You don't want to stop your child from exploring the wonderful world of cyberspace, but at the same time you need to be sure that they are safely controlled and monitored.

The first and most important step in protecting your children from online predators is good communication. Take the time to go online with them to see what they do. Let them know what they may encounter and what to look out for. Tell them if someone or something on the Internet makes them uncomfortable, they should come tell you. Ensure them that you will not punish them, but that you will be understanding and work with them to resolve the problem.

Children can innocently be doing a search in a major search engine and be drawn into a pornographic website.  Many webmasters will mislead web surfers as to the content of their sites in an effort to gain customers. This tactic is not meant to lure children into their sites, but that is an unfortunate drawback. The biggest offender of this was a website located at www.whitehouse.com. How many children do you think would go to that site looking for information on the president and be subjected to pornography? Eventually the owners of that site donated the domain name to the U.S. government in an effort to keep children from being exposed accidentally. Many times what appears to be a website relating to a specific topic, turns out to be an adult site. Another tactic is to take a mis-spelling of a popular site and direct it to a porn site. A child can simply spell something wrong, and be brought into a site that they do not belong in.

Once you visit one of these sites accidentally, you get bombarded with pop-up windows promoting all kinds of adult content. Each time you close one, another pops up. Sometimes the only way out is to reboot your computer.

Of the children surveyed, they reported entering a porno site by:

47 % - Searches
17 % - Through mistyped web addresses
17 % - Links from other sites.

The following are some examples from surveyed youths: (f)

An 11 year old boy and a friend while looking for a game site typed in “fun.com,” and were brought to a pornography site.

A 15 year old boy looking for info on the family car did  a search for “escort” and a site about escort services came up.

Another 15 year old boy while writing a paper about wolves cam e across a bestiality site where he view a picture of a woman having sex with a wolf.

A 16 year old girl was brought to an adult site when she mistyped “teen.com.” She typed in “teeen” instead.

A12 year old girl received an email with a subject line that said “Free Beenie Babies.” When she opened it, she saw pictures of naked people.

These examples are just a few from a single survey. Even more alarming is that is almost half of the episodes, no one was informed by the child. The fact that these children did not even mention it to their friends, even to laugh or talk about it, was worth noting. The survey felt that it reflected some degree of guilt or embarrassment on the part of the child.