Why Do Registered Sex Offenders and Pedophiles Like MySpace?

There is no charge to use MySpace, no registration fees; MySpace is used by many teens and most give out a great deal of personal information.

Why would a registered sex offender and a pedophile not love this environment? This is dreamland for these people. They can access over 50 million people, from their own homes, and no one knows it! Think about it...50 million...that's frightening!

Now one of the Internets largest social networking sites, MySpace has become the ideal environment for sex offenders and pedophiles. They can easily just blend into the environment, often passing themselves off as teenagers MySpace does not have adequate staff to monitor their users, and in spite of the fact they say they are doing all they can, there is little comfort in the knowledge that no one is really watching what is going on. If we know that, the sex offenders and pedophiles know it as well.

MySpace is where kids go to share everything about their lives in daily blogs. MySpace does prohibit users posting addresses and phone numbers, but, like in all avenues, we know that teens don't always follow all of the rules. With MySpace's admitted short-staffing, who is there to monitor what is posted?

When you register for your page on MySpace, you are required to fill out your personal profile. You are required to be 14 for a MySpace account, however, with the short-staffing-no-monitoring-issue that is so prevalent at MySpace, this rule becomes a joke.

All a sex offender or a pedophile has to do to get to your child is to read their personal profile and just send an invitation for conversation.

Most of the time they will claim to be a teen themselves, creating a whole online identity to match. They will usually start out this new friendship by talking about things they "have in common", music, sports, hobbies, peer pressures, whatever they can glean from the child's profile.

Once they have gained your child's trust, they will move on to conversations that have a more sexual nature. It is important to note here, that it is possible to have conversation on MySpace that is not visible to others.

Open your own MySpace account and learn all of the functions of the website. If your teen has an account, invite them to be your friend, they can not refuse, and this will allow access to their site.

If the account is set to private you can not access their page if you are not on their list of friends. All a predator needs to do is send an invitation to a private account. Many teens have thousands of online "friends."

Sex offenders and pedophiles both know that in spite of the rules and regulations of MySpace, if a child ignores their advances and follows proper protocol by reporting these advances, that MySpace, is so understaffed that there really is not much that can be done. All a predator needs to is establish another profile and begin searching again.

So set some rules for your kids if they are now using MySpace or plan too.

1) Make it mandatory that you have access to their MySpace page.

2) Get their MySpace login info and password.

3) Don't allow them to post personal information about themselves such as where they go to school or what school sports teams they play.

4) Set very clear expectations for your child and hold them to those expectations.

Amy Cainfield is a child advocate and expert on the dangers of social media for children. She is also a contributing editor for the MySpace watchdog site, http://www.MySpaceMonitor.com and teen chat acronym site, http://www.TeenChatDecoder.com

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