Following on from my recent article on protecting our children when using social networking sites on the internet, I received an interesting and informative letter from Gabriel Luu of Safe Chat, who outlines what she has done within her organisation to help parents.
She writes, "Great article, Aideen, and very informative for parents to become aware and understand the current problems that are harming our kids. We can't keep adults from going to websites, but we should be able to control our kids from going to sites where they should not be.
"Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world and social network sites were not designed for kids. They are open playgrounds for all sorts of individuals and thus it leaves a certain vulnerablility for our kids to be on without supervision.
"I developed Safe Chat to prevent unauthorised access to our children. Safe Chat does not monitor software, as this does not prevent kids from chatting to strangers. By the time parents review the monitoring report, their child has already been in contact with strangers.
"Safe Chat is a tool, however, that allows parents to protect their children by preventing them from chatting to strangers, from viewing inappropriate materials, and from downloading porn videos and photos in the peer-to-peer networks. In other words, if you don't have permission to chat with the child, you can't.
"Parents have complete control. Nothing like our programme has existed before - instant message protection, surfing protection, foul language protection, peer-to-peer protection and password protected parental controls that can't be circumvented.
"Safe Chat content filtering is fully customisable. For example, if the parents don't want their kids to see online contents about 'bomb-making,' they can customise it and Safe Chat will prevent them from viewing any pages that contain these contents. We have been very fortunate to receive great publicity for our works and endorsement from government officials and law enforcement. Visit http://www.zihtec.com/en/achievement.html for more information. Many police departments love our approach of being proactive instead of reacting after a crime has been committed. I hope this letter is of interest to your readers."
I'm sure there are many parents and guardians who will find this information useful.
As the school holidays are fast coming to an end and the start of the new academic year is almost upon us, our thoughts are turning towards the many ups and downs of school life. For parents and pupils alike, the start of the new term can be a fairly daunting prospect. For some, that first day back at school can be very difficult indeed. Bullying at school is always a subject for discussion and one which needs to be addressed, so if you as a parent or indeed if you are a pupil, then feel free to write in with your experiences to the address below.
* Aideen Shannon can be contacted at a.shannon@ulsterherald.com or write to her at c/o The Scene, Ulster Herald, 14 John Street, Omagh BT78 1DW
