Today I got a disturbing note from a woman whose 13-year-old daughter had been lured by a stranger over Instant Messenger. The man (as he identified himself) wanted the girl to buy a webcam and send him movies. Without going into too many of the details, he told her that if she didn't send a movie he'd send a virus to her computer.

 

Thankfully, the girl had the presence of mind to block this guy from her IM and tell her parents. Since then, the family has learned that this guy has been doing this to several other of the girl's friends.

 

Yet when the family called the local authorities to report the incident, in the hopes that they might stop him from harming others, they found out that local agencies didn't know how to help. This is not unusual. Many local agencies, including law enforcement and police, often don't have the resources or training to know what to do in situations where minors are being sexually solicited over IM, email or social networks.

 

The girl's parents did a couple of things worth noting:

 

1. They were there to help their daughter when she got herself into a bit of an Internet pickle. Oftentimes, kids feel that their parents either won't understand the situation or may blame them; they don't turn to their parents for help and attempt to resolve the situation themselves. This could be very dangerous.
   
   
2. They saved a printed version of the IM conversation. IMs are not fleeting; they can be saved to a file or printed. It's important that you have as much of a record of a disturbing or threatening cyber-encounter as possible. This will be helpful should the situation escalate.
   
   
3. They looked for a place to help others not fall prey to the same situation.

 

There are many places on the web where you can find out how to protect your children in cyberspace, but few that are actually equipped to deal with a threat once an incident has occurred.

 

One of the best places to report an instance of a sexual solicitation is the CyberTipline. A report can be filed 24-hours per day, seven days per week at the site, www.cybertipline.com, or by calling 1-800-843-5678. The report is then analyzed and passed along to the best possible authorities or agencies to try and help. These include the FBI, The US Postal Inspection Service, state and local authorities, and in some cases the Internet Service Provider.

 

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which operates the CyberTipline, tracks the number of reported offenses and makes these numbers public. Whether you track by day, month, or across the years, the major offense that's reported to the CyberTipline is child pornography, online enticement of children for sexual acts ranks second, but a distant second.