http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/87398752.html

While it is great that lawmakers are passing tougher laws, nothing substituted parental involvement and education. If you haven’t talked to your kids about Internet safety, do it as soon as you can.

For more than 15 years I was a reporter that spent most of my career focusing on crime. The last four of my journalism career I was a crime reporter in a medium-sized Georgia town. It’s a great place and the kind of place that you wouldn’t expect to be shattered by stories of child predators. In fact, in most places I worked you would think would be isolated from horror stories of sexual abuse.

Think again. The things I heard went beyond a 25-year-old man trying to date his 16-year-old girlfriend. There were kids as young as 2 in some cases molested by people they trusted. After I become mother myself, these stories were harder to hear. I couldn’t imagine the pain of those parents.

I feel like I have held back on the horror stories–that is the best way to describe them–maybe in an effort to try and be politically correct or maybe because I did not want to think about them. But these people are out there. And they are online.

When Jacob Andersen gave me the chance to write this blog I jumped at because I sat in those courtrooms and hear how those children were abused. I want to be a part of the effort to stop the abuse.

Pardon me if occasionally I tell a horror story about a case I covered. I am no longer dancing around the issue.

While predators are dangerous, there are less dangerous predators that approach children online. These are spammers who try to coerce children to get their parent’s credit cards and purchase their products. Kids get excited when they see an email from a toy company and will likely want to purchase the product. And some won’t ask your permission.

Remember that KidsEmail allows parents to see all of the email their children receive. This can save a child’s life and your pocketbook.

Tom Corbett, the Attorney General, made a statement that all parents should read:

“It is vital for parents to understand that Internet predators will take advantage of many different situations to plan a meeting with a child, including holidays, school vacations and even snow days — any time that children may be home alone,” Corbett said. “Since 2005, our agents have arrested men who have traveled from as far away as Kentucky or Texas, in every kind of weather, simply because they believed a vulnerable child was waiting to meet them.”

This should be a wake up call for parents. The predators are out there. What are we doing  to protect our children?