the adult site.

Don't get me wrong, I still love Totlol. I'm assuming they would not be allowed to use the YouTube videos without the YouTube logo, but there should be some way to disable the link. (Am I wrong that there isn't? I just checked again and couldn't find a way).

It just goes to show that even "kid safe" sites require parental supervision. We just can't be too careful!