The Internet Issue

There are some bad people in this world. And a lot of those bad people are very clever. So clever, in fact, that they are willing to take their schemes to elaborate lengths in order to get away with murder – or worse.

Having recently watched ‘The Lovely Bones’ for the first time, I found myself quite roughly jilted out of my safe little nook and into the waking reality that it wasn’t just another fantasy story – these kinds of things do happen, more often than we’d like to realise.

And then the Beaumont case resurfaced. All the fresh horror that I felt towards the world was only reinforced.

The scary thing is that the perpetrators in these cases had the hard slogs. These days it is so much easier . . . 

The Internet has provided a great many services and conveniences to the 21^st Century, one of them being the vast array of social networking sites at our disposal. Websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Xanga are all used to share photos, personal information, statuses and to chat – with personal friends and strangers. Whilst there are privacy settings provided on the majority of these sites, they are optional and customizable, and rarely used by the younger, more naive generation.

Teens make up a huge proportion of these sites’ users. A much smaller proportion – yet still very much there – are those bad people: pedophiles, rapists, kidnappers and murderers.

All these offenders need to know in order to track down a desirable victim is a surname and a town; most teenagers provide much more information than this. Needless to say, predators don’t have it tough when it comes to finding potential victims on the web. It is all too easy.

There have been many kidnapping, rape and murder cases since the birth of the Internet in which social media sites have played a big role. Middle-aged criminals posing as teens have hidden behind a screen and played the part perfectly, slowly but surely luring youth into a net beyond the network, and then it’s too late. These kids suddenly find they’re not safe behind a monitor anymore and it’s then that they realise not everything on the Internet is as it seems.

There have been countless instances just like this, and yet teens are convinced ‘it can’t happen to them.’ But it can. And it does.

If young, inexperienced children are to be exploring the web without so much as some guidelines, then the road is open for disaster. Parents need to understand what – and who – their children are being exposed to, and then set safety nets in place.

Many a life could be saved through a little understanding and discipline and many a bad person stopped in their tracks.