The internet opened a whole new frontier and an arena for pedophiles and sex offenders to contact and entice children and teens. Adult websites spring up daily, changing their domain names if shut down, and many of these sites provide still pictures, videos, and contact information which is easily accessed.

Parents, teachers, and other caregivers need to be aware of what websites children visit. Several years ago a number of public libraries in the United States tried installing computer software to control materials children could access on-line. Law suits were filed against these libraries citing that this violated the first amendment right to free speech. Libraries argued that they could monitor all the children using the computers. Libraries lost.

But for me it was an incident involving my son eight years ago, when he was nine that provided the momentum I needed to put safeguards and guidelines in place to help keep my two children safe. My son had typed the "boy scouts" into the search bar, wanting to check out the organizations official web site. He was immediately directed to a pornography web site featuring heterosexual and homosexual men of varying ages.

Sitting beside my son I had him type Boy Scouts of America into the search bar and the official web site came up.

And, at around that time I saw a news story on the national news about a young girl of approximately 12 who, while looking for information about the book Little Women' by Louisa May Alcott, to complete a book report had found a web site with the same name that was another porn site.

I spent time learning my own way around the internet including the best way to search for information. For instance, looking up Louisa May Alcott and Amazon.com gave me information on the books she had written and what they were about as well as the author's biography. Sometimes, typing very specific or more detailed information into the explorer, yahoo, AOL, Google, MSN or other search engines provide a better chance of accessing the right information. Of course that is not a guarantee, either.

The first thing I did was to take the desktop computer out of the enclosed computer room and put it out into a large open space in the dining room where I could see what my children were doing on the computer at all times and where they could not quickly minimize the page in order to cover anything up if they every had an inkling to do so.

There are software programs available so that

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