Social Networking Dangers
June 15, 2010
What makes the social-networking sites more dangerous than regular Web pages?
It’s one-stop shopping. You have the profile and instant messaging right there. These networking sites are a perfect predator’s playground. Predators don’t have to go to chat rooms, they can troll through and look for pretty faces that they like and get all the information they want. The police we work with tell us that when a predator starts grooming a child, he looks for vulnerability, and with a diary or blog right there, he’s already gotten past the first stage.
Is there any way to know how big a problem this is?
No, because the kids aren’t telling. Sometimes they don’t even tell mom and dad that they have a space [online]. Maybe they’re underage, and if they tell, guess what mom and dad will do? Take away the page. We’ve done surveys of kids ages 12-15 and asked them if they had ever been sexually harassed online, and most of them said they had been, but they never tell their parents. [According to Highlights of the Youth Internet Safety Survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice, "One in five children, 10 to 17 years old, receive unwanted sexual solicitations online."]
A mother whose 14-year-old daughter disappeared last month told a local paper recently that she had no idea that her daughter had a MySpace profile and that it was full of risqué language. Is that common?
Most parents don’t know anything about MySpace or the other sites, and if they do, they think it’s harmless. The truth of the matter is that a lot of parents are intimidated by their kids because their kids are so much more tech-savvy than they are. And they’re busy and they don’t have time to learn about this, so they say, “OK, if you’re having fun, go ahead.”
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