It always sickens me when I hear about child pornography and child sex crime acts. Following the fanpage for "Don't Feed The Trolls" on Facebook, I stumbled across this news article:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/ny-child-porn/
In the world of cybercrimes, child pornography has been around much longer then cyberbullying. Any crime that takes away the innocence of a child is a crime against nature. With pictures of youth so predominately displayed all over the internet, kids and parents alike need to be mindful of what images of their child they are posting. In the particular case described in the article, a file sharing program was being used to swap images from one pedophile to another.
They don't release specific details about the images, only that a wide variety of ages and acts are represented. It does make me wonder, how are these images obtained? Some, I'm sure, are obtained through force and abusive situations. Others, could be obtained from social networking sites. I've heard horror stories from people about how kids use cell phone cameras to obtain embarressing photos of the kids they bully. These images then get passed along via a mass text message to the other kids in their class or, even worse, posted on the web for the world to see.
I've also heard about how bullying victims can become prey for pedophiles. The typical young teenage girl has many insecurities. They worry about their appearance and about being liked. A pedophile could easily tune into these insecurities and try to make their victim feel special. These pedophiles then talk their victims into doing things that they normally wouldn't have done, including getting them to voluntarily taking pictures of themselves that may end up on these peer to peer file sharing websites.
It's important to know what images your child is sharing, on their phones and on the internet. Pay special attention to what images their friends are posting of them. Tonight, take a stroll down memory lane with your kids.
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