[LINK] Don't be alarmed: 29,000 sex offenders on MySpace

[Adam Todd]

At 01:01 PM 26/07/2007, David Goldstein wrote:
>Interesting perspective on the MySpace story...

Indeed.  I have commented :)

>Don't be alarmed: 29,000 sex offenders on MySpace
>There are about 600,000 convicted sex offenders in the United 
>States. As of this month, 29,000 of them had profiles on MySpace.
>...
>MySpace has deleted the 29,000 profiles. But as Roy Cooper, North 
>Carolina's attorney general, noted in a statement, MySpace can only 
>associate sex offenders with profiles when the offenders use real 
>names to set up their sites;

They would be the 5% who are absolutely brain dead and 
stupid.  Yeah?   I mean don't most professional criminals use aliases?  Duh.

>  there could be many other sex offender profiles the site doesn't know about.
>...

Yes the other 90% :)


>Does this mean it's impossible that your child will be contacted by
>a sex offender over the site? No. But the odds are quite, quite low.

Sure, if 5% are using their real names, and 95% are using aliases 
that can't be detected, that means your child could be contacted by 
any of the other 570,000 sex offenders.

Cool.


>How do we know this? Because if MySpace truly had made it easier for
>predators to find and attack children, we'd have noticed a huge spike
>in such crimes. And we haven't.

Errr, yeah right.  Child Sex Crime has been around since children 
were born.  Has there been an increase? Only as awareness is raised.

As Myspace become a place where an increase would be discovered, 
course not.  It's not something that started this year.  There has 
been no data to indicate how may of the 600,000 sex offenders in the 
USA used Myspace to make contact with the children for whom they are convicted.

Duh.


>  Take a look at North Carolina's statistics on rapes
>committed against young people. In 1997, there were 665 rape
>convictions in the state in which the victim was younger than 15. In
>2006, there were 615. MySpace made no difference at all.

Young people?  What age?  This statistic is useless.  In 1997 not 
many people used the Internet, kids played in parks and predators hid in trees.

In 2007, kids stay in front of the computer, and predators go online.

Sheesh.  Where's the stats that breaks down the seesaw effect?


Like saying that marriages are stable the last ten years despite the 
Internet.  However more people today meet online than 10 years ago 
where they met at work, pubs, clubs etc.

Gee these days you can meet a wife in Russia or China, rather than 
stalk the local pub!  Something that didn't happen 10 years ago.  But 
marraiges are stable!