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A private junior high and high school for girls with behavioral problems, emotional problems, or learning problems, ages 13-17, in Arizona.
The following is the story of a criminal case pending in Queens, New York.
According to prosecutors, in late 2006 two girls met on MySpace. Sophie Soto told her new teenage friend that she was an 18-year-old lesbian who was thinking about having sex with a boy, but she was very nervous about it and needed her support. In January 2006, Soto's MySpace friend along with a second teenager agreed to come to Soto's apartment to support her. Both girls were under age 15 years. Soto was actually 22.
Soto and her husband got the girls drunk and then had sex with them. Later that evening, the couple took the teenagers to a Manhattan strip club, where the girls got on stage nude and had oral sex with other patrons.
According to District Attorney Richard Brown, "The consequences of the alleged sexual assaults for the victims are profound and can well result in emotional trauma from which they may never recover."
The Sotos were indicted January 12, 2008, on fifty-six counts, including rape, sexual abuse, and using a child for a sexual performance. If convicted, they could get fifteen years in prison.
The Soto case is every parent's nightmare, but it is also a potential legal morass for social network websites like MySpace and Facebook. MySpace has about 70 million users, with over 80,000 added every day. Facebook claims 61 million.
Teenagers and college students register on these websites and create profiles that often include their names, ages, pictures, geographic locations, schools, hobbies, diaries, and other personal information. They allow their friends to have access to all this information, and communicate with one another, often several times a day, through emails, announcements, diaries, and instant messages. A profile that is set to "private" is available only to those people the person on MySpace designates as "friends." Anyone on the Internet can view "public" profiles.
Since millions of profiles are public and available on search engines like Google, sexual predators can easily access them. By posing as a teen or college student, a pedophile can often locate a child, especially if the child posts news about school or sports events.
Because of the potential damage from civil and criminal actions such as the Queens case, MySpace entered an agreement on January 15, 2008 with attorney generals from 49 states. Texas is the only state not participating, because a lawsuit is pending there against MySpace after two alleged rapes of teenagers by adults who met them on that social network.
The agreement is supposed to provide better safety for teenagers using the website, but most people familiar with current technology say this is impossible to do.
For example, one of the terms of the agreement requires MySpace to set up a registry for parents. If parents enter their children's email addresses, MySpace will bar those addresses from the website.
However, since it takes only a few minutes to set up a free email account from services such as Gmail and Yahoo, teens can easily replace their protected address.
Another part of the agreement makes all profiles of 16- and 17-year-olds private. However, there is no way of checking which children are lying about their ages on MySpace.
The agreement would also ban users over 18 years of age from accessing the profiles of those under that age, or from adding a person under 16 years as a "friend," unless they already know the child's name and email address. However, there is no good way for MySpace to check ages and identities or police these rules.
Anyone who ever registers as a male on MySpace will probably receive emails from prostitutes and pornography websites. Some of the most popular diaries or "blogs" and many of the pictures on MySpace are sexually explicit and available to everyone who registers. As part of the agreement with the states, MySpace agreed to commit more time to reviewing photos and discussion groups and to block minors from accessing mature content and porn star profiles. MySpace public profiles will no longer be included on search engines.
The part of the agreement that will probably have the greatest positive effect is the one requiring MySpace to create a Task Force to find new ways to verify ages and identities of people registered on the site. However, the Task Force has until the end of the year to issue recommendations, and everyone admits the technology to do that is simply unavailable.
MySpace's security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, told the Los Angeles Times, "In the past two years, we studied all the different technologies out there and didn't find any product that works in identifying under 18s...With a lot of heads working together, I think we can make some great progress."
In the meantime, parents must keep in mind that one in seven children is sexually solicited online, one in 33 is subject to aggressive solicitations, and that the technology to safeguard children in cyberspace simply does not exist.