Safety & Risk

  1. How to Protect Your Child from Being Harmed from Cybersex: Teach them Resilience

    By:
    Date Published:
    Tags:
    , , , , , ,

    During the course of researching my book, The New Age of Sex Education: How to talk to your teens about cybersex and pornography, I came upon the research of Pamela Wisniewski and her colleagues. Dr. Wisniewski's research focuses on teen internet safety and parental mediation styles. In non-scientific terms, her work helps us understand how teens navigate risk on the internet and how different parenting styles and parenting behaviors affect the behaviors of teens online. Her work is very timely and offers wonderful suggestions on how to help your child navigate the online world safely. In this…Read More

  2. Webcam Trolling and Children

    By:
    Date Published:
    Tags:
    , , , , ,

        A study recently published online in the Telematics and Informatics journal brought to light the problems of webcam trolls and how they can victimize children on chat sites. First, let's talk about webcam trolls. Many people are likely familiar with the term troll that is often used for people who post disruptive, mean, or harmful communication on the websites or social media sites of others. It is not uncommon to see a comment in the news about some celebrity replying to a troll who posted something on their social media site that is perhaps fat shaming, sexist, racist, homophob…Read More

  3. EMPOWERING KIDS TO COPE WITH ONLINE RISK

    By:
    Date Published:

    Part of my goal to slow down this summer is to catch up on my reading. Recently, I was introduced to the work of several researchers at Penn State (Wisniewski, Jia, Carroll, Xu & Ronsen). This team of researchers from Penn State are in the College of Information Sciences and Technology and some of their work relates to teen safety online. This spring, the team of Penn State researchers presented data at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Conference. The paper:Preventative vs. Reactive. How Parental Mediation Influences Teens’ Social Media Privacy Behaviors won …Read More

  4. How to keep kids safe online and build trust

    By:
    Date Published:
    Tags:
    , , , , , , ,

    Over the weekend, an article came out in the Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3034480/The-children-young-ten-feed-internet-porn-addiction.html) from the UK discussing children as young as ten who are fighting pornography addiction. While this might have been news for the general public, this is something that is common knowledge in the field of sexual addiction treatment. The age of those addicted to pornography continues to get younger and younger. Many parents, when faced with the either the media buzz or the reality of what their child is doing online, look for resources …Read More

  5. What type of internet parent are you?

    By:
    Date Published:

    In the process of writing my book, The New Age of Sex Education: How to Talk to your Teen about Cybersex and Pornography, I feel like I have read every scientific study from the past decade on the topics of online pornography, sexting and internet safety. Last night’s reading, a 2011 study on the safe internet use of Dutch children, prompted me to think about the tactics that parents use to try to maintain safe internet use by their children. First, the study talked about the types of risk a child faces (this comes from a 2008 study from De Moor et al). Internet risks to children can be brok…Read More

  6. Sexting, Cybersex & 7 year olds

    By:
    Date Published:
    Date Modified:
    Tags:
    , , , ,

    On March 10, 2015, the Internet Watch Foundation published a report entitled “Emerging Patterns and Trends Report #1: Youth-Produced Sexual Content.” This study was conducted from September to November 2014 by sourcing content from search engines and other online sources. The findings are a bit shocking. The images that the study assessed were broken down into two age categories. 82.5 percent of the sexual images were of adolescents age 16-20 while 17.5% were of children aged 15 or younger. The images were broken down into three categories: (A) images depicting penetrative sexual activity,…Read More

  7. Keeping Kids Safe on the Internet: Some companies start to get it

    By:
    Date Published:
    Tags:
    , , , , ,

    Last week's tech news reported that some companies in the tech/app/web world were starting to implement precautions designed to keep children from accidentally accessing inappropriate or adult content. You Tube announced the launch of YouTubeKids. This is an app available for ios and android platforms specifically designed for kids. The app has kid friendly content such a Jim Henson TV, National Geographic Kids and other kid friendly YouTube shows. The YouTube kids app will filter for kid friendly content algorithmically and will also have a staff team that will manually sample videos on the s…Read More

  8. SnapChat Safety Center

    By:
    Date Published:
    Tags:
    , , ,

    News across the tech blogs yesterday informed us that Snap Chat has partnered with three non-profit safety organizations to help raise awareness of the safe use of its app. They also launched a safety center (www.snapchat.com/safety) which has sections for users as well as parents. The page is a great resource for adult users. I imagine that the teens are not going to go to the safety site to check things out. There are separate resource pages for community rules, safety and for parents and teachers. The safety section is limited. It does provide a link for setting up privacy settings and a li…Read More

  9. What do kids worry about online?

    By:
    Date Published:
    Date Modified:

    Most research that I review is written by adults from a very adult perspective.  The research topics are based on adult concerns regarding the effects of cyber bullying, sexting and internet pornography on kids, which makes sense because the scientists who are conducting this research are no longer kids.  However, it stands to reason that the adults might be asking the wrong questions and be concerned about the wrong things.  We might wonder why the scientists don’t just ask the teens themselves. This September, a group of European scientists published a paper in the European Journal of C…Read More

  10. Tech Savvy Parenting: Prevention Lessons From Recent Grindr Arrests

    By:
    Date Published:
    Date Modified:
    Tags:
    , ,

    In the past few weeks in the Philadelphia area, where I have my primary therapy practice, there have been a number of arrests related to the hook up application (“app”), Grindr.  On May 1, 2014 a young man was found murdered after meeting someone with whom he connected on the Grindr app.  The person he was meeting for the hook up is a suspect.  Even today, in the news, a man was arrested in Seattle for beating another man he met on Grindr.  The most eye catching story from the Philadelphia area is that of the arrest of a Delaware Deputy Attorney General who is being charged with four c…Read More