Dharmagirl wrote a good series of articles recently regarding the dangers children face when using the Internet. Most people feel that their kids should be protected from online predators who are aggressively seeking these kids out. Well let me tell you something, the kids are hunting too.

     I am not sure at what point American girls became this needy. I have had an AOL account that I have used very infrequently over a few years (it is nice to have an email account that is not likely to go away or change) and on the rare occasions that I have logged onto AOL I have had some very odd encounters with people IM'ing me out of the blue. It was not until Dharma wrote her articles that I really analyzed all of them into something coherent and I had simply regarded them as a random series on events. Looking back though the pattern *leaps* out at me.

     We have convinced our teens that sexuality as expressed by "dating" is the most important thing on the earth.

     Let me be clear here, girls as young as 10 have IM'd me out of thin air asking the usual chat up standby "a/s/l?" (age/sex/location for the uninitiated). I never bother lying on AOL (what would be the point?) and so about 60% of these girls (90% of whom were aged 10-14) would simply disappear when they found out my age. This left about 20-40% of these very young girls *still* chatting me up even though they knew my age! What if it wasn't me they had been talking to? What if it was one of those guys over at pervertedjustice.com?

     Now I know that at least 25%-50% of these remaining "girls" were actually guys. As a long time netizen it is childishly simple for me to detect most homosexual males posing as women. So this leaves about 1/4 of these random IM's as legitimate teenage girls who were looking for an online "bf". (By the way, if you have a digital camera or webcam *anywhere* in your house I can guarantee that your teenage girl has used it at least once or more likely has figured out how to access it at will to get her picture online so don't delude yourself about that)

     Most of the time I would just tell these girls to leave off and go find someone their own age, as I am not much for online chat anyway. Once in a while I would engage them in a conversation about the dangers they were courting by talking to older men online though. The distressing thing was that most of these girls *already knew* the dangers involved but were so desperate to be able to say that they had a "bf" that they didn't care! Even more frightening was that these girls took the fact that I was warning them about older guys as a sign that I was "safe" and a "good guy". A pedophile with an ounce of intelligence would have had these poor, attention starved, sexually jumpstarted girls eating out the palm of their hand! This is one of the many reasons I don't frequent chat forums.

     At some point the Net, societal changes, and possibly even diet have rocketed girls into their sexually aware phase *far* ahead of their emotional development. Junior high and even grade school age girls are interacting with their peer groups based on pecking orders (popularity, dating, sexual experience) that were not used as social ladders by previous generations until *much later*. (In my case these things became paramount at around 15-16 years of age). These girls have no defenses yet. They are much too shy to actually "talk" with real boys their age so they have never had the personal experience of a male chatting them up in any manner necessary to get physical favors from them. Online this means they are a herd of lambs to the slaughter. Real life experience gives girls the chance to spot male flim-flam for what it is but these girls don't have that yet.

     I don't have a good solution to this problem or even a good starting place beyond draconian security measures for your child (which exact their own tolls). I guess the major point of all of these articles is that parents cannot afford to be technologically ignorant. The Net can *not* be a place the "your kid uses" and you do not. The Net is the 'hood of today and you need to be out there watching your kids in the same way you would if they were outside. The computer is not your fucking nanny.