Oh. My. God.

[andrewducker]

I just cannot believe the sheer stupidity that is rife amongst people who claim to know better.

This BBC news story

A forensic psychologist spoke about the dangers of online journals, or blogs, and pictures posted directly online.

Rachel O'Connell said adults could use weblogs to learn about children.

She said: "This is just a paedophile's dream because you have children uploading pictures, giving out details of their everyday life because it's an online journal."

She described a scenario where a group of paedophiles could exchange information on a child's movement, potentially leading to an abduction.

For Fuck's Sake! How many actual children are actually kidnapped by actual paedophiles in a year? And how many will get something good from being able to share their lives with others and find likeminded children? I'd have _killed_ as a kid to be able to not feel alone from the ages of 11 to 18. The internet would have added unimaginably to my life and LJ would have made it so much more worthwhile.

But apparently there may be paedohpiles out there so we should lock up our children.

Maybe we should make them wear Burkhas so that they don't inflame the lusts of any passing paedophile.

I just feel speechless with rage.

Comments

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

I was going to make a flippant comment about cars being a paedophile's dream because they allow them to travel to another area to look for children. But on reading the article I think it ought to be pointed out that she doesn't seem to be actually advocating banning of blogs or stopping children having them - what she's doing is pointing out some of the dangers that people may not have thought about. To take the car analogy again, we don't have to ban the automobile to take measures against people using them unwisely.

I'm all for kids having blogs. But a lot of parents aren't aware of the potential issues, and I think they need to be made aware of that, though in a manner that would give a sense of proportion.

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

I agree TBH. I altready said to Andy: most people (teachers/parents/policymakers/lawyers) don't know what blogs are, nor what RSS can do, and they need to be aware how these technologies can be used. Yes the current concentration on the Internet paedophile is deranged given the vast proportion of child abuse is inflicted by people they know, not strangers; but that doesn't mean we should ignore it. (In fact there is already a huge amount of govt/charity web stuff informing parents about how to deal with cyber safety ; but again, naturally it's the parents who need it who won't know it's there :-)