What happened to potential predators?

Teri Schroeder, I-Safe:  “If you could actually look through cyber glasses and see who’s peering in your window, who’s in your daughter’s room, who’s reading your daughter’s blog, who’s cyber-stalking your son....it is reality and the fact is we’ve become very ignorant to those types of things because we can’t see it.”

And it is what parents often don’t see is that this can have tragic consequences for kids online according to Teri Schroeder who is president of I-Safe, an organization devoted to online safety.

Schroeder: I think parents have known that this has been around. It’s just their attitude is: doesn’t happen in my house. It’s not going to happen to my son or daughter.”

I-Safe travels the country warning parents and teens how not to become a victim of computer predators. What hits home Schroeder says is when teens learn just how often their peers are solicited for sex online by an adult.

Schroeder: “You can hear a pin drop when they start seeing the stories of others being hurt. And they start relating to it and they go ‘Oh my gosh... I, you know, I’ve done that. It could have been me.’”

Kids who have their own blogs on social networking sites like MySpace.com can be irresistible targets for predators. Teens need to know that more than just their friends are reading what they post.

There are of course numerous software programs available that alert parents when inappropriate information is shared on their computer. Some software will even alert the parent via e-mail on a Blackberry or at work. But at the end of the day it really comes down to reminding kids that there are a lot of creeps in cyberspace.

But if you’re having trouble talking to your kids about all this, I-Safe offers a step by step program to help.  To access it, just go to I-Safe.org.

Schroeder: It informs them, gives them tips that they could actually, you know, be thinking about themselves and then actually helps them in terms of how  they would apply this in terms of their own real life or even within their own house.

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