Preying on Children

About a week ago, a dear friend of mine's grandson had an incident on the computer at her house. The boy, only 10 years of age, was attempting to help his little sister find the Care Bears website. As he typed in the web address, he accidentally misspelled the carebears portion of the web address and instead put in carebares. Without noticing his error, he pressed enter so that the website could be found. Instead of the safe and fun children's website of Care Bears, the ten year old boy and his younger sister were exposed to pornography!

Completely surprised and afraid, the boy attempted to shut of the site as quickly as possible. Once he shut it down once, it returned again. He then proceeded to tell his grandpa and became extremely upset as to what he saw and feeling that he did something bad.

Thankfully my friend's husband was able to remove the site from the computer and talk to the ten year old boy about the situation. He assured the boy that he did NOTHING wrong, that it was an accident and he was not in trouble. He thanked him for telling him what had happened immediately and expressed that computer time would be suspended for a little while until he and my friend could put a filter on that would allow the same situation to not occur again, hopefully.

Fast forward to days later, after the boy's mother wrote the FBI regarding the disgusting incident in which her boy and daughter were exposed. The FBI officer graciously replied that he received hundreds of calls on these same type incidents regularly, and that there was nothing they could do regarding the name of the website. He said the name of the site was protected by constitutional rights.

To be quite honest, that kind of stuff ticks me off!!! Obviously such sites are thriving on and preying on children. Why else would they make their web address so closely associate with children's things??? Care Bears, Disney stuff, there are tons of sites that are just a letter or two off safe websites that a mistyping can cause you to see images you do not desire. A ten year old boy should NOT have to see such a thing!

So I say... if you can't have disgusting pornography sites change their names due to constitutional rights, then let's at least mandate a sort of HOME PAGE on each porn site that is not allowed to expose images. This would alleviate children from haphazardly falling into these sites and being damaged by their imagery. Why not have a law that makes porn sites have a home page that makes you take one click more to reach the dirty pictures. The people that desire to see such will not be hindered by a simple extra click, but the innocent people that stumble accidentally on sites will not be victimized by the images from the start.

I'm planning on working up a letter regarding this for my friend and her daughter. I hope that my letter is compelling enough to have them, as well as some others send this type request to their congressman. We have got to do something beyond computer filters to save our children from such things. Not every computer a child has access to is filtered appropriately, a home page rule such as I've described would help alleviate those accident and innocent misspellings.

Grrrr. Some people are sick, I say!