Protecting Your Kids From Cyber-Bullies and Cyber-stalkers

If you are like the millions of parents who gave in and bought that highly desired Smartphone for your kids you had better do some homework of your own to protect your family against cyber-bullies. Whether it is an iPhone or other Smartphone technology such as the Blackberry or HTC, these units can be a gateway for tech piriahs trying to access and bully your children. The reason these new Smartphones are just as dangerous as your home computer for security and safety is their capabilities. These Smartphones allow access to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, allows your kids to take and upload pictures in seconds, as well as syncing all their networking to ‘where are you now’ technology which tells whoever their ‘friends’ are where to find them and their locations anywhere at anytime. All of this information can get into the wrong hands and lead to dangerous situations, stalkers and cyber-bullies.

To better inform you on how to protect your family from these insidious intrusions, I will try to touch on all of the major precautions you and your kids should take in order to avoid this new cyber-bullying phenomenon. Let’s start with the basics.

What is Cyber-stalking? Cyber-bullying?

Cyber-stalking uses social networking sites to locate your childs location in mere seconds. This new tech-ability is popular with kids these days because it links all of your networking sites into one easy to access button. Unfortunately for safety’s sake, this capability links up with the Smartphone’s GPS technology and allows others to pinpoint exactly where each posting was entered. Stalking and bullying go hand in hand.

Cyber-bullying is much like regular bullying, it is the deliberate and repeated hostile behaviour perpetrated by an individual or group to undermine and hurt others. Cyber-bullying involves online technology which can hide the bully, keeping them virtually anonymous. They do this by creating temporary email accounts, pseudonyms in chat rooms and IM programs, cell phone texting or any other internet social program to mask their identity.

What to do if you are a cyber-bully target

First, before you become one, plan ahead. Avoidance is imperative to keeping the bullies at bay. By avoiding the social sites and chat rooms you will cut down on your chances of gaining a bully by 60%.

For most kids though, Facebook and texting are very important for their social lives. So my advice to those parents is to set up their accounts together, go through the privacy settings on every social networking site your kids use. Be sure to be thorough, these social platforms are consistently updating their privacy rules, so staying on top of every new setting is very important. Do not allow your kids to download the ‘find me’ technology for these sites. This will make it harder for stalkers and bullies to gain access to them.

Also, like phone numbers, email addresses can be changed. Most email accounts now offer services which will filter out the unwanted emails before they reach your inbox. Check with your email provider to ensure that you have the proper privacy settings, firewalls and spyware needed to avoid spam, stalkers and cyber-bullies in your correspondence.

Other ways cyber-bullies can get you:

With all of the privacy preparedness, it is impossible to stop someone from posting something defammatory about your kids on the internet. If this does happen it could take up to a year to have it expunged from the internet (with a lot of elbow grease and patience) and anyone could download the information within that time.
Despite policies that describe cyber-bullying as a violation of the terms of service, many social networking Web sites have been used to that end. There are just too many people and too much red tape involved for any online company to find every bad person out there.

Consequences of cyber-bullying

Many kids are reluctant to tell any authority figure about being cyber-bullied. Victims of cyber-bullies have lowered self esteem, increased suicidal thoughts, depression and anti-social behavior all of which is the initial intention of the bully. There have also been too many suicides over the last few years directly related to cyber-bullying. So what are the laws for cyber-bullying?

The law and cyber-bullying

Lawmakers are just now trying to catch up with this nasty new trend. California is the only state which has actually passed an anti cyber-bullying law. Passed last January, 2009, this new law gives school administrators the ability and authority to discipline students for bullying online or offline. Aside from that, lawmakers are presently working on a proposed law which would make it illegal to use electronic means to coerce, intimidate, harass or cause other emotional distress upon anyone through the internet.

Despite the current lack of new cyber laws, the old ones still exist. If your child has a cyber- bully contact your local police department, school administrators and community policing groups. The more people aware of the intimidation and aggression, the better. The best offence is a great defense, dear parents and it’s yours to defend.

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Category: Parenting
Keywords: smartphones,iphone,blackberry,mobile internet plans