On November 2011, we started something called “HBB Initiative” and we successfully implemented little plans on World Day for Prevention of Child Abuse [Nov 19th, 2010] and International Day of Persons with Disabilities [Dec 3rd, 2010]. I would like to thank you for showing your support during those stages.
The main intention of this Initiative is to create social awareness and make bloggers to publish social related posts to help normal people, apart from providing constant tech related news.
A single post won’t change anything, but 100 or 1000, say 10K readers can make a difference. Established in 2000 by the Women’s World Summit Foundation, November 19 (today) is an international day to acknowledge the importance of preventing child abuse.
What is Online Child Abuse?
Online child abuse includes:
- Searching for, sharing and downloading images of children being physically and sexually abused.
- “Grooming” children in chat rooms with the intention of committing sexual abuse both online and off.
I would like to stress the first point more, because if you do that, you are in fact encouraging online child abuse. Please don’t do that!
Some Depressing Facts About Online Child Abuse
Congressional Study says, with an estimated 24 million children now online, one out of five have been solicited for sex in the last year.
- A top Disney executive was recently arrested and charged with using the Internet to solicit sex with a minor.
- 75% of children are willing to share personal information online about themselves and their family in exchange for goods and services.
- One in five U.S. teenagers who regularly log on to the Internet say they have received an unwanted sexual solicitation via the Web. Solicitations were defined as requests to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk, or to give personal sexual information.
- 77% of the targets for online predators were age 14 or older. Another 22% were users ages 10 to 13.
- 75 percent of the solicited youth were not troubled, 10 percent did not use chat rooms and 9 percent did not talk to strangers.
- Only 17 percent of youth and 11 percent of parents could name a specific authority, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), CyberTipline, or an Internet service provider, to which they could report an Internet crime.
- Last, but not least, only 1/3 of the households with Internet access are proactively protecting their children!
HBB Initiative – Simple Things We Are Going To Do (& Why)
I checked HBB’s demographics recently, and delighted to see middle class working parents checking out our blog. So in one way or another these approaches will delight them.
- Help Parents = Help Children, so I decided to pick some 20-30 not-so-geek parents on my Facebook and Twitter friends list, of course, I won’t be bothering them much.
I’m going to make them aware about the hazards of Social Networking sites and other Internet portals, the measures they should take to protect their children online. Advice they should give to their children (parents are the best teachers). I believe at least for the sake of their children, they’ll take the next step.
- Provide Internet Security software . We may give it as free, as giveaway or with good discounts. Hopefully with the help of our partner Bifdefender we will implement within this month. Having a good Antivirus and Internet Security software solves almost 40% of the problems.
- Dark side of Internet and how to avoid it. This will be the theme of our upcoming articles we decided to publish for the next few months. It will be something like, “HOW TO: Report Child Sexual Abuse Online [Save A Kid]”. I was getting lot of traffic from this post, that might be a good thing in one way, but in reality lot of parents and affected kids would have been searching for solution, that’s the truth and a single post can help them to take a decision.
- Search & Reply. This will be a simple one. There are lots of unanswered queries on the web regarding Child Abuse. For instance, you can take Yahoo! Answers. If you have a Yahoo! account you can easily log in and reply to those queries. Believe me, your comment is not only valuable to the questioner but for millions of Yahoo! Answers users. Similar you can pick any Q&A portals.
- Ad dedication. I have decided to make use of HBB’s leaderboard (728 x 90) or Banner (468 x 60) ad slot in a social way. For a couple of days, I’ll allocate this ad slot for some social causes. If you own any Non-profit organisation or charity related to this theme, and especially if you save money to help others, you can contact me regarding this advertisement.
I’ll be happy to do something in person, but my college exams are blocking it. Each and every single step you take makes a difference. On an average, this post “10+ Tips To Identify Fake Profiles On Facebook” of mine generates 3-5 queries per day. I have been getting many emails with messages like, “my child is being abused by a stranger. he uses her pic and edits it in an ugly way”. I was really depressed that I can’t help them 100%. But when we are part of their solution, that makes us to think more, write more.
You can also start with writing security related posts, for social media, for email, for computers and so on.
This is really a great and noble initiative towards this social menace. All support will be there from HBB followers. Keep up the good work Pradeep !
That's a great initiative, Pradeep. Child abuse online is really an alarming problem these days with the advancement of the Internet.
Pradeep, I would greatly thankful to you for taking such step to prevent online sexual abuse for childer. I also request and convey my message to all parents to take care their child to avoid from such type of activities.
Pradeep your contribution is greatly appreciated.
This is so wonderful, Pradeep. God only knows how many kids there are, out there, who won't even express it. Bless you!
Really an excellent initiative Pradeep. These kind of good efforts will never fail and will definitely get succeeded at some point of time.
really very nice to know that Brother Soft Is One Of Your Support.Very Work Pradeep.HBB Is Always Rocking 🙂
A really commendable initiative from HBB. I agree that it is the public awareness that can make a difference in preventing child abuse cases. Not many are in fact aware as to what preventive measures can be taken in this regard for preventing online child abuse, who innocently fall prey to wolfs on the web.