Yeah, of course I had a fake ID. It was wrong then, it is wrong now. I understand the wrongness of it. You seem to be saying that since we all did it, it must be right. If all of us jumped off a bridge, it means it was a good idea.

Parents have no idea what their sons and daughters are doing on myspace. The false identities you allude to are usually super-thug and sex-vixen. And no, none of us put classifieds out in the local paper advertising our sexual prowess. For you to say that the internet presents the same set of obstacles we faced growing up is a silly conclusion.

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The author seems to be ignoring the predators and putting the onus on the kids who pretend to be older/wiser/sexier than they are. This is "bass-ackwards." The onus is on those who pretend to be young and unsophisticated so as to lure potential victims. It's true that kids lie about their ages to access adult privileges, but the real crime is adults lying about their ages to access kids.

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Both of them are at fault. We aren't doing the young ones a favor by saying it is all the fault of the older ones. Especially the romeo type that just wants a one night stand and think they are dealing with those of "legal age and willing"

In my experience, there were girls in my class that looked like they were 21 at the age of 14. There were others at 14 who looked to be 10 years old.

The others, who know the young ones are underage and still meet them are a different story.

We need cautions posted on places like "My Spaces" that say not to meet with strangers through the net, unless they are willing to come to your house WHILE your parents are there.

That should be taught at school and on TV as a public service.

There is a lot of entrapment going on too, if the MSNBC TV shows on predators on the net is any indication. They entice predators to come to a child's house while pretending to be a willing, underaged child. That is tempting the devil. Although, if a predator was fighting his desires very much, I guess he wouldn't be on places talking to the underaged.

My mother dated my father at 14 and married him when she was 15. There was no finer man in the world, but in today's times he would be arrested and labeled an offender, since he was 21.

We need to protect all the children and to do that we need to get rid of child pornography. And we need to get rid of the violent & adult pornography too, because it has a mind altering affect on a young person. They can get access to it though the web and through friends and predators. Adult pornography can be accessed through sattelite like Fox New's Murdock Direct TV. Children can accidently see it if their parents have a subscription.

Personally, I would ban all pornography, but there is too much money in it, so it will never happen. They say to stop pornography would be against "freedom of speech" but while they say that they are firing teachers for speaking out against the war or Bush.

A lot of the violent sexual crimes that happen in our country don't happen in other countries nearly as much. We need to find out why, although I think we already know.

Personally, I think there is going to be a lot of things done to try to shut down or regulate or block blogging. We need to stay on top of all of the happenings and not let anything get out of control.

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Cheerleaders for the internet can't have it both ways. If it's the "new commons" or the new "public square," then how can we just shrug our shoulders and say, oh well, if kids are getting assaulted, it's their fault, or their parents' fault? Naturally, parents have a responsibility here to be aware of what their kids are doing. But these sites are designed in ways that make it way too easy for predators and teens alike to lie about their personal details, and kids are savvy about covering their tracks.

Children are being victimized by commerce on all sides: TV, malls, music, magazines and movies, everywhere you look our public space is saturated with cruelty and sexual exploitation. Victoria's Secret's mall display during the holidays was dominatrix mannequins with whips, and giant pink teddy bears with blindfolds. People tell me they're just selling a legal product, but do we sell guns and X-rated videos at the mall? Why is it okay to play with sex, the most personal and intimate aspect of our beings, as a commodity, to mess with teenagers minds, aggravate their tendency to insecurity and their need to prove their adulthood, in order to make money?

And the internet adds the creation of fake identities to this toxic mix. This is not a liberal or conservative issue, it's a question of whether we actually give a crap about the emotional development and physical safety of our children.
I'm tired of hearing how every depravity, every representation of violent sex, every manifestation of the abuse running through our culture, is a free speech issue. We are way past the point of freeing people from sexual repression. That movement was coopted decades ago by corporations armed with craven psychology designed to use our damage against us.

Do you realize how pervasive sexual abuse and rape are in our culture? Do you know that right now there are children all around you being hurt and traumatized? And do you know that every study of this shows that internet chat and pornography encourages perpetrators to see their behavior as normal? Do you not see the connection to the larger violences of war and adult rape and domestic abuse?

Enough. Sites that allow windows of opportunity for predators, or encourage the enjoyment of violence against women and children, should be shut down, period. There is no right to profit from the risk of children's health and lives. I don't advocate long jail terms even for abusers, because almost all of them were victimized themselves. We need to look in the mirror, acknowledge the sickness at the core of our culture, and protect the vulnerable for several generations to cure the disease.

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Complain to Emily. Did it ever occur to anybody that her post is downright lame?

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Ted Bundy blamed his life of sexual violence on pornography and he said, before he was electrocuted, that he felt sorry for the parents of young girls because the boys were getting pornography off of TV and the net and the boys would become predators like him. He seemed to think there would be an epidemic of sexually violent murderers.

We need to protect the young man that is labeled as a sexual offender if he has sex with someone near his age but not of "legal age", too. There is a tendency to lump all ages together. There is a difference between prepuberty and teenagers. Teenagers need to be protected just as much but they are not children.

Parents need to realize there is a little bit of animal in every man and be vigilant. Who you leave your children with is the most important thing in the world. We should all assume the man next door is a predator that hasn't been caught as far as our children are concerned.

Computer tracking of offenders should help, with more jail time if they are found on places like My Spaces or legal porn sites. Tracking offenders and not allowing them to live within a mile of school would help too. Convicted offenders should not be allowed to blog on places the young blog on. I don't see that long sentences help or the pictures on the net. We should be able to see how many predators live in our town and how many miles from our house they live by looking on the internet and at printed maps, but the internet posting names and pictures is a punishment for the whole family. And it freezes them in time where they can't move on.

Murdock should help track down predators to help make up for his part of the ungodly pornography shows on TV. Many lives are ruined by pornography, while others rake in the big bucks from it.

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Ted Bundy blamed his life of sexual violence on pornography and he said, before he was electrocuted, that he felt sorry for the parents of young girls because the boys were getting pornography off of TV and the net and the boys would become predators like him. He seemed to think there would be an epidemic of sexually violent murderers.

We need to protect the young man that is labeled as a sexual offender if he has sex with someone near his age but not of "legal age", too. There is a tendency to lump all ages together. There is a difference between prepuberty and teenagers. Teenagers need to be protected just as much but they are not children.

Parents need to realize there is a little bit of animal in every man and be vigilant. Who you leave your children with is the most important thing in the world. We should all assume the man next door is a predator that hasn't been caught as far as our children are concerned.

Computer tracking of offenders should help, with more jail time if they are found on places like My Spaces or legal porn sites. Tracking offenders and not allowing them to live within a mile of school would help too. Convicted offenders should not be allowed to blog on places the young blog on. I don't see that long sentences help or the pictures on the net. We should be able to see how many predators live in our town and how many miles from our house they live by looking on the internet and at printed maps, but the internet posting names and pictures is a punishment for the whole family. And it freezes them in time where they can't move on.

Murdock should help track down predators to help make up for his part of the ungodly pornography shows on TV. Many lives are ruined by pornography, while others rake in the big bucks from it.

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this blog post is a response i found to this article that i think is right on

Myspace is a great site, it is not evil as some people think it is. People have the tendenacy to overreact sometimes. Most teens and people that use the site are not in danger because most teens and people know not to post personal information on the internet like your phone numer. More importantly most people know better than to meet anyone they met online in person. Myspace is just an extension of a fear of the internet that parents have been having for a while. Some people are afraid that their children are in more danger than ever because of the internet. This is just not true in most cases. Telling your kid not to have a myspace because they could be in danger is equivalent to telling your kid not to go outside because they are in danger. What you should do instead is tell them how to protect themselves by not posting their phone number and to never meet anyone they met online in person which is the same as telling your kids not to walk in any dark alleys at night and to not to go in car with a stranger. I had a discussion with a teacher of mine. We were talking about how some parents think that their children and teens are in more danger than ever and that they feel they have to watch them every second. (This was at the time that the news media was obsessed with kidnapped children) His argument was that weirdo pedophiles have always been out there and parents just have to warn their children how to be safe and not let fear rule their lives. The internet is a great resource and should not be called bad because of a few bad people. Parents just have to teach their children how to use the internet safely. I thought this article was very misleading by the way. Most people have myspaces to interact with their friends in new ways for example to keep in touch with a friend they had from an old school. Most teens do not seek to hook up on these sites. Like instant messaging its a new way to connect with friends.

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Since the dawn of time, parents have been lamenting that such-n-such was "bad for the children"; rock and roll, dancing, bikinis, hip hop, whatever. Now it's the internet. Of course dirty child molesting perverts should be caught and punished - they should have their balls whacked off as far as I'm concerned. But blaming those perverts' actions on one thing or another is just pointless. People among us are sick and depraved, they always have been, and that's why we should find them and weed them out of the gene pool. Darwinism at its finest, baby.
The responsibility has ALWAYS been on the parents to police their children. I really believe that some parents are just lazy or stupid, and allow the computer or the television or that twisted Little Johnny from down the street to babysit and influence their kids, when they should be watching their kids like a hawk. Kids are naturally inquisitive and want to copy and emulate things they see. Parents should take more responsibility for what influences their kids - if you don't like them pretending to be sexy on the internet (probably just out of boredom, or lack of attention from the parents), why don't you take them to a museum or to the theater or enroll them in dance classes or take a family yoga class or something, anything, other than try to force the rest of the non-child-having world to sugar coat and gloss everything over to make it "kid-friendly".
I don't have kids. Don't wanna, and you can't make me. I am an adult full of free-will, and I like to do adult things with my adult friends - that's one of the privileges of finally growing up. Don't force me to dumb everything down so your 12 year old can be "safely" entertained. I would be more than happy (ecstatic!) if you had to be 18 and up to log on to Myspace at all. All the teeneyboppers on there only serve to clog up and slow down what is a really great and humorous social phenomenon. And for the record, I met the love of my life on Myspace, hooked up with old friends all over the world, promoted my new show, helped sell 10,000 copies of my friend's album, and have been introduced to some really exciting new happenings in my town because of that silly little website. So leave it alone - go find some perverts and bust them somewhere else.

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It is trivial to control which web sites your child (or any other user of your computer, for that matter) can visit on the internet . You can turn the controls on and off so that someone who knows the password can get access to any site or none. You can also control access to sites based on language content, sexual content, and violence. In Internet Explorer, go to Tools..Internet Options, and then the Content tab. Click the Content Advisor Enable button, and then use the various settings to set a password, prevent access to a site (e.g., MySpace.com), etc.

We have put MySpace off limits to our 14 year old daughter. Anyone who says that any 14 year old is mature enough to comphend and beware of the dangers on the internet is simply foolish or immature him/herself.

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Seems to me that MySpace is another medium, but it isn't the root of the problem.

I remember an episode of a British satire show called "Brass Eye." They got a bunch of celebrities to say some pretty patently ridiculous things about pedophiles, under the guise of reading a public service announcement. ("Pedophles can cause toxic fumes to emanate from your child's keyboard...") It was hilarious.

But also, it illustrated something a few posters have brought up. Fear of the Internet as a medium for child molesters seems all out of proportion, since people actually managing to get kids to go meet them is relatively rare. Most abuse is from people they know and trust already... which makes perfect sense.

Kids are mostly, in my experience, bright enough by age 12 or so that if someone you don't know at all says "meet me at X and don't tell your parents" to not do it. If your kid isn't, then I would not let him or her cross the street alone, or even leave the house.

Seems to me that the posters that talk about banning various things... don't get it. I saw some porn as a teenager. I haven't become a serial killer. In fact, most people do not become serial killers, and porn is pretty pervasive in some places, so I would bet that porn per se is not the issue.

I'd say the safest thing a parent can do is give a young girl especially a sense that she is worth something. Girls who know they have an intrinsic worth -- beyond what is between their legs -- are less likely to engage in risky behavior, sexual or otherwise. Because they are confident enough to make decisions based on how comfortable they are with it, not their friends' comfort levels. Or what is sexy, or what is cool.

But that is hard to do--it requires a lot of work as a parent. But that was part of the deal when you had kids.

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I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but the thing is: kids HAVE been abused, raped and killed through these sites. What's the great need out there that the sites are filling? Doesn't self-worth involve belonging to a flesh-and-blood community, rather than a "virtual" one?

Yes, it's usually someone known to the child, I know this all too well, as I am a survivor of brutal abuse as a child. But it's not always someone known to the child. Is it worth those few kids lives to us to have these relentlessly shallow, empty networks going? People talk about how wonderful the internet "community" is, but isn't it just an expression of the failure of real communities?

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