It’s a privilege to introduce you to Internet Sense First, an organization designed to educate and certify parents with online protection for children. Watch the new DA:NCE resource with Internet Sense First that we just posted on our website with Canadian Author and Founder/CEO Charlene Doak-Gebauer; we have created this film to understand the correlation between online safety and dance. Increasing numbers of children in dance are connecting with unknown people online; these dance students are posting competitive, personal and dance studio videos that attract predators who victimize and violate them. Internet Sense First will educate you with tools to know what to do about this toxic trend. It has a full certification available in September 2021.
ARE COMPUTERS AND DANCE RELATED?? by Charlene Doak-Gebauer, Founder/CEO of Internet Sense First
Author “Digital Sexual Victims: True Cases”
Author “The Internet: Are Children In Charge?”
Canada Chair, Child Protection – All Ladies League
Member International Internet Society
Member Canada Peace Research Association
Recipient Bishop Townshend Award of Teaching Excellence
Recipient 2018 Women of Excellence
Global Speaker
https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlenedoak-gebauer/
https://www.facebook.com/charlene.doakgebauer
Who is in charge of the Internet in homes – parent or child? Children, in just about all cases.
Too many parents throw their hands up in despair and say their children know much more than they do about digital devices. I can assure you, children are not “smarter than parents” because they can operate a cellphone or a gaming system. Digital devices (cellphones, laptops, gaming systems) are all so user-friendly now, it is safe to say, usage is not based on genius level of intelligence.
As a Computer Science Specialist in education and a Network Administrator, I have realized there is a huge gap between the vulnerabilities of children online and the understanding of adults. Predation has increased exponentially in the past few years, since the Internet became so prevalent in homes. Thorn in the United States has determined the proliferation of this type of issue has gone up by 10,000%.
Based on experiences in my family, and experiences of so many in society, I decided to use my expertise in computers to create user-friendly methods that would provide a proactive approach to online child protection, which I named “©Theory of Digital Supervision”. It is comprised of three parts – awareness (what is the reality of activities online); method (how can adults supervise children on digital devices); and, hope (we can do this, and we must).
Dance, when it becomes sexualized with young children, provides another dimension in child protection. Through discussions with Dance Awareness personnel, it has become obvious that online digital device use can relate to the dance world. Children are bombarded with excessive exposure to sexual content, either through pornography exposure, or communications with peers. When a child is enrolled in sexualized dance classes, this only adds to the sexual content exposure online. Some may say “my child does not see sexual content online”. This is a statement that requires examination by adults. Many children are watching videos/pictures online which contain sexualized dance/content, with dance videos being very popular. Often, these children are able to reproduce dance moves in videos, to the degree, they might know the moves better than the actual professionals in the videos.
Peer to peer communications are often of a sexual nature. Children are producing “nudes”, which are pictures of themselves naked, bare genitalia, performing inappropriate acts, and other types of sexual content. Schools are going so far as to say this is in epidemic proportions. A part of Digital Supervision is to review content on cellphones of children to ensure they are not engaging in this type of activity. If under the age of 18, this type of content can meet the definition of “child pornography”, which presents a whole new issue and possible police involvement.
Internet Sense First offers a Certificate of Completion for Digital Supervision training at the end of their conferences. We are planning our next conference for the fall of 2021, but are waiting to confirm the date. It will be a virtual conference due to COVID.
