I found a story about how a man and woman met online through MySpace, and then went to see each other in person, which then led to problems. In this case, the woman doesn’t get raped, but instead she brings the man, a known sex offender, back to her home and lets him sleep in the bed with both of her daughters. The two children, ages 11 and 14, are the ones that get abused and mistreated by the man. What’s even worse is that the mother knew that the man was a sex offender and had even asked county officials to allow the man to stay with her. Her request was denied, but she brought him over anyways. She had no regard for the safety of her children.

This could have been prevented if MySpace had been able to find the sex offender’s profile and deleted it before anybody could meet him online. If this had been done, then nobody would have been able to contact him and there wouldn’t have been any issues. I know that MySpace is already doing this to thousands of other sex offender’s accounts, but obviously it’s not quick enough to get all of them, nor is it the best way to prevent this kind of interaction. In this case, since the man was already being tracked with a GPS ankle bracelet, the legal authorities monitoring him should have intervened once they saw him traveling back and forth between the counties. They should have taken action and figured out what was going on. Instead, they let the information come to them, after everything had already happened and the damage was done. So to prevent the interaction between the man and woman, MySpace could have deleted the man’s account and the county officials could have stopped him by not letting him leave the county.

Another way to prevent this sort of thing from happening would be if the mother had actually cared for her daughters. It’s common sense that you don’t interact with somebody you meet online, especially a known sex offender, then let them sleep in your house, in the same bed as your daughters. I don’t know how you could let that happen without actually realizing what you were doing. Any normal mother that had a working brain would have seen the red flags and not put her children in any kind of harm.

This whole incident has a negative effect on the Internet, because people read about these types of incidents and think that we should tighten or lock up all Internet access just because it helped somebody carry out a crime. They think that every site or ISP the criminal used should be held responsible and that those companies should be the ones regulating what is being done over their bandwidth. This may seem somewhat rational if you’re still pretty angry about the whole crime, but if you actually think about it in a coherent manner, this isn’t the way these things should be regulated. Blame shouldn’t be put on those companies just because somebody failed to use their product in the intended manner. It’s just like a robber using a Ford Focus for a robbery. It’s not Ford’s fault that somebody used their car to rob a bank. Granted, on the Internet these companies can express stricter rules than what Ford could do, but it still shouldn’t make them responsible for every heinous act carried out over their network.

In Postman’s latest chapter, he mentions that we have “rights without responsibilities” in relation to technology taking over our culture. Although this may be the case in some situations, I think we still should be held accountable with what we do when using the Internet or any other form of technology. In my example of the sex offender and woman, the woman didn’t fulfill her responsibilities as a parent. The duties of being a mother seemed to elude her mind throughout the entire time the man was at their place. The man wasn’t responsible with his actions, since he knowingly persuaded a woman to allow him to sleep in the same place as her daughters. He knew what he was doing and didn’t stop to think about how it would affect everybody in the end.

http://www.vbbeacon.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2009/03/10/49b67f8c98874

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