Atlantic Magazine<\/i> (July\/August 2007) is just the latest media outlet to waste umpteen thousand words manufacturing the image of a cyberjungle of diabolically clever predators lurking to abduct, ravage, and murder your child. What a pointless crock of yuppie frettings the MySpace.com panic has become.<\/p>\n
Caitlin Flanagan\u2019s endless review (\u201cBabes in the Woods<\/a>,\u201d Atlantic<\/i>, July\/August 2007) of equally silly books and opinions about MySpace.com predators, bullies, and just plain untoward messages supposedly menacing every teen with a modem never once tells us: Why is this important?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n Of 40-plus million regular MySpace users (MySpace claims 100 million plus accounts, but a savvy geek<\/a> shows fewer than half are regulars), how many actual cases of teens being killed, seduced, or otherwise harmed by predators they met online exist?<\/b> Query law enforcement agencies concerned with internet crime and you\u2019ll find very, very few.<\/b> The MySpace and online panics are fabricated. Teens are handling cyberspace just fine. Cybertragedies are vanishingly rare.<\/p>\n Note that news stories<\/a> keep recycling a 2006 murder in Washington and other rare cases years and thousands of miles and years apart as if they constitute a \u201cpattern.\u201d The numbers are so low that police, news reporters, and net-nanny censorware peddlers have to make up cases. Recently, my own local TV news used the case of a murdered teen whose MySpace account, by police admission, had nothing to do<\/i> with her abduction to run several features on the dangers of MySpace.<\/p>\n In fact, a teenager is much safer unsupervised on MySpace than in church<\/b>. In the last eight years, more than a dozen teens have been shot to death in mass shootings in church or at church functions. Thousands of children and teens have been confirmed as victims of sexual abuse. So, parents, protect your teens\u2014let them stay home from church and go online instead.<\/p>\n And don\u2019t interfere with their net use. Statistically, teens are in much more danger from adults who supervise them than from anyone they might meet online. In 2004, the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect<\/a> confirmed that 1,400 children and teens were murdered and 180,000 teens were victims of violent and sexual abuses by parents in 2004). I could easily document more violent teen deaths in one impoverished Los Angeles zip code (say, 90044) in five months\u2014and more in American families in five days\u2014than could be blamed on MySpace interactions nationwide in five years.<\/p>\n Indeed, Dateline NBC\u2019<\/i>s \u201cTo Catch a Predator<\/a>\u201d should reassure parents about their kids\u2019 safety online (the pathetic dumbness of the men its stings lure to camera exposure with promises of pubescent sex shows why so few teens are lured by these dufi online) at the same time it shows conventional dangers (these predators include teachers, coaches, principals, cops, ministers, and others with plenty of respectable institutional access to kids offline).<\/p>\n The Ad Council<\/a> and other panickers warn: \u201cOne in five kids are [sic] sexually solicited online.\u201d (That\u2019s all? I get a dozen generic propositions every day.) Teens can handle it. In giant Los Angeles County, the Southern California High Tech Task Force<\/a> reports zero cases of criminal behavior connected to MySpace. I\u2019ve surveyed hundreds of my students, net veterans all, without unearthing significant online dangers other than the usual annoyances encountered offline. \u201cI met more weirdoes in Boy Scouts,\u201d one wrote. \u201cWould you rather encounter a psychopath online, or at a bus stop?\u201d another observed.<\/p>\n MySpace phobia is warping adult values more than teens\u2019. For a particularly overwrought travesty, read Los Angeles Times<\/i> writer Catherine Saillant<\/a>\u2019s April 8, 2006, front-page narcissism: \u201cI’ve covered murders, grisly accidents, airplanes falling out of the sky and, occasionally, dirty politics,\u201d Saillant began. \u201cBut in nearly two decades of journalism, nothing has made my insides churn like seeing what my 13-year-old daughter and her friends are up to on MySpace.com.\u201d<\/p>\n What outrage could Saillant\u2019s daughter and her peers possibly have committed that horrified her mother more than mangled bodies and screaming victims? The girl occasionally saw and used bad words on her MySpace website. She once posted a joking picture of her and friend flipping the finger. The horror. Welcome to privileged adults\u2019 self-doting bubble world, in which a daughter\u2019s mild growing-ups so enrage her growing-old mother that the rest of the universe vanishes in irrelevance. The moral values Saillant\u2019s daughter encounters online couldn\u2019t possibly be worse than her mother\u2019s narcissistic mispriorities.<\/p>\n