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Parents have a tougher job than ever in keeping their kids safe online

According to a two different reports recently released, children are at greater risk of being exposed to online porn than ever before. "Taking on the Internet Porn Industry" and a report from the Pediatrics Journal called "Unwanted and Wanted Exposure to Online Pornography in a National Sample of Youth Internet Users" were released in early February 2007. The goal of these reports was to assess the extent of unwanted and wanted exposure to online pornography among youth Internet users and associated risk factors.

According to the "Taking on the Internet Porn Industry" report from "The Third Way" the most appalling finding is the reach that Internet pornography has into our homes and into the lives of our children. Home computers, as well as many portable devices, are now portals into this dark world. Moreover, this immensely profitable industry makes money based on the number of people who come to their websites, regardless of whether they buy anything and whether they are adults or children. (They make money from advertisers based on "page views.")

  • The most frequent viewers of Internet porn are kids 12-17 years old.
  • The average age at which children are first exposed to online pornography today is 11 years old.
  • Certain Internet pornography producers imbed children's words like Teletubbies and Pokemon as "meta-tags" to lure kids to their sites.
  • Approximately 20 new children appear on pornography sites every month, many of them kidnapped and sold into sex.

The ease with which pornography is available online makes a mockery of the restrictions that society has traditionally placed on the access of minors to sexually explicit materials.

In the second report results came from a telephone survey of 1,500 Internet users aged 10 to 17, conducted with their parents' consent.

In the survey, conducted between March and June 2005, most kids who reported unwanted exposure were aged 13 to 17. Still, sizable numbers of 10- and 11-year-old also had unwanted exposure -- 17 percent of boys and 16 percent of girls that age.

Forty-two percent of Internet users aged 10 to 17 surveyed said they had seen online pornography in a recent 12-month span. Of those, 66 percent said they did not want to view the images and had not sought them out, University of New Hampshire researchers found. Parents have a tougher job than ever in keeping their kids safe online.

Common Sense did a poll on Parents' Attitudes Toward Their Kids' Online Lives and found the things that parents are most worried about:

  • Sexual predators (80 percent)
  • Having their kids exposed to values they don't agree with (72 percent)
  • Having their kids exposed to ideas that they.re not ready to see (70 percent)
  • Lack of outdoors time (71 percent)
  • Computer viruses (76 percent)
  • Experimentation with pornography or explicit content (55 percent)

moka5 has created a locked down LivePC especially to help keep your kids safe online. The safe surf LivePC includes the Linux operating system, Firefox browser and a whole host of kid safe surf sites like Nickelodeon and Disney. Also included is Kids Yahoo search site so kids can search safe surf sites.

Furthermore, the surf safe LivePC ensures your child doesn't inadvertently end up on a wrong site that might have inappropriate content.

And parents need not worry about those pesky viruses. Just re-start the LivePC and viruses, spyware and any other malware disappear.

If you want to partner with moka5 to provide a kid safe computing environment or if you are parent who wants to give us feedback, please contact us at [email protected]

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