Detective Bruce Headridge, an Internet investigator based in British Columbia, Canada, says the most conservative estimates indicate that one in four young people are exposed to harmful content or predators. As the Internet expands at an astonishing rate of 1.5 million pages every day, so too does the number of incidents of Internet-related child abuse, as defined by law enforcement agencies. Think of the Internet as a massive multiplex theatre, where a significant number of movies have innocuous titles, but actually are XXX rated and worse. The FBI has detected at least 23,000 child pornography Web sites there are some 500,000 online photos showing sexual acts involving minors. And with the Internet growing at 1.5 million pages every day, the number of pornographic sites overall is also rising.
Children can stumble onto harmful content a number of ways.
They may mistype URLs. Thousands of child oriented words, such as Barbie spelled inaccurately, lead to Web sites, displaying injurious content, including pornography, child molestation, hate messages, etc. Using common search engines to look for innocent information often leads children into the dark side of the Internet. Searches for etoys, epets, eboys, egirls and even eBarney prompt links to sites that contain distressing images and messages. Misdirected searches push porno and email links.