Is your child protected from cyber sex crimes?

POSTSCRIPT By Federico D. Pascual, Jr.
The Philippine Star

VIRTUAL SEX: Have you bought your precocious child one of those small cameras mounted on personal computers allowing users to video-talk with one another? Has your kid been doing more on-line chatting than using his PC for his homework?

The Internet and such infotech gadgets have spawned myriad e-businesses, some of them catering to pedophiles and sex perverts.

In a significant number of cases, many seemingly "nice" youths have fallen victims of sexploitation without their trusting parents being able to do anything about it – because they do not know or do not care enough to find out.

Children in the privacy of their rooms have been seduced into undressing or doing lewd acts in front of those PC cameras thinking they were doing it for a friend or a crush. In many cases, the pornography is filmed without their knowledge and end up being retailed to millions of paying viewers worldwide.

While the old telephone is all audio, now computers are audio-visual or virtual presence. Invasive TV goes one-way into the home from outside, but computers have made the trafficking of sexual content two-way. The home, even the bedroom, has lost its privacy.

If it is not a commercial racket, such electronic sexual contact could be a one-on-one case of seduction of minors, or a "fun" activity of friends who engage in virtual orgy via computers. * * *
BIG FISH: You would be surprised to know who are engaged in this sordid sexploitation.

In Florida, after surveillance the police arrested yesterday Brian J. Doyle, spokesman and a deputy press secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security at his computer at home for allegedly seducing a 14-year-old girl into some sexual situations.

The surprised DHS official did not know that his target victim online was a decoy and that the police have been documenting his alleged seductive advances and propositions with the use of computers.

Good they caught this big fish. But for every sexploiter arrested, how many others get away and continue victimizing youths who are not ready to handle the psychological trap?

In the Philippines, what have lawmakers – when they are not busy politicking and making money – done to update pertinent laws? Are the schools addressing the problem? Are there enough police and prosecution officers continually trained to fight cybercrime?

The Philippine National Police or the National Bureau of Investigation may want to organize workshops for parents, guardians and youngsters on this new form of sexploitation.

Or do we just let the potential victims learn the sad facts of life by themselves?

Video Game Violence: What is it Doing to Our Boys?

Rebecca Hagelin
The Heritage Foundation


"Life is like a video game. Everyone has to die sometime."

If you spent part of your youth playing "Pac-Man" and "Space Invaders," such a statement must seem bizarre. Video games were … well, games -- innocent diversions that did nothing worse than eat up dotted lines and too much of our allowances. A waste of time? Perhaps. But nobody got hurt.

At least, they didn’t used to.

The opening statement above was spoken by Devin Moore, a teenager who murdered three people -- two police officers and a 911 dispatcher -- in a Fayettesville, Ala., police station in 2003. Arrested on suspicion of car theft, Moore was brought in for booking and ended up on a bloody rampage.

He lunged at Officer Arnold Strickland, grabbed his gun and shot him twice. Officer James Crump, who responded to the sound of the gunfire, was shot three times. And before he ran outside with police car keys he snatched, Moore put five bullets in Dispatcher Ace Mealer. Was this the first time Moore had committed such a heinous crime? Yes and no.

Moore was a huge fan of a notorious video game called Grand Theft Auto. As the title suggests, the goal is to steal cars. If that’s all there was to the "game" it would be bad enough, but it gets worse: the way to acquire and hold on to the cars is to kill the police officers who try to stop you. And the sick minds behind the game give you plenty of choices -- shooting them with a rifle, cutting them up with a chainsaw, setting them on fire, decapitation.

If you shoot an officer, you get extra points for shooting him in the head. It's no surprise, then, that all of Moore’s real-life victims had their heads blown off.

According to court records, Moore spent hundreds of hours playing Grand Theft, which has been described as "a murder simulator."

But this time, his victims weren’t a collection of animated pixels on a TV screen. They were flesh-and-blood human beings whose lives were snuffed out in seconds. They had families who continue to mourn their loss -- such as Steve Strickland, Officer Strickland’s brother. Tomorrow, he will testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property. Chaired by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., the purpose of the hearing is to examine the constitutionality of state laws regulating the sale of ultra-violent video games to children. Three psychologists will testify about the potential link between playing violent video games and copycat violence, and whether the games contribute to aggressive behavior.

With the ever-expanding use of technology by our children, such hearings are critical. We must determine if Moore and other murderers like him are anomalies or if ultra violent video games dangerously warp the psyches of our youth. Those tempted to scoff at the connection between video games and behavior should bear a couple of things in mind. First, video games are not passive or spectator media. While playing the game, teenage boys and young men, the largest users of video games, actually become the characters who cut up their victims with chainsaws, set them on fire, or chop off their heads.

According to Dr. Elizabeth Carll of the American Psychological Association (who also will testify tomorrow), this active participation enhances the "learning" experience. And video games are often played repeatedly for hours on end -- so, hour after hour, teens playing games such as Grand Theft Auto "learn" how to kill police officers and earn points for their barbarianism.

The second fact to keep in mind is that teenagers’ brains are still developing and are extremely impressionable. The parents of teens hardly need reminding that for all their joys, teens often lack judgment, critical thinking skills and foresight. Some are better than others, yes, but many (like Moore) are startlingly deficient. In short: Put a "murder simulator" in their hands, and you just might be asking for trouble. But don’t put words in my mouth – I am not saying that every kid that plays a violent video game will become a criminal.

And as a staunch conservative who believes that "the government that governs least governs best," I’m not advocating a plethora of laws that may have a chilling effect on free speech. I do, however, recognize that it is sometimes necessary to provide special protections for minors from harmful materials - take pornography and alcohol, for example. As a mother, I also believe that our nation must examine how the products of our toxic culture affect the civility and safety of our children and of our society. We owe it to the students who died at Columbine; we owe it to Devin Moore’s victims; we owe it to our own children.

But armed with the truth, and a God-given mandate to train our own children, we must never depend on government to take care of our kids or raise them. Parents must wake up to the fact that our nation’s boys are being used and manipulated by an industry making billions of dollars by warping their minds. As I outline in my book, Home Invasion: Protecting Your Family in a Culture That’s Gone Stark Raving Mad, it doesn’t take an act of Congress to take back your home -- it takes active, loving, informed parenting. It takes setting boundaries and sticking with them. It takes understanding our kids, and understanding that our kids need us to guide them. Senator Brownback is taking a bold step and doing his job as an elected official in exploring the effects of video game violence - it's up to parents to use the information to protect our sons and our society.




Just got the chance to read it, and I must agree that there is a curious lack of attention as to how the parents might have taught their child, and too much blame on the effect of the game. If anything, I think it just underscores the point that people, in this case Americans, are putting too much trust in the media, and materials of media, to raise their kids. True, kids need a chance to get out and explore so they can learn, but too much freedom without guidance is just as irresponsible as being too strict, and too much protection and shelter from the world, and narrowing a child's POV to the point of making them out of sync with the world as a result. They want to blame media violence? Then explain Wile E. Coyote, Woody Woodpecker, and their ilk, and the products of that generation when the object of the outcome of many cartoons then was to make fools out of authority figures.

Joey Gohu

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I read the article written by Rebecca Hagelin of The Heritage Foundation. Though it is a well-written article, I find that it puts too much blame on Video Games for the observed teen violence.

In the end, it all boils down to parenting. In a way, video games can be used to teach, even the most violent ones.

Cheers!

Gerel Roa