We all know the dangers of letting children (or even childish adults) wander around on social networking sites without supervision. Issues like cyber bullying and cyber stalking are things we hear about everyday, but an even scarier subject is one that involves sexual predators. How do you know that the nice 14-year-old girl your daughter met on MySpace is really a nice 14-year-old girl?
That's exactly what worried Connecticut's state attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who successfully pressured MySpace to increase its security standards. Because of Blumenthal, 90,000 MySpace accounts, which were held by convicted sexual offenders, were deactivated. This has been an ongoing battle between Blumenthal and MySpace, who initially refused to give up the information due to federal privacy laws.
Since I grew up in such a technological age, I've been aware of the dangers behind the computer screen from day one, but unfortunately not everyone is so lucky. Do your children know about online safety?
Puma
If I had children, they would. We had our first computer when I was 10. Having a home computer was a strange thing and having the internet was even less common where I grew up. My parents always had a net nanny running on the computer for my sister and me. I know it was just to block bad sites, but it was better than nothing.
1Kids or no kids, everyone has to be careful on the web these days.
"Net threat to minors less than feared"
- A long awaited report from the Internet Safety Technical Task Force concludes that children and teens are less vulnerable to sexual predation than many have feared.
The report also questions the efficacy and necessity of some commonly prescribed remedies designed to protect young people.
FULL REPORT pdf:
The task force was formed as a result of a joint agreement between MySpace and 49 state attorneys general.
http://cfcoklahoma.org/New_Site/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=0&...
2As my 10 year old grows into the social networking world he is being taught that you don't need to befriend strangers online. Monitoring what your children and teens do is a must in my opinion. I would rather be preventive about this than have to clean up a mess later.
310, why do you have a 10 year old on myspace? isn't the age limit 13??
4Sorry, I should have been more clear... my 10 year old DOES NOT HAVE any social networking sites but he will be in middle school in just a year. My niece who is 12 is constantly on youtube and uploading videos to interact with her classmates. So I know this is coming and I'm preparing him now. He just got the Animal Crossing for the Wii and wanted to get the microphone so he could "talk to people". Like there's not enough stuff to worry about as a parent.
5On myspace, 90,000 is the number of registered and convicted sex offenders alone? Disturbing. Convicted ones are just a small minority of the creep population.
690,000 does sound like a lot...out of context. If you take the total amount of MySpace users 90,000 does not seem quite as large. Also (I wish I could cite the reference) but there was a study done that showed that the number of 90,000 closely resembled the statistical prevalence of registered sex offenders in 'real' society.
The net is no more or less dangerous than the outside world. Well, perhaps less so as no one can jump through your monitor. So yeah, educate your kids and all that, don't be stupid and whatnot, but at the same time don't panic.
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