The Internet's a Scary Place...

Myspace, facebook, livejournal. For the most part we all have/had one. However, the dangers which come from these sites is more than just someone being able to look at your pictures. For the most part, it is young girls who are the victims of these sexual predators. Girls like to look "sexy" in order to seem older, but what about that 30 year old man who is able to sit at his computer and interrogate...As a teenage girl with one of these sites I have found that it is certainly not uncommon for someone you have never seen before to try and strike up a conversation. Girls must be aware of the dangers and communicate with their parents or friends if they are receiving creepy comments from a person they have never met before. In Kansas City, a 13 year old girl, Megan Meier, was found hanging in her closet after receiving hateful comments from a made up person over myspace. Her mother told a source that she went into her room crying and within 20 minutes was found hung in her closet. She had felt like an outcast and thought the easiest way out was by committing suicide. What she didn't know was the person on the other end was a fictional character, Josh Evans, played by another girl named Ashley. The neighbors have now shunned her family and constantly berate them by performing acts on their house or making crude comments about their daughter. It is horrible to think a girl would go through with something like this after a conversation over the Internet. It is one thing to be the outcast at school, but this could have been easily solved by telling her mother and not communicating with "him" anymore. The Internet is a dangerous place because you can't see who the person is on the other end and a lot of times they are someone you would never expect.