A safety net for the Internet: Protecting our children

According to authorities, there is unprecedented growth in child pornography in the United States largely because of the Internet, which provides child sexual predators with a virtually undetectable means of sending and receiving illicit im- ages of children (Huycke, 1997). Because of its anonymity, rapid transmission, and unsupervised nature, the Internet has become the venue of choice for predators who transmit and receive child pornogra- phy. “The Internet is the ultimate distribution system for child pornography,” says Robert Flores, a former attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (Kaplan, 1997). “Before the Internet, pedophiles and child predators targeted children in parks and playgrounds, offering ice cream or candy to gain the child’s trust.” Today, the virtual playground of cyberspace affords these child sexual predators the opportunity to engage children in anonymous exchanges that often lead to personal questions designed to assess whether the child can be lured into sexual conversations and sexual contact.