MySpace.com hosting at least 29,000 known sex offenders
PC World posted a story that states that MySpace is hosting web pages for at least 29,000 known sex offenders who have registered MySpace accounts under their own names. While that is a huge number, and there should be no doubt that there must be at least three times that many known sex offenders using false names, it is not surprising. We have all seen the Dateline shows on catching predators and this is a huge problem.
The PC World article mentions a few state attorneys general who are addressing the issue but I can’t see that any good ideas for how to contain this problem have been suggested yet. They have talked about legislation that would ban registered sex offenders from using social networking sites. I think passing anything like this would be a waist of time and even counter-productive. These sex offenders will just start using false names. If a registered sex offender is willing to create a MySpace account under their real name then we should let them. At least that way their activity could be monitored.
I think that a better approach would be to require social networking sites to monitor all communication on their sites by minors. Realistically, this could not be done by human monitors but could still be somewhat successful if spiders would search the pages of minors looking for certain words or phrases and have humans monitor those pages that have been flagged.
We also need to come up with some much stiffer penalties for these offenders. I think the first offense should bring severe penalties and a second offense should remove the offender from society permanently. There is no reason we should not be doing this. The life-long effects of a child who is abused are just devastating.