'Grooming' by phone too

Online safety news that appeals to fears is counter-productive, so I hope the US news media will approach cellphone safety more intelligently than they did predation on the Web. But, as with the Web, parents do need to be aware of the downsides to this other very useful communications tech too. CNN reports that, according to law enforcement, cellphones were used by a teacher and 14-year-old student in a case in which she allegedly developed the relationship with and had sex with the boy on school grounds. So many of us get our kids cellphones so we know where they are and they can call us when they need us. Certainly we will and should keep doing that, but we need to know there are other uses for those phones, from very rare uses such as the case above to teen pranks and bullying that can be very destructive in their own way. "A New York mom, who requested anonymity because her kids don't know about her surveillance, said she uses software to regularly check her children's e-mail and online activity on the home computer. But she also gave her kids cell phones that have texting and photographic capability. Asked why she doesn't scrutinize the phone the same way she snoops on the computer," she told CNN she hadn't really thought about it. Just something to think about and discuss with our kids. A discussion point might be "How to recognize grooming." The CNN article also goes into the subject of "grooming" - predators' insidious process of gaining a child's confidence overtime, citing the work of Betsy Ramsey, who "has spent 20 years working with child and female victims and chairs the DeKalb County Domestic Violence Task Force in Georgia."

Innovative child-protection tech

Its creator, Adam Hildreth, 22, calls it the Anti-Grooming Engine, The Guardian reports. "He claims the product is 99.9% effective in identifying adults online with a sexual motivation," and it's not keyword filtering. "The software is designed to look out for conversation patterns, typing speed, use of grammar and punctuation, and any aggressive or bullying language. Using extracts of online conversations between young people as examples of 'good' data, it is fed into the computer and compared with conversation gathered from that of suspected groomers." And the computer, he says, "learns" to tell the difference. CyberSentinel in the US has made some similar claims in the past, indicating that others have thought of this approach (see this in 2001). The proof is in the pudding, though, The Guardian cites one child-safety advocate as saying, and the pudding's not done yet - check out the article to get the full picture. Here's info in our forum site, ConnectSafely.org, about "How to recognize grooming."

Anti-social networking: Europe

The European perspective on social networking sounds a whole like the US one, but Europe is pressing for multinational efforts to combat both adult-to-child crime and peer-to-peer bullying on the social Web. "With social networking sites exploding in growth, most young users are well aware of the risks and the seamy side of the territory," the International Herald Tribune reports. "But according to new surveys, many children and teens still cannot resist meeting strangers they have befriended online." The Herald Tribune reports that the Council of Europe, "which represents 46 countries including the United States," is pushing a global treaty that would criminalize grooming, where sometimes over long periods pedophiles manipulate children into meeting them for sex (for more on this, see "How to recognize grooming"). "The council adopted a draft convention last month and in October the treaty will be open for countries to sign." The European Union is, with about $90 million, supporting a three-year Internet-safety program with a strong focus on education about sexual grooming.