Thursday, May 17, 2007
Newspaper article number 3
Prosecutors want MySpace sex offenders exposed
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200705/s1922970.htm
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Reading the article, it did not surprise me. But the problem is, why has nothing been done before the problem even surfaced? Why was it not fixed?
I remember my parents always tell me not to talk to stranger, with the fear that one might get kidnapped or hurt. But I believe that the biggest problem regarding this issue, talking to strangers, is sexual harassment rather than kidnapping or rather child-trafficking.
This article tells us American prosecutors are urging a “friend-making” website MySpace to help detect and stop the acts of harassment. These type of harassment usually happens without even the victim knowing it until too late. The prosecutors are asking them to find the profiles of the sexual offenders who “prey” on children by the means of MySpace.
In the United States the sex offenders have to register their address before being released and have to continually update it. This would help detect the crimes committed by them and also help track them down if they even try to do so. But even so I believe that if it was being tracked trough e-mail address it would thus be much harder to stop them. This is because the anyone could have more than one e-mail and not restricted to any number. Furthermore e-mail can be created in a mere two to three minutes and its totally free.
MySpace came up with an idea of simply banning them whenever they create accounts based on their IP address. The host of this website have got a program to start checking their own pages to match the profile of any know sex offenders. This tells me that MySpace has taken the imitative and thus will not tolerate the abuse of the accounts for sexual harassment.
The safety of children using the net is the most important factor at this point of time. I strongly agree that something must of course be done about this because of the sheer number of cases and stories that have been going around by word where men are using teenage girls. I think that MySpace has done the right thing and took a stand, the banning of these accounts of the abusers should be the first step on tackling this problem. But there are also other ways to solve these type of problem. An example is probably teaching the teenagers how to deal with this problem when confronted with. It would certainly teach them how to act towards the problem and most of all avoid this problem. I believe that MySpace should also consider taking off the accounts, because if mistaken, an innocent user would certainly face a lot of inconvenience. This is a big start in solving this particular problem thus I encourage that websites and programs such as Friendster. IRC should keep track of the problem, and do take up the precaution like what MySpace has done to prevent and avoid this crucial problem on the internet today.