Predators on Facebook: Should you be worried?

 

In the wake of the shocking rape and murder of teenager Ashleigh Hall, who was ‘groomed’ by predatory paedophile Peter Chapman on Facebook, the British press have been quick to point the finger of blame at Facebook.

In an unbelievably sensationalist article on the Daily Mail website, Mark Williams-Thomas, a ‘vastly experienced’ consultant in child protection and a former police detective, paints a terrifying picture of hundreds of men waiting to groom and abuse young women online.  Mr Williams-Thomas set up a profile purporting to be a 14-year old girl and, apparently, simply waited for the indecent proposals to flood in.


Fortunately, as several commenters have noted, the story doesn’t quite ring true.  In order to be sent these messages the fictional teenager would either have had to initiate the contact in the first place or, at least, accepted friend requests from the predators. 

This is easily verified – set up a Facebook account, any Facebook account, with no connections with any other and see if (as described in the Mail article) you receive messages from anyone within 60 seconds.  Let alone a ‘middle aged man wanting to perform a sex act’.

One 16-year old commenter rightly points out that in 3 years of him using Facebook he has never come across anyone behaving in such a manner.  And this is the crux of the matter: the fake profile was set up and managed in such a way as to invite such contact – most Facebook users do not behave in this way.

So, should you be worried about how your children are using Facebook?

We believe that parents should be aware of their children’s online activity, and this goes double for social networking websites like Facebook.  After all, Facebook is little more than a mirror of the society from which it is born.  Like a city centre park, it is a wide open space full of people of all kinds.  Good and bad, young and old, the most pure and the most depraved are all free to mingle.

Would you ban your children from going to the park because of the risk of one of the other people there could be a predator?  Or, would you tell your children not to talk to strangers?  And keep a close eye on them whilst you were there?

Facebook has also come under pressure for failing to adopt the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre (CEOP) ‘panic button’ scheme and place it on each page, which some claim would help to protect children whilst using the site.

Does your city park have a panic button on every tree or lamppost, to connect your child directly to specialist child-protection services?  I suspect it doesn’t, but any good parent would have told their children how to summon help if they felt threatened, anyway.


We believe that:

• Misleading, sensationalist vilification of online services like Facebook is unhelpful. 
  After all - it is, and will remain, nothing more than a mirror of society.
  
  
• Parents should be aware of the risks involved in young people using the internet. 
  
  
• Parents should speak to their children about the risks, about what they should and shouldn’t do online, and about what to do if they feel threatened.
  
  
• Parents should be vigilant, and consider the use of PC & Internet monitoring tools like Spysure as a useful aid to their parental vigilance.
  
  

Do you have something you'd like to add to this article? As always, we invite your comments. Simply leave a comment below, get in touch on Twitter or Facebook, or simply email support@spysure.com.


Image Credit: ‘Salvo Vacarella’ on Flickr (CC)