Protect Your Child Online

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Child Safety Tips . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.