Unfortunately, abuse of children on line is a fact. According to Deputy Director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Daniel Ragsdale, today, there is an increasing trend of kids being coaxed into sharing “sexually explicit material online.” Recently, when 14 men were arrested by American authorities for this behavior, Ragsdale said simply arresting the perpetrators was not the answer to solving this terrible trend. He argued: “we cannot arrest our way out of this: education is the key to prevention.”
While we are educating kids and their parents about this issue, there are preventive measures that can be taken as well. For example, eSafely is a parental control tool that works through the web browser, giving the entire family “complete online protection.” At no charge and simple to install, the tool protects children while they browse the Internet, “blocking harmful adult images, providing safe access to Youtube, Wikipedia and Safe Search, and protecting your child from cyberbullying on Facebook.”
Simultaneously to protective web tools, the Department of Education and Science is working toward full protection against cyber-abusers and bullies. It is doing this by working with schools and youth groups to give kids the tools to ensure their own safety online. Indeed, in February a Safer Internet Day was organized by Insafe and attended by the Ministry for Education and Garda representatives. The aim of the event was to “communicate the message to students that the internet is not a safe space for bullies or others looking to take advantage of young people online.”
]]>This explains why students always used to feel uncomfortable when accidentally meeting one of their teachers in the shopping mall or a restaurant. Teachers were beyond the mundane everyday activities which we all participated in with our families and friends. Of course, we knew this wasn’t true, but the society we lived in encouraged the façade in order to raise our teachers up onto a new plane of living.
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The incredible revolution caused by the computer and the internet is raising issues of what are appropriate and not appropriate behaviors on-line. For instance, Facebook has recently exploded with users, and those on Facebook are being forced to makes social choices which will determine what acceptable social media behavior will be in the future. This is entirely different than the way societal norms develop in the world of human, face-to-face interactions, which are learned over time from parents, teachers and peers. Of course manners and what are acceptable behavior changes with each new generation, but the evolution is usually slower and more natural. Today adults as well as youth are being on a sharp learning curve and must come to grapple with what to do.
One issue now being worked out is whether students should become Facebook friends with their teachers. There are some interesting issues here that we will explore in part II of this series.
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