Are children advancing in technology, before common sense?

             In today's society, most toddlers become familiar with a mobile-phone within a few months, becoming fluent in its features by the time they're two and a half years old. 
   
                With more and more stories emerging of websites and applications being used with the disturbing intention to groom young children, aged anywhere from five years onwards, I find it alarming that this is even possible, let alone a very real issue we face. How did a five year old child, become that exposed over the internet? A five year old child should only just be able to recognise and name 3 different shapes, draw a person with a body, and recognise there own name when wrote down. So how the heck did he/she manage to open up a potentially dangerous internet page, unsupervised and unaided?  

                So, with young children becoming vulnerable to even more dangers, have the necessary precautions been put into place? In my opinion, no, they have not. If a four year old child where to pick up a sharp object (such as a knife), that child would immediately be scolded, and it would be made abundantly clear that this is very dangerous. So this four year old now knows that there is potential danger if they pick up this object, therefore when they are at the age when they are aloud to begin eating with a knife, they will know it is potentially dangerous. This knowledge will stick with them for the rest of their lives, I mean, do you know any grown-up that doesn't know that sharp objects are potentially dangerous? I didn't think so.

So, if a child is taught simple -yet necessary- precautions like this, as soon as they are exposed to danger, then why isn't the risk of child abuse treated the same? In my opinion, as soon as children have the ability to use the internet, or any internet related apps, they should be made aware of necessary risks and know their limitations on the internet. The parents should teach them to only go on official, child-friendly sights such as: Cbeebies, CBBC, etc. The parents should immediately take every possible precaution to make the internet access on the household computer/laptop as safe as possible for their child/children, such as Parental Control, putting password security on search engines; so that to enable someone to search for particular things a password must be entered, making sure that a child is supervised at all times while he/she is on the internet.

              Another issue is that, although they can access almost anything on a handheld device by the age of two and a half, the majority of children are not taught the 'Stranger Danger' guidelines until they are six years old, some even later! So, this means that this child has been extremely vulnerable and unaware of the potential threat that some grown ups pose to them, for possibly three and a half year, while browsing the internet. Is this acceptable? No! Would you allow a child of two and a half to cross a road alone, without knowing the dangers, even once? Of course you wouldn't. So why is it acceptable for them to be possibly strolling into the waiting hands of a paedophile prowling the internet? 

              Yes, I understand that child abuse, in all forms, is a very sensitive issue for parents and teachers alike. But is it not worth finding a friendly, understandable way to pre warn young children of these dangers, and possibly prevent it in some cases? I know that when I have children, they will not be unsupervised with any hand-held device, never mind browsing the internet where they could stumble across anything that could be potentially inappropriate or dangerous to them in any way.