Is Your Kid Communicating with an Online Predator?
The smartphone technology era has exposed our kids to several things, both good and bad. On the one hand, they can benefit from their devices in a couple of ways including searching for information for their school assignment, chatting with their friends online, watching movies, playing games, using social media, etc.
On the other hand, there is also a downside to spending too much time on smartphones and other electronic gadgets. Kids can stumble upon online dangers including pedophilia without realizing how dangerous that can be for their mental and physical health.
Every parent should be aware of growing pedophilia and should also worry about it at some point. Several reports have suggested that predators are found on social media and gaming platforms more than ever. These public online platforms allow them to be there and hunt for innocent kids. Is your kid communicating with a predator? Let’s find out.
How Does Predator Contact Your Kids?
The digital world has made it a lot easier for predators to reach out to your kids. With the help of social media and gaming platforms or any other online forum which is public, predators can hunt for their targets easily.
All they need to do is look for the kid by their name on any online platform and send them a friend request, follow them, or leave them a direct message in their inbox. In some cases, predators won’t know kids by their names. They’d just randomly search for kids’ profiles on social media and attempt to contact them.
What Happens When Predators Contact Kids?
As soon as contact is established between the kid and the predator, the latter tries to win over them by saying good things about them and praising them all the time. With their sweet talks, they lure kids to trust and confide in them.
Some predators pose around as kids of their age when they start talking to them. Kids, believing they are talking to kids of their age, start sharing personal information with them. In other cases, predators do not pretend to be kids of their age and chat with them being themselves.
They make kids trust them by ensuring them that they care for them and they are their well-wishers. Innocent kids who lack understanding and judgment fall for their trap and start trusting them in no time. Once the predator is sure they have full control over the kid, they demand their phone number and home address.
They have long phone calls that may even lead to video calls. While having video calls, they demand kids to show their private parts or perform sexual acts for them. In other cases, they also demand inappropriate photos and videos from kids only to keep the content reserved for blackmailing them and their families or selling the content to the dark web for a good price later.
Some predators can go to the extent of persuading kids to meet them in-person so they can engage in sexual acts with them. This is the most dangerous form that online predators can take and every parent needs to be aware of it. No parent would want their kid to fall prey to online predators and become a victim of their vicious intent. Hence, they need to take some necessary measures to keep their kids safe from predators.
How to Protect Your Kids from Pedophiles?
It’s important to be aware of growing pedophilia in the world. Gone are the days when predators would follow your kids and their whereabouts in the outside world. Now, the internet has given them access to several platforms where they can hunt kids without any fear and problem.
Being a parent, it is your responsibility to be aware of your kid’s online activity and to know what is going on in their lives. You should know who your kids are interacting with through text messages, phone calls, emails, and instant chats and what sort of conversations they are having with them.
For instance, you can use a call tracker free app to monitor your kid’s incoming and outgoing phone calls. With the call tracker online solution, you can also trace the names and phone numbers of the persons who contact your kid. Similarly, you can use any effective monitoring app to monitor your kid’s entire smartphone and internet activity.
Instead of freaking out when you find out your kid is in touch with a predator, you need to use strategies that could help you in protecting your kids from them. One of those strategies involves the use of a cell phone monitoring app such as Mobistealth.
This monitoring app will ensure your kids are safe from the reach of predators in the internet world. You will be instantly alerted by the monitoring app once a stranger tries to establish contact with your kid. That’s when you can ask your kid to not respond to them in any way. If the predator doesn’t stop contacting your kid, you can ask them to block or report them as soon as possible.
Another important strategy that you can use to protect your kids from pedophiles on the internet is to teach your kids how to use the internet safely and responsibly. Tell your kids to enable privacy settings on their social media accounts so the predators cannot contact them. Also, tell them they shouldn’t share or expose their personal information on social media at all costs.
This can only happen if you have good communication with your kids. Parents who lack understanding and communication with kids can face problems in this department. Make your kids comfortable around you so they can come to you when they face some trouble on the internet. Do not rebuke them for their mistakes. Instead, make them learn from those mistakes so they can never repeat them.
