From National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

"Parents, guardians, and adults who care for children face constant challenges when trying to help keep children safer in today's fast-paced world"

"For decades, children were taught to stay away from "strangers." But this concept is difficult for children to grasp and often the perpetrator is someone the child knows. It is more beneficial to help build children's confidence and teach them to respond to a potentially dangerous situation, rather than teaching them to look out for a particular type of person."

While we do educate Scouting adults with Youth Protection Training it is limited in scope to working in a group environment, applying the rules based on the scout oath and law and noticing the signs of abuse. Below you will find information to help protect your child when out in the general population.

Center for Child Protection

Message from the Director

I dream a dream of peace and safety for children. I dream of a world in which each child is cherished and in which tears occur only because of bumps, bruises, and broken toys. However, I live in a world in which hundreds of children are sexually violated by someone that they love and trust. I live in a world in which children experience the most painful physical injury at the hands of those who should be safe. I work in a world of violence, tears, nightmares, and fear.

The internet has been with us for thirty years and the the world wide web for almost twenty years. During the internet days we saw the creation of ISP's with their content, E-mail, bulletin boards, dial up and newsgroups. This opened a world of resources to us, news, research, communications, a way to post our comments to current issues With them came SPAM. hackers. viruses, and content that was not only unacceptable for children to view but embarrassing for most adults. We learned to place our PCs in our family rooms and living rooms limit hours of usage for our children and to watch where they were going!

In the 90s we saw the rise of the world wide web and the world became our oyster. PC prices had declined to be affordable to most families (an 8086 machine from IBM Cost $7.000 in the 80's). We saw the creation of many web sites, instant messaging, internet gaming, on-line chat, on-line shopping, on-line banking, blogging, VOIP, music downloads, social networks. internet tv, on-line movies. the cloud, PCs became more portable and every child in America today want a laptop and a telephone with texting capability and internet ready. This has come with increased attacks on our computer, chat room and internet predators, Cyber bullying, financially motivated hacking, sexting, identity theft, social engineering, vulnerability exploits, hoaxes. trojan horses, code insertions and Cyber warfare to name a few.

As parents we have lost control, we installed content rating systems, anti-mal ware. Fire walls (hardware and personal), netnannys, anti hijack tools, encryption, internet security tools and tried to keep pcs and game consoles in common areas. Not matter what tools we use they (bad people) find another way. So the answer goes back to basic parenting. Talk to your children, be involve in their day to day activities, know their friends, educate them to the possibilities and provide guidance. Links to resources follow:

Don't forget the Game Consoles