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Old Jun 23, 2006, 03:08 PM
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Maven Maven is offline
Pirate Goddess
 
Member Since: Oct 2005
Location: South Jersey, USA
Posts: 5,246
Well, I'm going to add my two cents to that off-topic part. They didn't ask everybody, and nobody speaks for me but me, so a "world wide survey" doesn't speak for everyone. And I sure don't take psychologists' opinions for gospel.

I'm also a MySpace supporter (like you didn't know). The majority of cases where kids get into trouble with pedophiles, hebephiles, predators and others online are because the parents weren't monitoring their children. Parents are still letting children keep their computers in their bedrooms and out of parents' views. They don't discipline their kids, or they're not consistent with their disciplining.

I saw the article on MySpace, too. As Kalamity and zen have said, there are a lot of sites like MySpace. MySpace is simply the most famous one, and the biggest one (biggest because of fame, and their fame made them bigger), at over 80 million users. They can't protect kids 100% on their site. We can't do that in the world. They already had protections. I know a boy I saw on a MySpace group who admitted he'd lied about his age. Lots of people--adults and kids--lie about their age on MySpace and the whole Internet.

If parents watched what their kids did online, they'd see if a pervert contacted them. And I bet you many parents don't know what kids are putting on their MySpace and similar sites, and some don't know their kids even have these sites! And I'm sure there are those who don't think there's any harm in their teenage daughters posing sexy or posting suggestive content. A lot of people post their age as "99" or some obviously untrue number, although some aren't really lying; some people put up sites for projects, such as music albums, movies, businesses, etc., rather than people. Others are obviously trying to keep their age private.

I'm not saying parents are solely the reason kids get into trouble on the Internet; and I'm not saying parents can guarantee 100% that their kids will be safe online or offline, but you can see for yourself, that kids are either not being monitored, or their parents don't care. Just look around MySpace and other sites.

I was on an adult Yahoo! Group a while back, and I saw posts by some adults for underage kids, and even one girl who claimed to be around 12 or 14, who wanted to get together with adults for sex. There was at least one set of parents who responded to a guy, offering to let him have sex with their daughter(s). I left the group and reported what was going on to Yahoo! They sent me a form email telling me that they would look into it, but couldn't give me details of actions taken, because of privacy issues or something. I never saw anything on the news about it, but I hope they did do something to stop it.
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