Carlow’s children are at risk of befriending porn-workers soliciting online.
Concerned Carlow parents contacted Carlow First last week in a bid to warn other parents about the dangers of online social networking sites.
“My daughter is seven and I thought I knew all of her friends, until someone contacted me to say they saw her online chatting to a sex worker,” said a 34-year old mother of three, who lives in The Willows.
To protect the child, she did not want to give her name, but she admitted she felt very helpless when it came to protecting her child online.
“I let her go online in the living room, when I am there to see what she is doing. I thought she was just on those sites where you chat to your friends and share photos of whoever’s party and puppies and that. It wasn’t until a woman I see at the school told me to check what she was actually reading on these sites that I checked.”
When she checked her daughter’s page on the site, she discovered she had added several sex-workers to her friend list because they had asked to join her group. “She didn’t know who they were, she thought they were friends of friends. But when I went into their pages, I nearly got sick.”
A similar fate befell the woman who had initially tipped her off. A Polish national living in Ireland for the past eight years, she said she had kept an eye on her ten-year-old son because she had heard about the sites from her younger relatives.
“I was trying to protect him, while letting him have his own e-mail account. I got an account on g-mail because they filter out the adult things. But I check it in case. And I was seeing these strange people sending messages on his g-mail asking to be added to his friend list on his social networking site, Bebo. When I checked into his site to see about them, I discovered they were asking him for sex. My sister says they trawl the web just looking to find someone who is interested in their offer. My son is still too innocent, but I don’t let him go on now unless I sit with him,” she told Carlow First.
Bebo, in media statements says they employ people to monitor content on their site, and enable users to block people they don’t know or don’t want from their personal pages. “Sadly, children face risks in everyday life, whether playing in their school grounds or on the internet. We are very conscious of this and are working hard to ensure our site is not abused. Users can now opt to pre-screen comments and images that others attempt to post to their Bebo homepage. In addition, users can choose to block specific users from further interaction,” says the company. But that doesn’t go far enough say Carlow parents.
“I just want to warn parents they need to sit with their children while they are online, just as they would when they are watching TV, so that they monitor what they are looking at and what they are accepting into their brains,” said the mother of three.
