ABA Family Legal Guide

Computer Law

Child Protection and the Internet

What signs of trouble should parents look for?

Parents should become suspicious if their child spends a lot of time online, particularly at night. While pedophiles are online all the time, many have day jobs that keep them from their computers until the evening and early-morning hours.

Parents also should be alarmed if they find pornographic pictures on their child's computer. The FBI says that pedophiles will often send graphic images as a way to broach the subject of sex with children. You can run a search of the most common file formats for all pictures in your computer, such as .jpg and .gif, and list them as thumbnails to see what's there. You can also look in the history of visited sites (the cache) to find out which sites the child has visited most recently.

Children may also exhibit certain behavior when they are engaging in inappropriate conversations online. For example, they will turn the computer off or quickly change websites when a parent enters the room.