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Where Was the Responsible Adult?
By Nicole Chardenet, Bristol
It was bound to happen sooner or later. A child has been murdered by someone she met on the Internet. My only surprise is that it hasn't happened before this.
A 13-year-old Danbury girl was found dead in Greenwich after meeting a 25-year-old Brazilian national over the computer. The first question that went through my head, as it inevitably does when children run into trouble via strangers they met in chat rooms, was: "And where the hell were her parents?"
As it turns out, her aunt is her legal guardian, and it was she who lacked vigilance in monitoring what her teenage niece was doing. The papers report she "thought she was keeping track of things," but given that the police found emails from the alleged murderer that the aunt didn't know about, which the girl herself hadn't deleted, I'm guessing the aunt knew as much about her niece's on-line activities as I know about how to build the space shuttle.
I knew that before the media told me. I've been in the computer business for ten years and I know there is no beast more common in the world than the Clueless Parent.
My first experience with the Clueless Parent began almost as soon as I started working in computers. A father I spoke to said they had just bought a new computer (not from our company) and he'd found a lot of pornography on it. When he questioned his teenage son, the boy claimed he didn't know anything about it, that it must have come with the computer. Was that customary? The father wanted to know. No, I told him, and while there's the slight chance it did mistakenly come with pornography loaded on it—perhaps an unethical technician used their computer to download files—it was more likely that someone in the home had downloaded it. Do you have a modem on your computer? Yes? Then it's likely the pornography has been downloaded since you brought the machine home, sir.
Then there was the man a few years ago who was really proud of his eight-year-old son who was "all over the Internet" but admitted he had no clue what he was doing. When I gently suggested he might want to take more of an interest in his son's activities he shrugged it all off; he said he "couldn't" learn the computer but what he really meant was he couldn't be bothered to learn how to use the computer like his son—and he was indirectly abrogating his responsibility as a parent.
I don't think there's any excuse for a parent or guardian to not know what their children are doing on the Internet. If you don't have time to learn, if you can't be bothered to learn, or if you think you're just not smart enough to learn, then you should not have a computer in the house, or at least no Internet account. There's simply no excuse for the ongoing lack of parental responsibility for making sure their children surf safely. Do you have time to talk to your children about appropriate/ inappropriate touching? Or not to accept candy from strangers? Then why is there no time to talk about the perils of cyberspace?
In a perfect world, parents have an honest and open relationship with their kids, and don't have to spy on them or invade their privacy to keep them safe. In the real world, there are good parents who nevertheless have untrustworthy children, or simply children who don't have as good judgment as the kids themselves might think. There are also clueless, irresponsible parents who'd rather not be bothered with the whole computer thingy because it's just too much trouble to learn how to use it, and to keep an eye on what their kids are doing. There are huge red flags for what the aunt of the murdered girl was not doing to protect her charge: In addition to not even knowing about the deleted emails from a man enticing a minor for sexual purposes, she missed the sexually suggestive instant-messaging identities the girl was using to chat with the man, the chat logs and who knows who else. The girl also had a web page of her own that Auntie knew nothing about.
Looking through old emails and checking your kids' chat room identities isn't rocket science. Neither is checking history files, or cookie files, cybersearching a kid for a web page or knowing where to look for deleted files on the computer. For parents whose kids are savvier than they are—and perhaps more devious—it does take a bit of work to learn the tricks their kids already know, like how they're overriding parental control software, how to cover their on-line tracks, and finding software the kids might have installed surreptitiously to help them hide their activities. Many kids know a lot more about computers than the adults around them, and they know they know more. The boys who committed the horrific Columbine massacre banked on their parents' ignorance about computers and the Internet, where they left neon signs that trouble was on the way.
For some families, it can be a game of technological leapfrog—the kids trying to hide what they're doing, their parents trying to keep up. If you don't have time to play these games with your kids, the answers are quite simple—restrict use of the Internet, or put the family computer in a commonly used room rather than allowing one in the bedroom. Teach them ground rules, like never giving out their real names or personal identities to strangers; restrict their use of the computer like you might TV or video games; and ground them from the computer when they break the rules.
And make sure they're following the rules. It sounds simple, but a lot of parents just can't be bothered, or won't take the power in their families, and one guardian in Danbury who didn't pay enough attention is partially responsible for her niece's death. You can argue whether the aunt had as much culpability as I'm claiming, but I'm betting the aunt doesn't really care because she's already blaming herself for a death she can't take back, her own private hell that she's going to have to live with for the rest of her life. Do you want to whine and complain about parents and guardians taking the blame for these events, or do you want to protect your children? Will you care whether I'm being harsh with parents now if it's YOUR child lying dead in a ditch or raped by a stranger in a motel room?
Friends and neighbors, please DON'T let this happen to your family! Take responsibility, get savvy about the Internet! Know what your kids are doing! Take a class, for god's sake! Ignorance is no excuse!
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