We can all agree that motherhood and fatherhood communities are great. They’re a helpful resource of people who also have kids, and in them, you can learn informative things, like what sunblock SPF your baby needs in the sun, best bikes for toddlers, misandric paranoia, how to hide vegetables in fun foods…wait, what? One of those things doesn’t belong. But when my wife got an e-mail yesterday from Circle of Moms, that’s exactly what she got.

In an article called “How to Spot a Child Predator,” Sharon Silver walks us through a scene where a man in a a local eatery in public, in plain view, is loudly asking some children questions.

I know, you’re thinking – call the cops, lock this guy up, burn his penis off with hot pokers and make sure he can never do this again. The nerve! Talking to kids..in public? What is this, the 50′s?

Dany Lacerte has two young daughters – ones that he’d like to keep away from online predators. So, oftentimes you can find Lacerte on Facebook – but not on his own profile. You can find the father from Quebec using the fake profile he started – one which Lacerte uses to pose as a 13 year old girl, luring in and exposing creeps.

Lacerte has a Facebook page called “Contre les cyber-predateurs du Quebec” (Against cyber predators in Quebec) where he exposes the predators that he finds. He says he catches about five men per day.

While some of the things that Lacerte does are in legally-grey areas, vigilante projects like this are great. Lacerte says he does this “to raise awareness about the people who are around us,” and I think most parents are grateful for people like Lacerte who do a job that the police are still too old-school to devote time to.

Read more at the sauce for the rest of the story, or click the Facebook link if you’re French-savvy.

Remember the Wall Street Journal story that 8BitDad covered about treating fathers like predators? The online fatherhood community has been sounding off, and Motherload blogger Lisa Belkin summarized the story up until now, as well as invited others to comment if they’d been discriminated against as a man or father.

Commenter “KevinL” sticks it to Belkin the same way we did:

But, if we are serious about dispelling the stereotype that fathers can not be good parents in the same way that mothers can, how about a small step: change the name of this blog about parenting in general to not have the word “mother” in it?

BAM! Take that!

(pic source) As a man and a father, I worry sometimes about how I’m seen in public holding and kissing my 2 year old kid. Not because I’m embarrassed to show my son affection – but that I’m afraid someone is going to think I’m a pervert for holding my kid a certain way or accepting my son’s kisses, since the only kisses he knows at his age are innocent kiss-on-the-lips style.

Think about it, fathers – if you’ve still got a kid at a young age, do you show the same affection to your child in public as you do at home? Do you have any fears that people see you as a pervert or a predator? Am I just paranoid?

Saying that the new Barbie Video Girl can be used for child pornography is kind of like saying that a cucumber can be used as a baseball bat. Nevertheless, that’s what people are saying, and the FBI has purportedly gotten involved. For the record, no one yet has hit a homerun with a cucumber been accused of using the Barbie to lure and record young children.

Now that the components that make up webcams and digital cameras are small enough to shove into everything, childrens’ toys have seen a golden age of photography. This Video Girl Barbie is not the first camera toy aimed at children. Fisher Price has had both digital-still and video cameras out for at least a year.

So, let’s all relax a little and take a deep, good-parent breath. You teach your kids right from wrong. You teach them to run from strangers. You teach them that when people touch their no-noes, it’s a no-no. While Video Girl Barbie is a slightly retarded concept, it’s probably not actually cause for panic. We should probably be more worried about the fact that she still dresses like a whore.

Sauce: ParentDish

You can always tell what’s most important in society by what the the powerful computers are being used for. In the 80′s, the big computers were used for the Cold War space program. In the 90′s and first half of 2000s, they were used for rendering computer graphics in movies. And now, in 2010, we’ve got a 1.8 petaflop computer that’s sifting through internet traffic to find purveyors of child pornography.

The problem is that there’s a scary amount of child pornography on the internet – and catching the people involved in it is daunting. Grier Weeks, executive director of the National Association to Protect Children, talked to the computer scientists there, and together are coming up with a way to digitize the taskforce – instead of having cops riding a desk for hours trying to find the source of the offending material, Weeks would rather let a computer do it.

Robert Patton, one of the dudes running this beast computer, says his aim is “to say ‘Hey, of all of the data you’re looking at right now, here are a handful of IP addresses that you should investigate further’.” With 1.8 petaflops doing the number-crunching, law enforcement should be able to narrow down the real targets easily.

I’m resisting the urge to make a “1.8 pedoflops” joke.

Sauce: New Scientist

Not to celebrate a group of scumbags, but modern dude website Guyism posted their favorite screencaps from To Catch A Predator. Since we’re a fan of sneaking host Chris Hansen into as many pictures as we can, we couldn’t resist paying it forward.

Humor like this kind of takes the edge off the idea that these are disgusting dudes that intend on literally raping children. Suddenly, I’m all out of LOLs and OMGs.

Ken Wooden, the dude behind Child Lures Prevention, somehow read between the lines: the new TSA pat-downs, he says, are grooming our children to be compliant regardless of whether the pat-down is TSA or sexual predator-administered. Booyah, take that, TSA!

Children, known for hiding grenades and sticks of dynamite behind their junk, get a “modified pat-down”, according to the TSA website.

The TSA, in order to reduce childrens’ fears of having a strange persons’ hands on them, have turned it into a “game.” Wooden told Raw Story that children aren’t mentally sophisticated enough to distinguish between a TSA pat-down and a predator pat-down. Wooden says the TSA’s pat-downs can “desensitize children to inappropriate touch and ultimately make it easier for sexual offenders to prey on our children.”

So if you’re planning on traveling this holiday season, do yourself, your child, and the TSA a favor and just bring your child to the airport nude. Or get them a 4th Amendment shirt.

Sauce: The Raw Story