December 8, 2006 12:02PM  |
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News of a new bill — sponsored by Charles E. Schumer (D.-NY) and John McCain (R.-AZ) — to require sex offenders to register their active e-mail addresses follows on the heels of a MySpace announcement to vet its user base against the sex offender registries of 46 states, the nation’s first attempt to combine database systems across state lines into a single, unified system.
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 Two of the Senate’s biggest names, Charles E. Schumer (D.-NY) and John McCain (R.-AZ) plan to push for legislation that will compel sex offenders to register their active e-mail addresses with authorities in an effort to save kids from online predators.Schumer and McCain will introduce the bill at the start of 110th Congress in 2007. If passed, it would send convicted sex offenders to prison for providing false e-mail accounts. The news follows on the heels of a MySpace announcement to vet its user base against the sex offender registries of 46 states, the nation’s first attempt to combine database systems across state lines into a single, unified system.
MySpace is the star of the social networking universe, and a fixture in most teens’ after-school time. While popular, MySpace has been dogged by reports of known sex offenders using it to solicit teens and tweens with abusive and often nightmarish proposals. It’s a problem that’s well known to John Shehan, program manager of the CyberTipline, a project by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. According to Shehan, parents need to rely on talking, and not merely technology, to keep their kids safe. “It’s old fashioned communication,” said Shehan. “You put every type of technological advantage online, but there are ways around all of them.” Yet talking — and above all, talking with teens — is sometimes the hardest part of parenting. Shehan and colleagues performed a set of focus groups in which parents quickly admitted that not knowing as much as their kids did about was a roadblock to even the simplest dialogue.
Teens’ language, including the dozens of acronyms they use for on-screen chats, was among the most confounding facets of their online lives. Yet some of those very acronyms reveal the danger that unpoliced computer use can pose:
To help parents talk with teens, CyberTipline offers a list of acronyms, tips, and talking points on its Web site at www.cybertipline.com, as well as a way to report the actions of suspected predators. “Even little tips like getting the computer out of kids’ bedrooms and putting it into a central location” can make a difference, said Shehan. He added that sex predators’ attempts to contact kids seem to know no limits of deception. “We’ve even seen cases where individuals have gone online posing as atheists,” said Shehan, “then go into chatrooms and look for kids who are devout in a particular religion.” The adult — often posing as a teen — claims to find religion in an attempt to groom the victim into sending photos, meeting offline, or worse. |
