A whole generation of children has experienced Halloween's end of night tradition - where Mom and Dad spill the sugary loot onto the table in search of anything that appears opened, tampered with, or homemade. The objective is to find any candy that an evil person might have laced with poison or stuck a razor blade into and prevent danger from befalling our little witches and goblins. What a lot of effort exerted over a scenario that rarely if ever occurs. Much like the effort we're spending to stop kids from falling into the hands of online predators.
We know that there are predators and pedophiles in the online world. MySpace has found and deleted profiles of over 50,000 known sexual offenders from their site. And those are the so-called "dumb" ones who used the same email address to register with the S.O. database as they used to create their MySpace page. Kudos to MySpace for continuing to do everything they can to clean up their site! One of the other things MySpace and all the social networking sites are doing is working closely with 49 State Attorneys General and the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center to determine a good way of protecting these social networks and their users even more.
A few weeks ago, I flew to Boston to observe the presentations made of many firms with interesting solutions to keeping "bad" people or those who lie about their identity away from "good" or "honest" people. The primary objective from the law makers' perspective is to give tools to kids and those who love them (parents, teachers, etc) that enable them to know who they are dealing with online. This is important but very tricky work. One of the trickiest aspects is that the online predator doesn't typically lie about who they are or what they want from their target child. I witnessed this in the most sickening fashion when I attended an FBI demonstration of chatrooms that appeal to this type of sexual offender. Within ten minutes, the agent posing as a 14 year old girl received three invitations to privately chat with grown, married men who wanted to find an under-age girlfriend. They were very, very upfront about their objectives.
We also know from research that the children who fall for the online predator fit the same risk profile as those who might go with an adult in their real life for sexual purposes. These children lack good peer relationships, have difficulties at home, their parents are likely no longer married or they may even be in foster situations. And we should remember, it's difficult to find a predator who hasn't yet been caught or otherwise identified. We still need to teach our children to be aware and to protect themselves with people they should otherwise have every reason to trust.
We're getting closer to October 31st and to helping our children dress up in costume to go door-to-door. As we outfit them with reflective tape and white socks, give them flashlights to carry and other aids to increase their visibility, let's also reflect (no pun intended) on all the efforts we make to keep our children safe. You should still walk them around the neighborhood (real world and virtual), you should still check and doublecheck (even sample) their candy (or new websites and online friends). Even as we continue to do those things that seem to define "good parenting" in the modern age, maybe we at least can be a little honest about what is necessary and what is "parenting theater" (to paraphrase Bruce Schneier's term "security theater")?