Criminals are making virtual connections with children through gaming and social media platforms. One popular site warns visitors, “Please be careful.”
Excerpt:
"His wife, Rhonda, compared the predicament to watching a child get behind the wheel of a car: “You have to trust them.”
Ms. Marshall said it was also hard to ignore the potential upside of their son’s gaming. “He kept telling me, ‘Mom, you told me I shouldn’t spend so much time on computers, but I can get scholarships for this,’” she said.
Still, there’s no hiding the dangers. Kristy Custer, the principal at Complete High School Maize in Kansas, helped design the curriculum used by many high-school e-sports teams.
“Right now, in the curriculum, we have a section on, ‘If this happens to you, this is what you do,’” she said. “But we probably need to say, ‘When this happens to you, this is what you need to do.’”
Dr. Custer said parents should react carefully when their children report encounters with online predators. Punishing the children — no more video games or social media, for example — could backfire by pushing them into even more dangerous places for their online activity.
“You just did exactly what that predator wanted them to do — and drove them into the darker space,” she said."
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