MySpace Users Fight, One Stabbed Several Times

An article referenced by Drudge talks about Cyber-Bullies and online safety. What caught my attention, of course, is the bit about MySpace. Underage teens got into a cyber-spat with each other, and a 13 year old girl stabbed a 15 year old girl in the back several times. From the PalmBeach Post here:

Cyberspace new realm for bullies’ fear tactics
Schools, parents and students learn how to fight back from growing online torment.

Two freshman girls from a school in Palm Beach County logged onto Match.com and created a profile for a teacher they didn’t like. Under interests they wrote “hard core porn.”

An unpopular kid that cheerleaders made fun of stole one of the girl’s buddy list, an online address book of her friends’ screen names, and offered it back in exchange for sexy pictures.

In January, a 15-year-old girl from Port St. Lucie was stabbed in the back several times allegedly by a 13-year-old former friend after getting into an argument on MySpace.com, a popular Internet blogging site. The 13-year-old was arrested and charged with aggravated battery.

Other teens send text message threats and profanity to classmates over cellphones while teen blogs propel gossip and cruel jokes anonymously and instantaneously.

In South Florida, school officials are conducting cyber-bullying seminars for parents, asking students to promise not to tease or harass classmates in cyberspace and addressing the topic in student conduct rules.

Some kids even share passwords to e-mail and blog sites. If the friendship goes bad, it can get nasty.

“They can go in and change their profile to say they’re gay, they do drugs and drink,” said Lee Munro, a technology teacher at St. Andrew’s School in Boca Raton. “They’ll pretend they are someone else and write ‘I hate you.’ Sometimes a lot of it is playful bantering, but sometimes the kids are malicious.”

“I went home after the meeting and started looking up all my friends’ kids up on MySpace,” said Wendy Greenhut, whose 12-year-old daughter attends American Heritage Academy west of Delray Beach.

Greenhut is considering purchasing monitoring software and moving the computer from her daughter’s bedroom to the den.

First of all, each incident of MySpace mentioned in this article includes underage teens, which is prohibited by the Acceptable Usage Policy of MySpace. MySpace needs to do more to prevent underage use of the site, and it also needs to police its content for violent and sexual speech and images. And any page that contains personal information needs to be deleted.

But more importantly, parents need to police their children’s Internet usage. Children are constantly posting personal information on their MySpace pages that would easily lead a sexual predator to them. And often parents are oblivious to their childrens’ surfing habits.