boston.com
Despite efforts, or lack thereof, to keep kids off of MySpace and Facebook, most teenagers today have an account with at least one of these sites, posting pretty much everything a stalker or pedophile would want to know. This in mind, one of the major concerns surrounding these sites has been the threat posed by online sexual predators. In the midst of connecting people through hundreds of networks nation-wide, there have been several cases where minors have fallen victim to sexual predators, for which the punishment was initially 30-90 days in jail. As the number of users and offenders have increased, the sentence has also increased to an average one year for a first offense.
To start, parents are ridiculous. I know most kids have easy access to computers and can get online to make an account, but c'mon...give your sons and daughters a sense of self-respect so they're not posting vulgar pictures of themselves on the Internet, and right next to their contact information nonetheless. Moreover, these sites should be required to extensively monitor the operations on this site. It is VERY easy to create a fake profile or lie about your age, something that makes users more vulnerable, and while the site does not allow pornographic images, there needs to be stricter regulations to monitor images.
While it is good to see that the punishment for online sexual predators are becoming more serious, it seems that this issue is being dealt with mostly in the aftermath. Why has there not been more legislation imposing more regulations on these sites to prevent these problems in the first place? It seems that the current solution has been to educate teens on not meeting with someone you only know online, rather than allowing users to provide so much personal information in the first place, something that should change in the near future.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment