What Parents Can Do About Online Safety
Another serious problem is cyber-bullying, in which children are harassed, bullied, embarrassed, defamed or pressured via the Internet or cell phone. Examples of cyber-bullying include using email or other messages to threaten a child, but it can also include spreading malicious rumors or innuendoes, online sexual harassment.
Cyber-bullying can happen in chat rooms, on websites, on blogs or social networking profiles and via instant messaging and cell phone text messaging.
How widespread is cyber-bullying? The survey found that "9% of young Internet users said they were harassed online in the past year. 6% percent said someone was bothering or harassing them online and 3% said someone had posted or sent messages about them for other people to see. Also 3% of youth described an incident of distressing online harassment, which left them feeling "very or extremely upset or afraid." In a third of the cases, the harassment included "contact or attempts at contact by telephone, offline mail or in person."
The targets, according to the report, were 58% girls and 42% boys. "Girls were more likely than boys to experience distressing harassment (68% compared to 32%) The majority of harassment episodes (72%) happened to teenagers ages 14 to 17."
Of course there are many other issues of concern to teens and parents. Loss of reputation is a growing problem as teens put inappropriate information on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.
Teens posting pictures of teens in sexually provocative poses or in the presence of alcohol or illegal drugs may seem cool at the time but can come back to haunt them later, especially if discovered by school officials, potential employers, admission counselors or parents.
Kids need to understand the legal and academic consequences of illegal or unethical behavior - or the perception that either has occurred.
And, like the rest of us, they need to be aware that not everything they see on the Internet is necessarily true.
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