Some adults sometimes care too much about their children. They accompany you to school, call you every hour, and shoo you away from your walk. And when the child is at home, the parent’s heart calms down. Now you can spend time in the kitchen or in front of the TV while your child is on the Internet...
From obesity to suicide
Modern children, having barely learned to speak, go online. And adults, in order to get rid of persistent requests and please their child, buy him smart phones and laptops.
Children from 2 to 6 years old can be in front of a monitor for about 15 to 40 minutes a day, starting from 6 years old - no more than an hour a day, says Vera Probylova, an accredited expert for the right to conduct examination of information products, candidate of psychological sciences. - But in reality it turns out that children almost live in the computer. As a result, they lose their health - both physical and mental. There are vegetative-vascular dystonia, problems with vision, posture, gastrointestinal tract, obesity, and sleep disturbances. It is not for nothing that psychophysiologists say that computers and television are generally contraindicated for children under two years of age!
What makes the Internet addictive? Are teenagers missing some thrills?
“Once I took my daughter’s laptop to work,” says the mother of a 13-year-old Nizhny Novgorod schoolgirl. - My daughter did not leave the VKontakte page. I was overcome by curiosity. Opened the messages. And there they discussed plans for suicide. I was pounding when lines with details of the upcoming tragedy appeared before my eyes...
The mother turned to the school psychologist and saved her daughter. This case could easily add to the collection of child suicides, which, alas, are not uncommon in the Nizhny Novgorod region (see infographics). The impetus for suicide, as studies have shown, is often specialized sites and articles on the Internet that describe the technology and benefits of suicide.
From conversation to rape
Attempts to commit suicide or try drugs are “offline” threats, something that can happen to your child in real, not virtual life. The scheme is terrible, but simple.
Another threat is that pedophiles go to children's pages, make friends, conduct active correspondence, finding common interests, and then insist on meeting. And then they rape or even kill a simple-minded teenager.
The story of a pedophile from the Avtozavodsky district thundered throughout Nizhny in the fall of 2011. The 29-year-old non-human found his victims on dating sites and social networks. For a 15-year-old girl, the attacker rented an apartment in one of the houses on the street. Monchegorskaya. The investigation charged the man with 3 counts of crime under Part 1 of Art. 134 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (sexual intercourse with a person known to be under 16 years of age).
Pedophiles, it turns out, are quite mobile people, and the geography of their “activity” extends throughout Russia. Do not lose your vigilance when an uncle from the Caucasus or Siberia corresponds with your son or daughter.
In May 2013, a Nizhny Novgorod pedophile who seduced a 13-year-old girl from Barnaul appeared in court. A 32-year-old man found his victim through social networks. Under the fictitious name “Rostislav,” the pervert courted the schoolgirl for several months. The pedophile bombarded the girl with his intimate photos and demanded the same in return. It was getting close to a real meeting. The girl’s mother looked at her page in time. Having received the message, investigators from the Altai Territory went to the Nizhny Novgorod region, where they arrested the hunter of children’s bodies. He was accused of committing indecent acts without using violence against a minor (Part 2 of Article 135 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).
The hunt is on...
Live parental control, as practice shows, saves lives. Social activists are also involved in exposing pedophiles. Now in Nizhny the local branch of the famous public movement “Occupy Pedophilia” is being recreated. Young Nizhny Novgorod residents unite, find pedophiles on social networks, and then tell the whole world about them. So far, the Nizhny Novgorod branch has one caught pedophile - a young director of one of the local television companies.
On social networks, we first create a profile for a boy about 13 years old. This is our real-life agent, the so-called “bait,” shares Kirill Banyshev, a movement activist, with his technology. - Adult men quickly show interest in the questionnaire. When entering into dialogue, we ask our uncles provocative questions. We are interested, in particular, whether the age of the interlocutor confuses them.
When we are convinced that my uncle is not ashamed, we set up a meeting. Our agent has a microphone and a voice recorder. And we are watching from afar. After we are convinced of bad intentions, we proceed to an interview with a lover of boys...
The main task pursued by activists is not lynching, but exposure.
The project is not aimed at planting, but at exposing the problems of society. One of them is the imperfection of legislation in relation to people who seduce minors, continues Kirill. - We catch pedophiles not out of love for children, but out of hatred for pedophiles. Hatred, alas, motivates more than love.
The matter does not move beyond the interview. The collected evidence is usually not enough to bring a child lover under an article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. In other cases, a case is not opened at all, because the parents of the “bait” refuse to contact the police.
Good with evil
How else to deal with all sorts of perverts and scammers on the Internet? By the way, the system of restrictions and prohibitive sanctions for illegal content does not work 100%. Government agencies daily create lists of prohibited sites, submit them to telecom operators, and they are obliged to block the resources. But information still circulates on the Internet, admits Anatoly Seleznev, head of the Roskomnadzor department for the Volga Federal District:
Unfortunately, we were not able to finally solve the problem of blocking information about drug distribution. Content owners do everything possible to preserve it, changing the IP address within a few minutes. The information again remains on the Internet,” Seleznev concluded.
Experts agree: the best way to protect children from the negative influence of the Internet is to teach adults, so that they, in turn, teach children how to behave on the Internet. In the Nizhny Novgorod region, programs have been formed to work with teachers, and they, in turn, will help parents and children avoid trouble.
It is important to ensure that from a very early age the World Wide Web is perceived not only as a means of communication and communication, but also as a means of obtaining information and education, says Associate Professor Elena Kalinkina, Vice-Rector of the Nizhny Novgorod Institute for Educational Development.
Competently
Marina Maslova, computer science teacher at secondary school No. 1, Semenov, Nizhny Novgorod region:
To resolve the issue of Internet security, we organized technical control and practical work with students and their parents. Access to the Internet at school is carried out using a “white list” compiled on the basis of the catalog “Educational resources on the Internet for basic general and secondary (complete) general education.”
According to tests conducted at school, more than 80% of children access the Internet at home. Therefore, we work closely with parents and hold school-wide thematic meetings dedicated to children’s adaptation to the Internet. Then we distribute leaflets, booklets, and reminders to parents.
Forms of holding parent meetings in classes - lectures, debates, testing, role-playing games. Recently, a parent meeting was held at school in the form of a role-playing game on the topic of how to make the Internet safe for a child. All parents received an invitation card upon entering the classroom indicating their role. The audience was divided into 3 different groups - “children”, “parents”, “experts”. A fairly typical situation was brought up for discussion. An adult on a social network invited the child to make friends - invited him to join an interest group, discuss everyday situations, and evaluate a photo. The children did not see any dangers in such a proposal. Parents' opinions were divided. Some considered it normal for a child to communicate with a stranger. Others were cautious and advised children to refrain from socializing. Experts recognized the latter’s position as correct.
Following the meeting, participants prepared a memo for parents. Later, the boys themselves performed the same role-playing game. She showed that children have become more critical of contacts on social networks. This certainly indicates that the interaction between parents and teachers is not in vain.
Officially
Sergey Kuchin, Minister of Information Technologies, Communications and Media of the Nizhny Novgorod Region:
Children today, from a very early age, use information technology much more actively than their parents. Most first-graders have modern smart phones with Internet access in their pockets. Many people have more than one computer at home with unlimited access to the Internet, and therefore to all the content that is present there.
Adults understand: the Internet is a storehouse of information, including information that children should not receive. And here the responsibility of parents and the entire environment involved in education arises. We need to learn to teach children to use modern technologies. It’s good that there are organizations and people who pay special attention to this and invest their own resources in developing programs...
There are many questions in the legal field. In addition to the technical possibilities of restricting access to the Internet, in addition to software, there are also regulatory ways to restrict those who generate and broadcast this information, and not only on the Internet.
Memo to parents
Talk to your child
It is important to tell your child what dangers the Internet poses. Give examples of how many evil, selfish and simply dangerous people for society are on dating sites and social networks.
Follow the profile
Add as a friend
Turn on the filter
Contact your provider to activate services for blocking sites with questionable content. Many companies have long offered so-called parental controls.
Protect documents and passwords
Personal information, scans of important documents, and passwords for online banking should not be stored on the computer that your child uses.
Cybercrime, pedophiles and online scammers are less of a concern to parents of children who are passionate about computers than the danger to their physical health. These conclusions were made by researchers from the analytical company B2B International, who surveyed Russian home Internet users over 16 years of age, commissioned by Kaspersky Lab.
In total, five main threats to children were named, which, according to adults, are fraught with the Internet.
Negative impact on the child’s health - 59%
Vision and posture are the main victims in the body of a young user who spends too much time at the computer. Even the most comfortable furniture is unlikely to help here - a person, and especially a young and actively growing one, needs to move a lot. If you spend the first half of the day sitting at a desk at school, and after lunch, first sitting on homework and then at the computer, it will be almost impossible to stay healthy.
“On the one hand, the parental control function can help here,” says Kaspersky Lab child safety expert Maria Namestnikova. - The program allows you to set the period of time when the child will be able to access the computer. But it is much better to simply offer and show by example interesting and varied activities outside the World Wide Web. Or, for example, encourage reading paper books instead of electronic books."
Internet addiction in children - 54%
For some reason, no one ever complains that people are dependent on water and air. Or, for example, from human affection and communication. They are considered the natural needs of people. Plunging headlong into the World Wide Web, people usually try to compensate for the lack of something in everyday life. What do children and teenagers do most on the Internet?
According to the cloud service Kaspersky Security Network, young users spend the vast majority of their virtual lives - 77 percent of the time spent on the Internet - on online communication tools. That is, social networks and instant messengers. Live communication is, of course, much more interesting. If there are no particular difficulties with it, then additional network communications are unlikely to lead to serious problems. If a child or teenager experiences difficulties with live communication, this is a reason to consult a psychologist. Computer and network dependencies here are not the cause, but the consequence of problems.
Children will see inappropriate content - 53%
Firstly, we are talking about the classic set: pornography, suicide, scenes of violence and cruelty. Search filters, privacy settings, and parental control programs help block access to sites with this content.
“Parents should not be lazy and set up the children’s gadget so that it simply does not allow access to resources that, in the opinion of mom and dad, the child should not visit,” continues Maria Namestnikova. “There is no need to be lazy tinkering with the settings or installing special programs, Moreover, it’s all quite easy to do.”
There is another approach to this problem. What we call “undesirable content” is also a part of our world that a child should also be introduced to. And, if a little person is raised not by the Internet, but by parents, then helping with this is their direct task. Naturally, this must be done as tactfully and carefully as possible, so as not to damage the fragile psyche.
“I don’t see anything wrong with my children seeing porn or something like that on the Internet,” explains twice-father actor Maxim Vitorgan. “The most important thing is that when faced with something surprising or shocking, they come to me , and we discussed what we saw. I think I can correctly explain the meaning of this and highlight all the emphasis. Trusting relationships with parents help much more than prohibitions and restrictions.”
There is also non-standard “objectionable content”. Network security experts pay special attention to cyberbullying. That is, the collective persecution of one person via the Internet. The scale of this phenomenon is quite serious. Last year, BtoB International researchers surveyed more than 11 thousand parents around the world, including Russia. The results surprised even experts. Almost all families have experienced cyberbullying in one form or another. Almost 60 percent of parents surveyed had to intervene themselves to protect their child from aggression. In addition, every sixth virtual conflict eventually grew into a real one. Moreover, often the victim of online bullying went to take revenge on his offenders in real life and thereby himself became an aggressor, and sometimes a criminal. Another seven percent of respondents said that their children experienced the consequences of cyberbullying so much that they had to recover for a long time from the psychological trauma they suffered. And, what is most dangerous, a quarter of the mothers and fathers of all victims of cyberbullying learned about the problems of their children only a considerable time after the incident itself.
In addition, according to another survey, now of children themselves, 80 percent of them are not going to tell their parents that they have been cyberbullied under any circumstances. Meanwhile, it is an adult who can quite easily stop an attack on his child: in most cases, it is enough to write a letter to the administrator of the social network where the aggression occurs. They have their own user protection technologies and usually respond to parental letters without unnecessary delay. And another category of “undesirable content” is thoughtless online shopping. Often, when passing a game, the user is offered to buy something. Even an adult does not always understand what they are offering to pay for with in-game currency and what for with real money. If a parent’s card is tied to the computer on which a child is playing, he can, without knowing it, give his parent’s salary, or even more than one, for his hero’s ammunition and other conditional benefits. Here are some recent stories. The young Briton paid 1,700 pounds Strellings (16,750 rubles) for purchases in the game Zombies vs Ninjas. One novice gamer spent $4,500 (291,000 rubles) in FIFA 2015, and the Game of War: Fire Age hobby cost another family $46,000 (almost 3 million rubles).
To prevent this from happening, experts advise not allowing children to play on parental gadgets, but when sharing a device, open a profile for each user. Then the child simply will not have the opportunity, willingly or unwillingly, to spend family money on his own entertainment.
Communication with strangers - 44%
Not all meetings are created equal. Children are easier to persuade than most adults; they are more trusting. Therefore, they can completely calmly tell their new virtual friend what they would never tell a stranger in ordinary life. For example, the parent’s bank card number and three digits of the CVC/CVV2 code, allowing you to make purchases online. Or the day when the whole family goes on vacation, leaving an empty apartment for a long time. Or some other information with which attackers can cause big trouble for the whole family. To prevent this, you need to teach your child a simple rule: communication on the Internet is exactly the same as communication in real life. Online anonymity is an imaginary thing, and you should not rely on it. Just as you shouldn’t publish compromising photos: your own, your family or friends. “What goes on the Internet stays on the Internet.” The post can be deleted, but the digital photograph or video itself posted in it will not go anywhere. It will remain in the depths of the World Wide Web and one day will emerge at the most inopportune moment.
Communication with strangers on the Internet can develop into real communication in life - 36%
Unfortunately, this danger is very real. Surveys show: every twentieth child has already attended meetings with people they know only through online communication. Such dates are dangerous because all kinds of villains: pedophiles, child abductors, drug dealers and so on - it is through social networks and dating sites that they often seek out and lure out their victims. Of course, the virtual interlocutor may well turn out to be a good, honest person, but the risk of running into a criminal during such meetings is very high.
In addition to these five dangers, which users themselves talk about, experts list several others that can come from the Internet. They are very different. For example, search engines can often produce very seditious answers to a completely harmless children’s request. A schoolboy types in “How to glue a model?”, and instead of airplanes and manuals for assembling them, he is given advice on meeting beautiful girls. Or children become victims of phishing - they follow a link to a site that looks very similar to a well-known resource. And even the address is almost the same - it differs by one letter or with a different domain - not .ru, but .com. There he is asked to type a password or provide some information about himself. Being confident that he is on a reliable site, the child does what is required and thereby transfers the information to attackers who can do with it as they please. Viruses and other malicious software also await unlucky young users. Russia is confidently one of the top three countries with the maximum distribution of banking Trojans that steal payment card numbers and PIN codes, and at the same time is a stable leader in the distribution of ransomware. Once on a computer, such a virus blocks its operation, and a notification appears on the screen indicating that the user has visited a site with some nasty stuff. And in order to unlock the computer, they offer to pay a “fine”.
In general, there are enough threats and dangers on the Internet. How to protect yourself from all of them? Experts recommend using two methods at once. First, install a good antivirus, set up parental controls and blocking of dangerous or unwanted content. And, secondly, raise your children yourself, be real parents for them, teach them, and not hope that the computer and the Internet will do this instead of mom and dad. According to surveys, in modern Russia, 45 percent of parents for some reason believe that children learn more from the Internet than from real life or from themselves. They will find out, of course. But such knowledge often comes at a prohibitively high price.
Modern children are familiar with the Internet from an early age. Many parents know that children face various dangers online. In the article we have collected material about what threats exist on the Internet and how parents can protect their children from these dangers by establishing rules, conversations and using special programs.
Why the Internet is dangerous for children and teenagers: types of threats
The main types of threats on the Internet for children:
- Sites related to sex. The Internet is full of services that promote unhealthy sexual relationships: sex for money, various corruptions, homosexuality. You need to protect your children from this, especially if they are still small and do not understand much.
- Sites that disseminate information about prohibited things and concepts. These include terrorism, sectarianism, fascism, etc. Such content can greatly harm a child’s weak psyche.
- Games. Firstly, many games contain violence and murder. Secondly, games begin to replace the real world, and it becomes increasingly difficult for a child to leave the game, especially if he felt like a real hero in the game and has a lot of friends there.
- Gambling. They promise big money in a short time. But it is much more difficult for a child to resist such a temptation than for an adult. Under the influence of a thirst for winning, a child may begin to waste his parents’ money.
- Forums, social networks, dating sites drag the child into the virtual world. He makes friends with a lot of people online, he communicates well there. But in reality, the child may have problems communicating with peers.
- There are a lot of scammers on the Internet and it’s easier for them to get close to us and our children. There are many ways to deceive a person. Let's look at one of the popular methods of online deception. The site asks you to enter your cell phone number, then you receive an SMS about winning a large sum of money. To receive them, scammers ask you to send an SMS from your phone to another number. As a result, a decent amount is debited from your mobile account.
- Cheating in the real world . Through the Internet, anyone can meet your child, for example, under the guise of a pretty girl and arrange a date with him. Your child comes to the meeting place, and an unknown man approaches him, introduces himself as the girl’s father and persuades him to take him to her, since she is sick. In this case, anything can happen to him. Therefore, teach your child not to trust strangers.
How to keep children safe on the Internet - tips for parents
Table. How to protect children from the dangers of the Internet?
| Types of dangers on the Internet | How can parents prevent their child from encountering dangers on the Internet? | What should parents do if their child encounters a certain dangerous situation online? |
| Objectionable Content | Tell your children that there is a lot of false information on the Internet. Teach them to ask you if they misunderstood something.
Be sure to ask what your child has seen on the Internet. It often happens that he becomes interested in one site, he begins to open other similar sites. It is worth enabling parental controls and safe search. They will help in the fight against unwanted content. |
The family should have rules for using the Internet. Thanks to this, the child will clearly know what to do if he encounters unwanted content.
Ask your child what he is looking for on the Internet. |
| Internet - dating | You must know who your child communicates with on the Internet; check his contacts to know who he communicates with.
If you notice that your child often communicates with people older than his age, then you should talk to him about it. You should not allow your child to meet an online friend without your permission. If he is eager to meet one of his virtual acquaintances, then you should definitely accompany your child. You need to know where your child goes and who he goes there with. |
Explain the following rules to your child:
1) You should not give your friend personal information about yourself. And acquaintance with a virtual acquaintance should take place under the supervision of parents. 2) If you feel uneasy when communicating with a friend on the Internet, convince him to break off such communication. |
| Cyberbullying | Talk to your child and convince him to communicate on the Internet politely and without rudeness.
Teach him to respond appropriately to messages from other people. Explain to him that you should not continue communicating with a person who is aggressive. If a child has been offended, then help him get out of this situation. On any forum or website, you can block this person or write a complaint about him to the moderator. Explain to him that you cannot make threats or spread gossip on the Internet. Keep track of what your child is doing online. Observe his mood after using the Internet. |
If a child receives insults via email or other services, it is worth changing contacts on the Internet.
If you find a picture of cyber-humiliation of your child online, be sure to contact the service administration or call the hotline. |
| Cyber fraud | Teach your child about types of scams and encourage him to seek adult advice if he wants to use any online service.
It is worth installing an antivirus or personal firewall on your computer. |
If your child wants to make a purchase in an online store, then tell him about the safety rules.
It is worth checking all the data about the store (details, name of the legal entity). Find out if the online store delivers cash receipts. Please read the store rules carefully. Find out exactly how much you will need to pay for the product. Tell your child that you shouldn’t give out all the information about yourself when you buy something in an online store. |
| Gaming and Internet addiction | Observe your child and analyze how much time he spends on the Internet every day.
Chat with your child, ask what he is doing online. Does he neglect his real hobbies in life: does he play his favorite sports, does he read, etc. Look at his mood after each exit from the Internet. If he is in a bad mood, aggressive, irritable and does not want to talk to anyone, this indicates Internet addiction. |
Communicate with your child more often, show interest in his personal life, play with him.
You cannot prohibit him from using the Internet, but it is worth limiting his stay on it. Allow him to use only your computer or a computer that is located in the common room for better control of the child’s Internet activity. If you see that a child has become attached to the Internet and practically cannot live without it. Convince him that nothing bad will happen if he takes a few hours off from the Internet. |
| Malware | It is necessary to install specialized mail filters and anti-virus programs on all computers.
It is worth using licensed programs and data only from trusted places. Explain to your child that you should not download everything, but only verified information. Scan your computers for viruses every week. Be sure to copy important documents to a flash drive or disk. Change the passwords on your accounts every three months and do not use overly simple passwords. |
Communicate with your child kindly. Win him over, he must trust you.
Listen carefully to your child if something happens. Try to understand how much this affected him. If a child made a mistake and was hacked on a social network, or he decided to buy something on the Internet and came across a scam, then you should not scold him too much. We just need to figure it out together and calmly explain to him the rules of action on the Internet. If a child is threatened on the Internet, then you need to find out all the information about this person. Ask the child if he has met him. You should definitely insist that you cannot meet strangers. You can try to collect more information about this person, copy the messages he sent and contact the police. If you notice that the child does not say something or you cannot understand what happened, contact specialists who will tell you what actions to take in this situation. |
“Parental Control” program - assistance in ensuring the safety of a child on the Internet
There are a lot of programs for parental control of children on the Internet. Let's look at some of them.
- Paid program KinderGate Parental Control b blocks sites for adults, there are settings to limit access to gaming sites, sites with violence or drugs, etc. You can set a schedule when the child can surf the Internet. You can see what sites he visits.
- Free browser for children's Internet filter CyberDad. Here the filter is turned on and the child visits only children's sites that have been carefully checked. Only parents can turn it off if they know the password.
- Paid program CyberMama. You can create times when your child can be online. All this is controlled. You can also block Internet access.
- Free children's browser Gogul. This browser has its own children's sites. Here is the time when the child can surf the Internet. You can limit your Internet access. Parents receive a full report of which sites their children were on.
- NetKids. Parents view all the sites their child visits. They can also block dangerous sites.
- Paid program KidsControl. Here you can manually limit access to dubious resources and control the time your child spends on the Internet.
Advice from experts on child safety on the Internet
The first thing parents need to do is teach their child not to share passwords with anyone. Tell your child: “Never share your passwords with others, even friends. Keep written down passwords out of reach. Never give out your password by email." ( A. Levchenko, Assistant to the Commissioner for Children's Rights under the President of the Russian Federation, Director of the NP Monitoring Center for identifying dangerous and prohibited content by law)
It is important to teach your child not to share personal information online and not to publish confidential data. Excessive frankness on the Internet is fraught. At the same time, it is important to remember that personal information may become available unintentionally: by using autocomplete functions, allowing applications to track location, filling out fields indicating address and telephone number, a child exposes himself to additional danger. Contact between parents and children is a key factor on which a teenager’s behavior in virtual life depends. Parents should navigate social networks, know what sites their children are on and how they spend their time, and, in addition, improve their own level of technical awareness.( R. Veraksic, security expert at McAfee, a division of Intel Security)
Communicate more with your children, gain their trust, take an interest in their affairs, involve them in family games, go to sports with them. Then your child will not want to spend a long time on the Internet, because real life will be more interesting for him than virtual life.
Virtual communication is an integral part of the pastime of modern teenagers - however, young people, accustomed to spending their free time on the Internet, use communication opportunities in different ways: some get acquainted with the basics of computer graphics or study educational programs, while others crave the desire to assert themselves, get rich illegally, or simply create a virtual image " superhero" - very far from real. A teenager's involvement in cybercrime can occur in various ways.
Schoolchildren on the Internet must be monitored. Parents and teachers should explain to the child that information that is of a personal nature should not be posted on social networks. At the same time, it is necessary to explain to teenagers that communicating with strangers is just as unsafe as in real life.
Recently, such a dangerous phenomenon as cyberbullying has been gaining momentum. This is a form of harassment, bullying or intimidation of children using information technology. Its main goal is to cause psychological harm. Most often teenagers do this.
This is expressed in the fact that often offensive or threatening phrases are sent on children’s pages on behalf of other Internet users. Children often take them seriously. Most teenagers whose home computers are connected to the World Wide Web are regular users of social messengers. The number of visitors to the Odnoklassniki website has already exceeded a million users, and the VKontakte network, mega-popular among teenagers today, is the first most visited site on the Russian-language Internet (Runet). Cyberbullying is a phenomenon that arises for a number of reasons: some teenagers are driven by anger or envy, others simply cannot assert themselves in the real world and give their opponents an “intellectual challenge” on the Internet.
Example: a teenager, wanting to annoy a classmate, created a copy of her VKontakte page. I posted a real photo of the girl there, but instead of hobbies, I indicated very obscene details. Then it got worse: the computer hooligan began sending obscene messages to her friends and acquaintances on behalf of the “victim.” It also happens that the chosen victim is subjected to real persecution. This can be either a continuous stream of insults, or the disclosure of details that are not entirely pleasant for this person. A distinctive feature of the Internet is its anonymity. Therefore, often a teenager who has become a “scapegoat” of virtual tormentors does not even know who is hiding behind the mask of this or that user. This could be a “friend” with whom the “victim” did not share the boy, or a classmate who was jealous of the new mobile phone. The problem is that a person can ignore the real offender and respond in kind. It is difficult for an adult to survive mental trauma, and the fragile psyche of a teenager in such cases can behave very unpredictably...
For those who have become victims of virtual criminals, a number of recommendations:
So, if your page is supposedly created on the Internet with offensive content or slander:
- Save a copy (take a screenshot) in case the offender tries to delete it. There is an option - print it out.
2. File a report with the police. Please indicate how you found out about the clone page and what you consider offensive in its content.
3. Contact the administrator of the site where the information is posted - ask to block, but not delete this page.
Wandering through the endless expanses of social networks, teenagers often come across thematic groups with “telling” names: “Hemp is not a drug”, “The best girls in the country”. By registering in such a group, schoolchildren unwittingly find themselves in a circle of people whose interests and hobbies are based on such criminal acts. It's no secret that social networks today are a real Klondike for criminal elements recruiting replacements. Moreover, many of them no longer hide their intentions. Parents and teachers should tell students that such groups should be avoided.
Groups on social networks that promote suicide directly threaten the life of a teenager. One of the signs that a child is interested in suicidal topics may be the appearance of certain numbers and drawings in his notebooks, notepads and albums. Often members of dangerous groups talk or write about numbers " 57", "58", "50"(the first two numbers refer to the names of groups on the social network “VKontakte”, the second is associated with the book “50 days before my suicide” by Stace Kramer). Sometimes the number can be arbitrary, but often repeated. It may indicate that the leaders of a dangerous community assigned the child a serial number, which he now calls himself and uses for his identification. As for the drawings, parents and teachers should be wary of: whales, butterflies, knives, images of scars and cuts (including on the hands of a child). All this is symbolic of communities pushing teenagers towards irreparable things. You also need to be wary of names, like Eva Reich, Philip Lis, Myron Seth.
Sometimes a sign that a child is visiting dangerous groups on the Internet can be drowsiness. The fact is that there is a community on the social network that encourages teenagers to get up early in the morning, at 4:20, to correspond with like-minded people and group leaders. We recommend that parents go into their child's bedroom from time to time at night to make sure that he is sleeping and not sitting at the computer or hugging a tablet.
Members of closed groups have their own pseudo-mysterious signs that are very attractive to impressionable teenagers. Among them is a symbol with the word “It” written inside it. It can be seen in group profile photos. In addition, to lure teenagers into groups, quotes about death, inscriptions in Hebrew (usually without translation), illiterate phrases with supposedly deep meaning, and excerpts from holy books are used. Cruel and dark videos, as well as musical compositions on the theme of death, are regularly posted on community pages.
A fair question arises as to why groups that encourage teenagers to commit suicide are not removed or closed by the departments responsible for this. In fact, work to find and block them is ongoing, but new ones are appearing in place of closed communities, and they are designed in such a way that you can get an invitation to them after going through several degrees of elimination. If you suspect that your child may be interested in the topic of suicide, pay attention to the following phrases in the search history or in his VKontakte profile: “#f57, #f58, #quiet house, #rina, #nyapka, #whales, #morekits.
Let me remind you that in a family where there is trust between parents and children, there are no problems with Internet addiction, because the child discusses difficult moments with his parents and there is no need to fill any gaps in real life with virtual activities.
Head of the OPDN Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Millerovsky District
Police Major P.N. Berezhnaya
