The Daily Mail has a very sobering article about an investigator who posed as a 14-year-old girl, established a profile on an Internet social networking site, and then monitored the traffic she received. As you can imagine, it wasn’t savory . . .
What gets me is the sheer gall of some of the men concerned, coming right out with their intentions and not hiding them even for a moment. I mean – surely they’re aware that police are monitoring such online rendezvouses, and posing as potential victims, in order to entrap pedophiles? But that didn’t seem to deter some of these . . . well, I hesitate to call them ‘people’, because I’m not convinced guys like that are fully human! – it didn’t seem to deter them at all.
If you have teenage kids, or work with them, you need to be aware of this sort of thing. I highly recommend reading the whole article, and giving it the thought it deserves.
Peter
I've heard it said that the only people still using Myspace are pedophiles and cops posing as young girls.
So here we see the other edge of the sword coming back to bite we.
Jim
Eh, overall, the article comes across as far too alarmist. The author reminisces about days of old when we warned kids that strangers were dangerous. Truth be told, not only was that never the message (strangers wanting to take you somewhere alone is what's dangerous) but there is also the fact that a child is statistically more likely to be abducted and abused by someone who is not a stranger.
It's all a matter of education, and I think we give teens too little credit. While I would not be allowing 10 year olds to troll facebook or other such sites unsupervised, I think most 14-15 year olds (high school age) are smart enough to identify sketchy people. Overall, I think we hype this sort of thing up too much, when it all comes down to education and common sense.
Disclaimer: I have no kids, and am young enough to have been a teen during the days of creepy AOL chatroom stalkers. I speak only from my own experiences.
We're still trying to preach "stranger danger". Which is unfortunate…
Yes, strangers CAN be dangerous. However, the stats show that most child molestation is done by someone who knows the victim.
Peds don't just groom their victim, they groom their family too.
Also unfortunately, there are a LOT of teens that don't really pay attention to the dangers inherent in meeting someone new from the online community. Has to do with their sense of invulnerability…