The Abstinence Clearinghouse Blog

Last week I mentioned a new study stating that 1 in 25 online youth has been solicited for sexually explicit photographs. The story of the day seems almost a tailor made follow up. The North Carolina Attorney General’s office have revealed that there are 29,000 registered sex offenders with accounts on MySpace. These users have been purged from the system (another story here).
There are a couple things I’d like to mention.

This is definitely a good thing; anything to protect our children is A-OK. However, we do need to be realistic. The fact that 29K offenders were found in and purged from the system does not mean that there were only 29K offenders to begin with. There are probably a great deal more who had the wherewithal to use false information. For that matter, depending on what sort of follow-up precautions are taken, there might be a number of these 29K that jump right back in with false names and different email addresses. We can hope that MySpace keeps record of IP addresses. The point is that
again, while this is a good thing, it is no excuse to be less vigilant against threats against young people. On the contrary, it is if nothing else a loud reason to take greater care in what (or who) youth are exposed to online.

The first article I linked quotes MySpace Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam as saying,

To really stop giving predators a free ride on the Internet we need legislation. We’re pushing hard to pass laws that force predators to register their e-mail address, just like they have to register their street address in the real world.

There’s a good chance that Mr Nigam knows a few more things than I do about technology, but I’m hesitant to jump on board with this suggestion. Every major e-mail service is free, and you can have as many addresses as you want. What’s going to stop sex offenders from putting submitting a dummy address into the sex offender registry and using their real one for MySpace? Or from setting up one exclusively for MySpace use to go with their false personal information? It just seems a bit short-sighted to me.

At any rate, those are a couple of points that immediately came to mind. Kudos to the NC AG for their work nailing these offenders. Let’s hope this work continues.

Update 7/26:

Today’s e-mail update offers some interesting stories regarding the sex offenders themselves.