Protect Your Child Online

If you’re very lucky, keeping your child safe from the dangers of the internet will be easy due to, well, due mainly to luck.  If you’re slightly less lucky and your child is communicating with someone you don’t trust, there are ways to run a people search by email.

Tracing an ISP

If you have the email address of the person your child is communicating with, you can use this to contact his or her ISP and verify that they are who they say they are.  This isn’t always easy as ISPs do attempt to protect the privacy of their customers until proof of wrongdoing is provided.  But verification is sometimes a little easier if that’s all you want.

Background Check

If the person does exist, you can run your own background check and confirm things like age and location.  This is a little more difficult as there tend to be overlaps in names and such, but it can be done.

If you are still not entirely satisfied with your results and cannot break the relationship your child is having that frightens you, there are other options. You can hire a private detective to spend a lot of time gathering data or you find a retrieval system to help you verify your people search by email and quickly eliminate the risk with proof.

Do you have reason to believe your child has been communicating online with someone with a criminal record and could be potentially dangerous?  If so, there are many ways to find criminal cases online.

Conducting an Internet Search for Criminal History

Not that having a criminal history necessarily disqualifies one from being a good person, but children and teenagers are impressionable.  Knowledge is one way we can keep them safe.

If you are engaged with your child and her life, she is more likely to share her online and real life adventures with you.  This helps you to track down questionable persons without snooping as well as waiting until you’re sure to shake things up.

Most court cases are public record.  So if you know the person’s name and location, you have a much better chance of checking out their history.

Check the News for Criminal Cases

Newspapers and even television news programs have online archives where you can seek the party in question’s name to see if your suspicions are correct as well.  If the area you’re looking in doesn’t have an online archive, you may be able access transcripts or other physical records.  This applies to court records as well.

There is also a very excellent retrieval engine that can do this work for you, leaving you more time and energy to guard your child in the flesh.  Let someone else figure out how to find criminal records online.  This way, you can spend more time creating a bond with your child.

Does your of age daughter’s online date have a court date?  Knowing how to search court dockets can save you both a lot of heartache and even horror.  Well, there will still be some heartache, but you can prevent worse.

Find Court Dockets in Public Records

If you have reason to believe that an online paramour is about to come up before a judge or has recently, court dockets are public record.  Meaning that if you know the date, you can find and scan them to see if the person in question is listed.  This may or may not help you find out what the party in question is charged with (which is the real issue), but it is certainly the first step.

Checking Criminal History

The next question to ask when you’re searching court dockets to keep your loved ones out of danger is what the person was charged with and has it happened before.

Teenagers, especially boys, can easily do stupid and even illegal things such as rappelling down the outside of the high school without being a genuine danger.  Knowing the truth will help save your child.

Court actions are also generally open to the public so that if the docket search doesn’t provide sufficient information, you can always attend the hearing.

If you don’t know the date of the action, finding out what you need to know to protect your child can be more complicated, and you may find it too late.  A retrieval system can run your court dockets search more quickly and with better results than you may be able to.

There are any number of ways to find someone online.  The problem that arises during most of these searches is if it’s the right someone.  It’s hard to tell from a Facebook profile or a Google search if you’re on the right track.  Is this the predator you’re looking for?

Finding Someone Online by Location

Trying to locate a specific person online to ascertain that they are who they say they are is enough to make you want to smash the computer and force your child to learn to use a typewriter.  The open rebellion and technical problems this would involve preclude this option, but there are times when it’s nice to think about.

The first question you have to ask about someone questionable your child is chatting with is whether they are whom they say they are.  The second is if they are where they say they are.

Doing Your Own People Search the Long Way

Today’s teenager is not going to be online without a profile on some social networking site or other.  Therefore, your first step in verifying a person is to start searching the social network yourself to see if you can find him/her.  A negative result will not be conclusive, but it will be telling.

Regardless of your result on the above step, the next step is to try to locate this person.  If you have found them on a site, you can check to make sure this is the person you and your child think it is and work outward from that.

How to Find Someone Quick and Easy

There is a lot of data out there and keeping your child safe online may be better served by consigning your effort to find someone to a data retrieval site.  Find someone online with as little as a first and last name.  The more information you have, the better, though.  An online data research works as a one-stop-shop to questions you have about anyone.

When you need to find out about the person your child is spending time with, one way to do that is by running a nationwide investigation.  Whether you’re snooping or accidentally got into your child’s email (it can happen by accident with shared accounts), you’ve found some emails that you think are a little… creepy.

How creepy, and what kind of conversation you need to have with your child depends on a few things.  Okay, the first thing is to stop all communication with the suspected person.  The second is checking the person out.

You can Google the World, Why Not Google Your Background Search?

Doing this kind of search on your own is quite possible.  If you don’t know very much about the person your child is corresponding with, it can take time to do all the necessary steps.  Your first question is whether the person is age-appropriate for your child.

If you can find that out by “googling” and checking the various social networking sites, maybe you just need to discuss boundaries with your child and maybe do some closer monitoring.

Verification of Age through Public Records

If you can’t verify the person’s age, then it’s more serious.  You need to do things like finding out a criminal history and trying to do a background check.  This can be done by searching criminal records, public records, newspaper archives, and other information that is abundant online and can be keyword searched.

If you aren’t sure where the person who is attempting to victimize your child is, which is the reason for the nationwide investigation, this can take time, resources, and knowledge.  It may take you a long time to muster all of this.

Your time might be better spent caring for your child and letting a retrieval system do most of the work for you.  If you are ready to research your child’s friend, coach, teacher, or anyone, conduct a nationwide search online.  You’ll be happy you saved your time and energy.

Were you calmly sitting at home listening to the radio when your adopted child suddenly announced that her birth mother or father had found her on Facebook?  This kind of thing can give you a heart attack and send you rushing to find anything you can about adoption and birth record data.

State Adoption and Birth Records

All adoptive parents have a twinge about their child finding her birth parents.  This is natural–anxiety and jealousy–and nothing to be concerned about.  It’s the possibility of the child being harmed emotionally or physically by someone who is not the birth parent–or worse, someone who is.

Most adopted children, no matter how happy, have curiosity about their birth parents.  Again, this is natural, but leaves them open to various types of predators that have found a huge playground on the internet. Your Department of Health, Office of Vital Statistics has records of anyone adopted in that state.

By accessing these public records, you may be able to get more data on the birth parents, and even do things like run a background or criminal history check to at least verify the person’s identity.

Private Adoption Records

Private adoptions are much harder to access and generally require contacting the law firm that initially handled it.  This can also lead to other difficulties.

If you don’t have the time to work through bureaucratic red tape, there are records sites that can find this data very quickly and help you determine if your child is at risk.  Find adoption and birth records without all the hassle of contacting local county or state agencies.

If your child is suddenly acting even more moody than the usual teenage stuff, and you think this is the result of spending too much time online with a new “friend,” you may be right.  If you are, this may be the time to start figuring out how to find public records of juvenile court cases or adult court cases.

Sealed Criminal Records of Juveniles

The problem, if you’re trying to determine if your son or daughter’s new best friend/romance has a criminal record, is that many juvenile cases are sealed, or at least very hard to access.  You can go through the circuit court and generally find that there has been a case.

Whether you can get details is something else entirely.  Thus, it becomes hard to know if the new influence is trouble or he just made a mistake, which even good kids do.

Newspaper Records May Reveal Juvenile Records

There are ways around some of the court procedures, such as searching newspaper archives for the person’s name.  Again, they may not always be listed, but family members might be noted or the like.  The same goes for TV news reports–with so much online these days, those are much easier to access.

Of course, all this can take time.  If you’re sufficiently worried, it can cost a lot of money for a lawyer or private investigator.

If you really to want find public records of general court cases (most juvenile records are sealed) quickly to keep your child safe, there are sites that can do most or all of the searching for you.  Once you have access to their criminal records, you will also have access to their entire family’s personal information.  This means you can pull up court cases, death, birth, and marriage records, which may end up explaining a lot.

They say that some of the indicators a child is on drugs are becoming moody (with a teenager this is a judgment call), refusal to communicate, and negative changes in appearance.  This is true but it may signal something else, which may in turn indicate a need for you as a parent to learn how to find court case details.

If You See Signs of Emotional Abuse, Do a Background Check

The day once was that when our children were in abusive relationships, we had had a possibility of meeting the person and gaining an instant dislike of him/her.  This didn’t always reveal much as far as the relationship goes, but it gave us some clues as to how to learn about the person.

These days, with so much communication done online, we may have no idea that our child is in a “relationship,” let alone  with someone who has a criminal history. It’s much harder to learn these days whether a person has been taken to court for abuse–either physical or emotional.  And it’s much easier for them to find a sensitive teenager online and sink in their claws.

Finding Personal Information about Your Child’s “Relationships”

As a parent, if you stay engaged, you have a better chance of finding out about the abuser (at least you might find out their full name).  Then you need to determine how to do a criminal records search.  This can be done online or in person.  The same with court cases–the public records are all there to be gone through once you’ve gone through channels and filled out the forms.

However, if you need to know how to find court case details sooner, there are services that can do the searching for you and let you help your child that much sooner.  Not only can you research their background, but you may pull up details about births, deaths, marriages, and any type of public court record.

You know your child spends a lot of time on the computer; it’s unavoidable these days.  However, there can be many times when you feel like you need to find personal information about some of the people they’re talking with.

Your Child’s Personal Information in the Hands of Predators

With the internet having exploded into its own world, people in Maine and Madagascar can talk about the latest streaming reality TV program or You Tube video.  Thanks to translation software, they don’t even need to speak the same language, so there are opportunities abound.

Many of these opportunities are terrific.  They’re bound to learn something about each other’s culture, even if the signal to noise ratio is pretty low.

Unfortunately, opportunities of other stripes also exist.  The big one is pretending you’re someone you’re not.  This can be relatively harmless or quite dangerous.

Search Public Records if You Really Want to Know her Friends

There are ways to find out whom your child is communicating with.  There’s always basically snooping into her email or asking questions.  If you find something suspicious, you can go online and do some Googling and checking of Facebook and all the other social media sites to try and run this person down, to see if s/he is who they pretend to be.

There are also ways to search through public records, often in person at the courthouse or by hiring someone to do that for you.  The learning curve can be steep doing it on your own, and it is time consuming.

In answer to your needs, services exist to do this kind of search for you.  They are generally able to find the right answers with less personal information than you may need if you did it on your own.  When you need more personal information, look no further than your computer.

It’s a brave new world for parents; one where, no matter how young the parent is, the child is more internet savvy than s/he ever was.  This means that in every state in the union there is a greater need to protect children, which means that sometimes you need to know how to get a copy of a criminal record.

Protecting Our Children from Online Predators

An ever-increasing array of things in the online world is needed to protect our children – and ourselves.  Sexual predators get the most attention, but they are not the only kind out there.  Emotional and spiritual predators roam the online world, just as they do the real one, as well as people who are simply looking for an easy way to steal your stuff.

As always, the best way to protect our children is to teach them the skills to protect themselves while at the same time staying engaged in their lives.  Hovering will probably make them easier prey for wrong types, but interested interaction and trust can save everyone a lot of heartache.

Online Criminal Records

Unfortunately, no matter what we try, kids will be themselves and sometimes this leads to needing to take the engagement in their lives up a notch.  This means having some mad internet skills yourself, such as how to get a copy of criminal record.  Being able to ascertain just what kind of person your kid’s new Internet best friend is may save possessions, body, or soul.

• Aug 18 : When a People Search by E-mail Doesn’t Work, Do Some PI Work
• Aug 17 : Why Knowing How to Find Criminal Cases Online Could Save Your Child’s Life
• Aug 16 : How to Search Court Dockets for Detailed Information
• Aug 15 : How to Find Someone Online
• Aug 14 : How to Do a Nationwide Investigation and Protect Your Child’s Welfare