Kids' Net safety: Another step

The child-porn hotlines that have developed all over Europe are doing extremely important work, but they're also a first step toward a broader goal: protecting online kids. Not just from abuse by child pornographers but also from contacts and grooming by pedophiles online. With today's launch of the Virtual Global Taskforce's Web site, the goal's a little closer. The site reflects some remarkable cooperative work. Initiated by the UK's National Crime Squad, the VGT is an international partnership between law enforcement agencies and the tech industry in Canada, the UK, Australia, the US, and Interpol (that last is the world's largest international police organization, with 182 member countries). Their goal is to "make the Internet a safer place" by fighting all forms of online abuse of children (also to make the Internet "a more hostile place for pedophiles").

The VGT's site itself aims to 1) be "a one stop shop for all information about child protection online" and 2) to help people report online child abuse. The first is a tall order for any law-enforcement Web site because so much of online-child protection is about day-to-day parenting, but there's some great info in the site, especially the six "Top Tips" on the kids' page. The site also has a ways to go on point #2. This is just one parent's perspective, but I've watched this scene for a long time and have felt that, ever since the US's CyberTipline.com went live (at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children), that's what every parent in the world should have access to in an emergency. Having a child immediately at risk online happens pretty rarely, but when it does, parents need to know where to go and there needs to be someone at the other end, 24/7. [As of this week, Canadian parents now have the Cybertip.ca, and the UK is working on something like North America's tiplines.]

CyberTipline.com and Cybertip.ca are linked to from VirtualGlobalTaskforce.com, but they're several clicks down from the home page, the word "emergency" doesn't appear anywhere, and it's not clear on the first few pages that there will be immediate help unless you call your local police (which by now, if there's an emergency, you probably already did!). It'll be great when a parent in any country can go to something like North America's hotlines and get fast action, even if it's a little advice or a local contact from a calm, expert analyst looking at a database of local law-enforcement people nationwide who know just what to do when a child is at risk online. Here's more on emergency help in my site. And here's the BBC's coverage and the VGT's press release on its new site.