Recent surveys have shown that today’s children spend an average of 20 hours per week on-line. 

Many sites have filters which have varying degrees of effectiveness, some good some bad. But in today’s world when children are traversing several sites, protection is only as good as the least effective one being used.

Although chat rooms have largely been dismantled, social networking has replaced them. There are currently nearly 400 million users of these.

In a recent BBC program where they invented a 14 year old girl’s profile to the web, they were shocked by how quickly ‘she’ was targeted by potential predators.

Also in the recent Shannon case, police were initially worried because they stated there were 2,500 registered sex offenders within a 25 mile radius.

The internet is huge, continues to grow in size, is difficult to police and those who want to deceive children and young people can still do relatively easily.