Helping Keep Kids Away From Becoming A Pornography Victim
There are children exploited in pictures, and children who spend hours looking at porn Web sites.
So, what's a parent to do?
Local experts tell us, it's naive for parents to just hope their kids won't look for, or even stumble into pornography. The information superhighway, they say, is littered with porn and pornographers always on the hunt for new victims.
"The pornographers are very good at making their pornography very accessible," Dr. Hilarie Cash told KOMO 4 News.
Dr. Cash runs an Internet/Computer Addiction Counseling Service in Redmond. She tells us, though no definitive research has been done, more children are falling into the porn trap.
Local families come to her looking for help. Her top tip to parents:
"The very biggest thing they can do," she said, "is keep the computer in a public place in the house."
Dr. Cash believes keeping computers out of kids' rooms is more likely to keep kids out of trouble.
What kind of trouble? Web cameras, for example. Many pornographers spend their days and nights trying to talk kids into taking their clothes off in front of Web cams.
You can measure their success by the thousands of teen Web cam sites. Many of the pictures appear to be from Web cams located inside a child's room.
"If you just have it up in a room where a child has access to it by himself (herself) for hours at a time, you're really kind of asking for trouble," said N2H2's David Burt.
N2H2 is a Seattle-based company that provides Internet filtering software. That software allows some parental control. But, these companies insist their product will only help if parents use it as a tool, and not as an answer.
"It's not a panacea," Burt said. "It's not going to block every single Web site out there, and it's not going to block every single communication to your child that's going to be harmful to them."
Also, the experts add, kids are getting more computer savvy all the time, so parents need to stay sharp to keep up.