DANGEROUS DIALOGUE

As Florida's attorney general, I am deeply disturbed by the increasing number of stories of young people who make plans to meet in person a "friend" they've met online, only to discover that their "friend" is someone who intends to do them great harm.

The explosion in popularity of social networking Web sites, chat rooms and texting creates a quandary for parents and educators. We want our children to embrace the new technology that brings a fascinating world to their fingertips, but we also worry about those who seek to exploit our children online, particularly for sexual purposes.

I created the attorney general's CyberSafety Education campaign to address this problem of Internet child predators. We launched the program last fall at the Rampello Downtown Partnership School in Tampa and have since taken it statewide. The 50-minute interactive presentation is designed to raise awareness among middle and high school students about the real dangers that exist in the online world. The program is not intended to scare them, but rather to empower our young people to make smart choices about information they post online, the people with whom they communicate, and even the Webcam videos they play of themselves.

My CyberSafety Education presentation includes videos of real-life stories, such as "Julie," a teen who at just 13 years old ran away to be with someone she'd met online. As she relates in her chilling story, the person turned out to be a 56-year-old convicted murderer. She was rescued and the man was sent to prison, but Julie still suffers from the victimization she endured and his promise from his prison cell that he would kill her if he ever gets out.

Surprising to some, girls are not the only targets of online predators. During the presentation, the students are introduced to Paul Parker, an attorney from Panama City who is now spending 14 years in a Florida prison. Investigators with my office's Child Predator CyberCrime Unit discovered that Parker, posing online as a 15-year-old girl, had convinced several adolescent boys to engage in sexual activity on their Webcams, which he then recorded and used to create child pornography.

My Child Predator CyberCrime Unit has arrested 64 men over the past two-and-a-half years. Many of those predators were taken into custody as they attempted to meet someone they believed to be a young teenager with the intention of having sex with that child. Fortunately, these predators were really chatting with undercover members of my law enforcement team.

More than 100,000 students have seen our CyberSafety presentation this school year and of those children, more than 5,000 have told us they were the unwitting recipients of online sexual solicitation and/or pornographic material. Nationally, 77 million children are on the Internet every day, and of those children ages 10 to 17, at least one out of every seven will be solicited online. But in spite of these startling numbers, we are facing challenges in bringing our critical CyberSafety Education message to all the students who need to hear it.

Of the 235 middle and high schools in Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties, only 51 have registered to have the CyberSafety program presented to their students. That means just 22 percent have registered for a free 50-minute safety lesson that could literally save a child's life.

Help me encourage our school officials to make room in their busy calendars for the attorney general's CyberSafety Education programs when school starts again in the fall. Pick up the phone or send your principal an e-mail asking him or her to log onto the attorney general's Safe Surfing Web site and register for a presentation at www.safeflorida.net/safesurf.

One of my highest priorities as your attorney general is ensuring that Florida's families can live in a safe environment where our children can achieve their full potential. I am committed to bringing the message of cyber safety to every student in Florida and with your help, we can achieve that goal.