All devices, all video games, need to have parental controls on them, and if a game won’t let you, then your kid can’t play. Have rules and consequences when those rules are broken. You don’t need to police your kids, but you have to monitor their online behavior because a stranger could be talking to them at any time. It can take as little as two minutes for a kid to be approached online. If I had it my way, these video games, these apps that are supposedly just for “fun”, they’re cesspools, they should be shut down. They’re strangers and they can be dangerous. And they think ‘this person is nice to me online, so he’s my friend.’ But we need to tell kids that this isn’t true. Kids are looking for an escape into another world, and they meet people. They said the guy who did this, he was able to wipe all his data. They let our son know it wasn’t his fault. We felt helpless, it really is every parent’s nightmare. It was just traumatic, so unexpected, we thought we should have seen it happening, that we should have known, or been there to protect him. You know, just horrific stuff, things I haven’t ever seen in my life. He had been dragged into it by one of these predators. That’s how we found the messages, pictures, videos – the things that were sent to him, what he was asked to do. We came home one night and the laptop was sitting there. We caught him lying a couple of times, he was avoiding our eyes, his personality changed. We started noticing he was going over his time, you know, the laptop started moving out of our view. But the thing is, some of these games don’t have parental controls. After school he had a couple hours for homework, then an hour for video games. And child predators are going to go where children are. But the stories are very clever, seductive even, they suck kids in. Parents assume they’re safe…it’s for kids. These online video games seem fun and harmless, some even look like old arcade games. This parent’s child became the victim of an online predator while playing Roblox, please make sure your family is not the next one to suffer from this horrific abuse. Knowing what makes an online game or app dangerous allows parents to identify the dangers and to empower their children to protect themselves in the online environment. Parents everywhere are struggling to keep up with technology. This is based on a real case and is the second in a series of three. Child Rescue Coalition is proud to have collaborated with the UK Border Force to produce this awareness raising video from the perspective of a parent.
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