To catch a sexual predator – NBC Dateline

When I viewed a program on NBC Dateline TV called “To catch a predator” about these sick adults on the internet who target our children, it sent chills up my spine.

Sadly, we have recently been exposed to the story of now 19-year old Justin Berry, a victim of online predators since he was thirteen years old. He testified in front of Congress in early April 2006 about how he was sexually exploited through the internet by thousands of adults. A day later, we heard about our own Homeland Security - Deputy Press Secretary – Mr. Brian J. Doyle being arrested for attempting to lure a 14 year-old girl (another sting operation) into having sex.

These predators are from all walks of life, are often “educated” and lead productive, professional lives. The danger they pose more insidious because they prey on our children slowly to gain their trust, wait for the right opportunity when our children are most vulnerable then they strike. All of these premeditated, cowardly practices are performed each day from behind the veil of the internet chat room.

We’ve looked for tools to protect children but have been incredibly disappointed. The choices are limited and the claims of protection are easily circumvented. They all claim to protect, but none of them offer any preventative intervention; instead, they are all reactionary proclaiming monitoring and filtering technology as the answer.

Watching the trends, it is clear that Internet messaging and social network website is the new medium for online communication and one that presents the most danger for our children.

Since parents can not always be around to protect their children while online, Safe Chat Universal Messenger™ with Parental Controls was created. Safe Chat can not replace the supervision of a parent, but it is a great tool to help parents prevent unauthorized individuals from reaching our children via the internet.

When properly installed and configured, Safe Chat gives complete control back to the parents and allows them to specify when and with whom their child can chat online.

Safe Chat has the following features:

• One, standard interface to manage chat sessions with multiple popular chat programs, including AIM (AOL), Yahoo, MSN and ICQ.
• Prevents the child from conversing outside of the hours specified by the parent
• Prevents the child from receiving foul language during a chat session due to Wordguard™, a built-in list of prohibited word and phrases that can be easily customized at anytime by the parent. Any language that is contained in the list will be masked as *****, while the rest of the phrase will be visible.
• Prevents the child from visiting known dangerous web-based chat sites via built-in list of prohibited sites that can be easily customized at anytime by the parent
• Prevents the child from circumventing the Safe Chat protection once set by the parent. Attempts to launch or load other chat software applications will be automatically shut down.
• Notifies the parent via email each time a child logs in or attempts to log into Safe Chat
• Notifies the parent via email anytime someone attempts to enter a password and change parental control settings
• We even built in a provision to allow the parent to continue working on that computer without interference by clicking an icon in the system tray and temporarily suspending the program. Restarting the protection is simple mouse-click away.
• Prevents the child from uninstalling Safe Chat by password protecting the uninstall process.

Try Safe Chat FREE for 30-days.

Please visit our website for more information about Safe Chat.