@dlowan,
dlowan wrote:I don't have a position on when kids should be online. I think it depends on the skills of those assisting them in their online experience, not their age.
I want it left up to the parents but the US COPPA law in effect bans children under 13 from registering to these sites because it requires the sites to obtain written consent from the parents. This isn't a procedure that works easily on the internet (the sites are supposed to ask them if they are under 13 and then try to get them to get their parents to give written permission, but they can't easily discern who the parents are etc, so they effectively just say they aren't allowed). Even if this isn't the law in most of the world because these sites tend to be based stateside this is pretty much the de facto standard on the internet.
So what I want is for this to be at the discretion and the
responsibility of parents and for laws like COPPA to be repealed as I think they put too much of the onus on sites and in a way that essentially makes sites just ban kids. The blog post I linked to earlier is a good example of this:
Google made my son cry. The dad wants to let his kid use gmail, but due to this COPPA law Google disabled his account and won't enable it unless they lie about their son's age.
Quote:Thing is, the very parents whose kids are most vulnerable are the ones who have no idea about net predators, about kids accessing porn (I see lots of people who have no idea that kids seeing porn, or rape, or domestic violence, or lots of sex is even an issue for instance). The society you are thinking of vs the society that people like me see are often different beasts. We've had mothers who actually delivered their young daughters to the homes of net friends they had never seen and left them there without even meeting the person to check. That's some pretty out there cases, but they exist. These are situations where very great harm came to the girls in question.
I understand, I've run into enough of that to know it's out there but I guess what I'm saying is that those are the folks that I think almost no amount of education can help without hurting the society in other ways. For example, sometimes I fantasize about quasi-eugenics, where everyone would be sterilized by default and need to obtain a licence to raise kids. That's obviously over-the-top but short of crazy regulation like that I have no idea how we can get through to mothers who don't care who they drop their kids off with, to me it's almost not an education problem but a not-giving-enough-of-a-****-to-be-allowed-to-have-kids problem. Those are the parents that short of preventing them from being parents I can't imagine how to deal with but we are only able to do so after-the-fact (we can't interfere in parenting until something bad happens) and ideas I've had like punishing parents whose children end up harmed this way aren't very delicate instruments of justice to use either.
Quote:I've actually been looking around for good net safety packages (not very hard, because I haven't time) that generally very ignorant people might be able to make sense of....including stuff for lonely mummies who fall for lovely men on the net who use that modus operandi for accessing the kids.
Not sure what you mean but if you mean any kind of software solution I think that can only work once those parents begin to care enough to do it manually, all it can do is automate some of the choices they need to make and most of the time the software is bad enough that it can be easily circumvented by the kids who understand it better than the parents at some point.
Quote:I am usually in the position of educating after the harm has occurred, which kind of sucks, really.
No kidding, and I think it's the dispair at only having the hospital at the bottom that motivates many to seek a fence at the top but most of the fences I've seen proposed aren't that great.
Quote:I am just thinking that actually talking to kids and parents about real (but obviously disguised) cases, where people can look at the tactics used by the abuser and how they managed to inveigle their way in might be one way...I find that's what most helps in most teaching, examples that people can analyse and make sense of.
Yeah, but how do you do that I guess. Short of just cranking up the volume how do you reach those folk living under a rock? The training content isn't the hard part to me, it isn't hard to explain that it's not bright to deliver you kid to strange adults for sexy time but that these idiots still haven't gotten the message, despite how prevalent it is, is what I find hard to address.
Quote:But I agree, if you draw parents in the great lottery of life who don't know how to parent, and how to identify and learn about stuff they realise they need to know, it's damn tough to for you to be able to keep yourself very safe.
You've inspired me to look around for what is there, so I can promulgate it in the training I do if I find anything I think is classy!
If it involves forcible sterilization let me know. :-P I keed. This stuff bothers me too but I have little toward a solution to offer. There's a city in CR that I've been fantasizing about papering with leaflets due to the backward parenting I hear about there. That is actually a case where education I think could help, but in much of the third world short of advocating more and better education for all (not about this particular issue necessarily) I really don't know what can reasonably be done to raise awareness further than current levels. I also suspect that no matter what is done, there will need to be the folks doing your role picking up the broken pieces anyway, which is a bit of a bleak outlook but one I haven't been able to shake.
