In October the FBI announced a safe browsing Website portal for children, specifically targeting grades 4 through 8. The article making the announcement says:
It’s called the FBI-SOS (Safe Online Surfing) Internet Challenge—and it was developed with the assistance of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and with the input of teachers and schools.
Safe surfing has become increasingly important for children because online predators are targeting lonely children and drawing them into abusive, exploitative relationships. Children are being taught to search the Internet for information and news but society has failed to develop sufficient safeguards to protect the children from exploitation.
This oversight is a natural consequence of the rabid, thoughtless development of new technologies that is being pioneered by teenagers and people in their 20s — people of ages, in other words, who lack sufficient life experience to think about the long-term complications that their cavalier attitudes engender for the rest of society.
The social lesson lesson here will be learned only in another generation or two, after incomparable psychological and sociological harm has been inflicted upon millions of people. The Internet created a vast medium of complex interaction for which we had no rules or common sense to guide us. The results so far have literally produced numerous rapes, murders, suicides, public humiliation campaigns, and even a few revolutions in the Middle East.
To say that we need to create safe online environments to protect children is not just an understatement — it is a desperate call for sanity because we have already lost one generation of Internet users to harmful bad judgement and devastation.
Check out the Safe Online Surfing Portal with your children today.