December 11, 2008
For more information contact
Supervisory AUSA Karen E. Rhew
(850) 942-8430
PROJECT SAFE CHILDHOOD: A NEW APPROACH
The Department of Justice has recently unveiled a national Public Service Announcement (PSA) campaign to accentuate its two year old Project Safe Childhood initiative aimed at combating the proliferation of technology-facilitated sexual exploitation crimes against children. The new PSA campaign is designed to educate parents about the potential dangers that their children face online and also to warn potential online predators that exploiting a child online is a serious federal offense.
The four new PSAs were developed jointly by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and Project Safe Childhood partners INOBTR (“I Know Better”), iKeepSafe and the Hispanic Communications Network.
The PSAs, both in Spanish and English, highlight the risks that children face each day when they go on the internet and underscore that parents simply must be as aware of where their children go on the internet as they are of the books that their children bring into the house. One of the PSAs illustrates how, in the digital world, children can travel anywhere and talk with anyone. In the past, parents warned their children not to talk to strangers out on the street. As these PSAs demonstrate, the strangers parents warn about are no longer just in the street, they are right in our homes, reaching out to our children electronically.
Current research shows a number of pretty startling facts: one in four students have been exposed to unwanted pornography on the internet; one in four students have been asked sexual questions online; fourteen percent of students have invited an online stranger to meet them in person; and, seven percent of students have received requests for nude photos of themselves. But are these just statistics? To the contrary, unfortunately they are very real dangers that have invaded even our community.
In the last year alone, the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force (ICAC), investigated 31 separate cases of internet enticement of children in north Florida. In Tallahassee alone, the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Florida, in conjunction with our partners in this struggle, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Office of the State Attorney General, the Sheriff’s Department, the Police Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, prosecuted four men for using the internet to solicit children for sex. Three of these men actually traveled to Tallahassee to meet and have sex with the children they solicited, a fourth used the internet to entice the parent to bring her children to another state so that he could have sex with both of them. All four of these men were arrested, indicted, convicted, and sentenced to Federal prison. These “children” were lucky enough to actually be undercover officers posing as children, that is why these predators were caught.
The need for parental oversight of their children is more important now than ever before. With the holidays coming up, children may be receiving computers as gifts, they will certainly have more time to be on the internet talking to who knows. As this PSA campaign amply shows, the real line of defense, the real protection is not just watching your child like a hawk when he/she goes outside but knowing where they go and with whom they are talking when they are in the safe confines of their home.
For more information on these public service announcements, please go to
www.KnowWhereTheyGo.org;
www.stopanonlinepredator.org;
www.ProteglosAhora.org and
www.NoTeArruines.org.
For more information on Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov.