There is only so much you can do as a parent and it's not easy knowing the right answer without hindsight, but personally as a child who broke every firewall used to control my browsing habits, who engaged routinely with people 10+ years older, I have experienced more creeps in real life than online and most small communities I've been a part of would shut that stuff down immediately.
It's definitely a problem with scale as far as community moderation, however even when creeps made attempts at me online I knew to report, block and move on. I think our fear over exposing our children to topics of sexuality prevent them the chance to develop the appropriate sensibilities to avoid being targeted.
There's not an easy solution, but I hope that being open with my children about the kind of vile people in this world and the tactics they use to trick and manipulate others will instill enough common sense that I don't have to hover over their Roblox sessions. I'm curious if in hindsight you could have educated her better, or if you think it just didn't stick.
Assuming you're male... it's not that there are zero predators seeking male children, but the threat does seem to be asymmetric. (I may be wrong about this! It a supposition based on my experiences and what I've heard from others.)
> as a child who broke every firewall used to control my browsing habits, who engaged routinely with people 10+ years older, I have experienced more creeps in real life than online and most small communities I've been a part of would shut that stuff down immediately.
Same situation and I was groomed repeatedly (luckily mostly, though not entirely, ineptly). Perhaps not a coincidence that I'm a girl...
> I knew to report, block and move on.
Or that girls are often sexually precocious and may _want_ pseudo-romantic attention from older men, while being too naive to see the risks to them. That was certainly my case.
Overall I don't think it's as simple or easy as you're making it out to be.
I didn't mean to oversimplify, just didn't want to get too longwinded. I agree with the points you make. That's why I think it's a difficult problem, because I realize not everyone thinks the way I do and I want to learn how to distill that knowledge into others.
Assuming that sexual precociousness is a natural feeling, which as a male I certainly felt in my youth, is there a way you think you could have safely satisfied or otherwise dealt with those feelings appropriately, or did it come down to a misunderstanding of power dynamic or that you were being manipulated? Did it stem from a lack of closeness with the existing male figures in your life?
Clearly we both found that prohibition does little to stop the fortuitous, so instead of trying to control and track my children's internet habits I hope I can just address these issues directly and just raise them to be sensible.
It seems to me like there's a lot I can do as a parent. I control the endpoints. I can use certificate pinning and a proxy to read https traffic on the network. I can get passwords and accounts and monitor contacts.
Whether I should do that is more of a question. But I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that children will be able to escape digital surveillance.
My point is that I can't track my childrens' every moves, MITM them, while simultaneously teaching them about the dangers of the surveillance state and the value of cryptography. So I have to rely on the same means we used before the internet, which I feel is something of a dying body of knowledge.
It's definitely a problem with scale as far as community moderation, however even when creeps made attempts at me online I knew to report, block and move on. I think our fear over exposing our children to topics of sexuality prevent them the chance to develop the appropriate sensibilities to avoid being targeted.
There's not an easy solution, but I hope that being open with my children about the kind of vile people in this world and the tactics they use to trick and manipulate others will instill enough common sense that I don't have to hover over their Roblox sessions. I'm curious if in hindsight you could have educated her better, or if you think it just didn't stick.