Online Child Exploitation: The Risks Great Information at the Canadian Red Cross

Online Child Exploitation: The Risks http://www.redcross.ca/article.asp?id=010712&tid=082
While there can be great benefits for children and youth who use the Internet, it also holds potential dangers. Some of the main risks to children and youth include being exposed to unsuitable or offensive materials or from adults who wish to exploit children using the Internet as a point of contact.

Online child sexual exploitation is a serious problem. Approximately 1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online.1 Because you can't see the person who you are communicating with online, it is very difficult to know if they are telling the truth about who they are. Chat rooms, a popular place for children and teens, are a susceptible place where abusers may look for victims. They may adopt a child/youth identity, strike up friendships with children or youth and then attempt to meet them in person.

Identifying offenders can be very difficult even when the child does report the incident to parents and/or police: one never knows if the age and sex that the individual has given to the victim are accurate. In some cases where meetings have taken place, the person has been much older than the child was led to believe; in others the offender was in fact an older man when the child/youth had been told the "new friend" was a female. Despite a few highly publicized arrests that have been made, the United States' rate of conviction for online offenses against children is currently about 1,000 individuals annually (Carr, 2001).

How Online Predators Can Find Your Child's Information

Member Profiles and online white and yellow pages:
There are various web sites that allow users to create profiles and search for members with similar profiles. The white and yellow pages contain addresses from various sources that often share contacts.

Chatrooms:
Spammers and sexual predators harvest names from chatrooms, as it allows them to "target" their mailing lists. To target kids, sexual predators will go where the kids are. Examples of such places are game rooms, kid-friendly sites, and teen-support sites.