Earlier today, KINSA saw one its initiatives recognized in the Ontario Legislature when Bob Runciman, the MPP for Leeds Grenville, and a long-time advocate for victims rights and law-and-order, introduced a resolution in the Ontario Legislature to have February 7, 2007 declared "Safer Internet Day" in Ontario.

Mr. Runciman expects that he will receive unanimous support from the other parties in the Legislative Assembly and the resolution could pass before they recess for the Christmas break. 

Here is a transcript of Mr. Runciman's statement in the Ontario Legislature earlier today:


MEMBERS' STATEMENTS

INTERNET SAFETY

Mr. Robert W. Runciman (Leeds-Grenville):
Today I tabled a resolution calling on the government to declare
February 7, 2007, as Safer Internet Day in the province of Ontario. The
resolution was inspired by the good work of the Kids' Internet Safety
Association, KINSA, a group founded to bring together people with
expertise in business, law enforcement, education and public policy to
address this issue.

At a media conference this morning, Paul
Gillespie, the vice-chair of KINSA and a former head of the Toronto
Police Service's child exploitation unit, pointed out that there are
approximately 560,000 different images of children being sexually
abused to be found on the Internet. The anonymity of the Internet is
used to lure kids to meet these pedophiles, and it gets even scarier:
According to an Industry Canada survey, 50% of kids between nine and 16
have an e-mail account their parents don't know about and 33% of
children in that same age group go into adult chat rooms.

I encourage parents and grandparents to go to
www.kinsa.net to learn more about this serious and growing problem. I
also encourage the government to quickly adopt this resolution to
assist the important work of this outstanding organization, Kids'
Internet Safety Association.

Perhaps even more exciting - and important - was the media attention KINSA and the issue of child exploitation received today.  Paul Gillespie and Bob Runciman did a news conference this morning and follow-up interviews were done by CityTV and Broadcast News.  CTV, Global and a few print publications also followed up ... we'll do a full media scan in the next 24 hours to see who picked it up.

In this pre-Christmas season when so many parents are buying computers for their kids, we hope that at least some of them have heard our message and are taking appropriate precautions to keep their kids safe as they launch them into the wonderful world of the internet.

A copy of our News Release and Media Backgrounder is attached here, in case you're interested ...

Download news_release.doc

Download Backgrounder.doc

Coming soon, watch this blog for news of the Federal Government moving on this initiative as well. 

Labels: In the News

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Heard a disturbing thing on CBC Radio in Toronto this morning.  (Sorry, I can't seem to find the link to the report). 

It was a report that York Region Police investigators have discovered a disturbing trend in internet crimes involving kids.  More and more of the child pornography being found on the net is actually produced by teenagers themselves.  In some cases, it is a teenager posting pictures of sexual acts and pornographic pictures of a companion (boyfriend, girlfriend).  In many other cases, it is pornographic imagery made of themselves - possibly in an attempt to get attention. In most cases, the imagery is posted on peer-to-peer networks to be shared among friends, but older pedophiles are finding these images, scooping them and trading them among themselves. 

One unidentified teenage girl was interviewed in the report saying that it is common among her friends to take at the very least suggestive pictures (and often more than just suggestive) and post them in the hopes of finding a "cute guy" to date.  She went on to say that "it never occured to her" that older men might be trolling these sites for these images and trading them around the world.  While the imagery being transmitted is bad enough, the truly scary thing is that sexual predators have an "easy target" when they find a girl or boy who has posted these images in the hopes of finding a companion and arranging for a contact is too easy. 

York Region Police ended the story saying that in their opinion teenagers should not be able to access web-cams (at least without supervision) and that computers should be in a common area of the house, not a teenagers bedroom.  Practical and sound advice!

Labels: In the News

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As the KINSA on-line community grows, the thought occured to me that a body of expertise and practical advice lives out there on how best to protect kids on-line ... and I hope this blog can become a forum for finding some good ideas and sharing them. 

If you have some practical tips, advice on great filtering technology or even just some common sense advice, offer them up here and we'll throw it out to the other "experts" we have access to as well as the larger on-line community of concerned citizens.  Who knows, maybe your idea could become the basis of one of our future "KINSA Kids" awareness campaigns.  Note that KINSA will not endorse any specific filtering products, but if you have a recommendation, tell us what's great about it and tell us what's not so good about it too. 

As always, our blog does not post comments in real-time in order to allow our site administrators and editors time to review the comments and make sure some of the sickos who don't want us to succeed use our forums to attack us.  So if you don't see your idea right away, don't worry - it'll be there soon. 

Looking forward to some great ideas!

KINSA

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