Week of September 4, 2005

Two kinds of experts - a parent and an analyst at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's CyberTipline provide a heads-up on MySpace.com and other teen blogging hot spots.

Sexual solicitations from strangers are a fact of life for MySpace.com bloggers. Why single out MySpace? Because it's the No. 1 site for teen social blogging (see numbers below), and "if teens are there, predators are there too," said John Shehan of the NCMEC's Exploited Child Exploited Child Unit (the people who run the CyberTipline, at cybertipline.com and 800.843.5678).

There's no research on this yet. But there's strong anecdotal evidence being shared in the law-enforcement community: John said MySpace came up a number of times "as a point of interest" at the internationally recognized Crimes Against Children conference he just attended in Dallas. No other teen-blogging site came up, he told me. "That's not to say this isn't happening at other blogging services, but this is the one I kept hearing about."

The reason why I spoke with John is because Karen, a parent in California, emailed me that this had come up at her house - to give other parents of teen bloggers a heads-up. Here's her story:

"I found a message in my [16-year-old] daughter's MySpace.com mailbox from someone saying, 'You are a doll. We should get together'," Karen wrote. "I googled the email address he left, and it turned out to be a guy who produces pornography, specializing in teenage girls. He purposely left the message in the MySpace mailbox (password-protected), rather than leaving it as a comment [or post in her blog], where anyone could see it.

"I reported this to the local police department and also to CyberTipline.com. In less than a week, I received an email from the police detective, saying he had spoken with a special agent from the FBI, and they wanted to look into this immediately." Her research, Karen later told me, turned up an East Coast news story about a girl being killed during one of this producer's photo shoots in 2004. Three weeks ago, the photographer was found guilty of killing her, Karen said.

"Even that information didn't shake my daughter up," she wrote. "Her reaction was fairly defensive, and she told me that since she didn't respond to his email, this guy would just go on to someone else, since there are a lot of girls who do a lot of worse things on the Internet." But Karen's daughter did close her MySpace account right after that incident, Karen later told me.

I asked John Shehan at the National Center how they treat reports of strangers emailing kids. "We consider these high-priority situations. Any time a child receives a solicitation, we consider that grooming, a pre-travel situation [traveling to meet a minor for sex]. That's a Level 1 priority" (the CyberTipline has four priority levels its analysts assign to reports coming in). They get a report like Karen's to law-enforcement within 24 hours, John said. "We always urge parents to make the reports" because, he told me, 10-20 other children are probably hearing from this person too. He reminded me of the statistic from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center that one in five kids receive sexual solicitations online.

For measures Karen took at her house, please click to this issue at Net Family News.

Numbers & latest news

27 million & counting. That figure for current members of MySpace reflects 400% growth since the beginning of this year, the New York Times reported. MarketWatch reported in July that MySpace.com had 15.5 visitors in the month of May alone (and its parent company was being acquired by News Corp. for $580 million).

A Seattle dad nixed MySpace for his 14-year-old, the Seattle Times reported, because of "the bikini-clad pictures and graphic language" he found there.