EU to tackle cyberbullying, grooming

Interesting that they're being lumped together: The European Union is moving its Safer Internet program will be training the spotlight on "cyberbullying and cybergrooming," German tech-news site Heise reports, the former being about peer-to-peer behavior and the latter about adult-to-child aggression. So far only two EU countries have enacted legislation dealing with these forms of aggression. Maybe the program puts them together more as behavioral issues as distinguished from inappropriate content. Heise reports that 34% of the Safer Internet program's €55 million 2009-'13 budget (about $69 million US) will be allocated to "illegal and harmful content."

Predation in online gaming

Police have been saying that predators go where kids go, and they've been saying it since before there was an Internet. So the "place" that the news media and online-safety advocates are increasingly focusing on is online gaming. I first linked you to a story about this in January 2006 (see "Teen exploited while gaming"); in May, a report out of Cincinnati saying the FBI was investigating "a number of cases in southern Ohio" concerning Xbox Live; and last month we heard from a US attorney in Massachusetts that cases of man-to-minor predation involving World of Warcraft were under investigation. This week USATODAY reported on online-game predation cases in Utah and Michigan. Where the Xbox Live gaming community is concerned, "Microsoft trains police at national conferences," according to USATODAY. Parents need to know that "Xbox has password-protected 'family settings' that allow parents to turn off Internet access or track content and contacts. PlayStation and Wii also have such controls." I was delighted to learn last summer that there is some "neighborhood watch," or community policing, activity in Xbox Live (see this feature) and hope to see more evidence of this other form of protection that can be empowering for kids. For some context around all this, see this editorial too. The No. 1 message for parents in all this is the importance of teaching our kids to be alert and responsible wherever and whenever they're in places where lots of people interact, online or offline. Alert about what? See "How to recognize grooming" and "How social influencing works."

'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.