Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Friending Stranger Danger

Here's a link worth reading:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/facebook-fears-after-sex-offender-logged-on-to-murder-1918330.html

To summarize, a 33 year old sex offender pretended to be 19 on Facebook, where he fooled and befriended a 17 year old girl, and eventually got her into his car and raped and murdered her.

Thank goodness this is a rare occurrence. For the most part, social media is harmless and fun ("most strangers are good people"), but every now and then there's a nasty person lurking. How do I explain rape and murder to my seven year old daughter? I walk around the issue carefully, sparing her most of the gruesome details, other than to say that some strangers are bad and can hurt you.

SO...

In this house, you are not allowed to have Moshi Monster friends unless they are people you know in person. I don't care what your seven year old friend's parents say she can do. There are different rules for different houses, and in this house we don't have on-line friends that we didn't already know before logging on.

It stuns and saddens me that someone who is nearly an adult (17) could be victimized this way, especially since she had a profile herself and knew how easy it is to upload a picture and insert any profile details at whim. My heart goes out to her family.

Yes we can maintain a system of monitoring the on-line activity of sex offenders, but what about the ones who haven't been convicted yet? There will always be new creeps out there.

Educating and setting limits for our kids has to be the first step. Being the "mean mom" and making the unpopular rules has to happen when they're young, and age appropriate explanations and education has to be forthcoming.  We can't just assume that the risk is low and they'll know better when they're older. The reason they'll know better is because they've been taught by us, and the sooner that starts, the better.

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