I am thinking of a resource that is very popular today, used by people of all ages. People meet up there to catch up with each other. For most people, it is a friendly, fun place, and even a place to conduct business. They may also meet there for romantic encounters. They may end up leaving this relatively secure location and going somewhere else to have sex. Child predators are known to habituate this type of environment. Often, parents have no clue what their children are doing there. This environment professes to have rules and security measures, but admits that these are hard to enforce and that 100% safety cannot be guaranteed. And yet, these environments thrive. And parents let their kids go, in fact they enable them to go by providing them with ways to get there! What am I thinking of???
OK, another analogy from me...this time I am talking about the mall. Or maybe the movie theater. The thing is, people regularly let their kids off there and pick them up several hours later. One thing kids do at the mall is go to computer stores and open/update MySpace accounts. And at the movies, kids have been known to.....well, you figure that one out. I am not saying parents should not let kids go out in public, though sometimes I think some parents let their kids be unsupervised in malls at too early ages, and for too long. But what they need to do is teach their children to be smart and safe wherever they go. And that goes for social networking sites too. Paranoria about social networking sites is NOT the answer!
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