Quarterly Newsletter
LEAD ARTICLE
MySpace and Internet socializing…What’s behind the risks kids take?
Four years ago, Christina Long was a popular cheerleader and sixth grade honor student living in a suburb of Danbury, Connecticut.
Today, she’s known as the first confirmed U.S. victim of an Internet predator – at 13, Christina was strangled to death by a 25-year-old restaurant worker she met online.
“I would give anything to take that computer back,” said her distraught father after Christina’s body was found.
While it’s easy to understand his reaction, is it really computers – or even popular social networking sites like MySpace, FaceBook and YouTube – that are the problem?
It’s true that before all today’s technology existed, Christina probably would never have crossed paths with her killer.
But, just what happens when kids go online? What are they doing and saying? When does socializing on the Internet turn from fun to potentially fatal? How concerned should we all be?
Very, says New Horizons Clinical Therapist Eilean Mackenzie, who often works with young women recovering from bad online experiences and struggling with issues that got them into destructive situations in the first place.
“Teenagers constantly experiment with who they are,” said Mackenzie.
“And when you combine that with a deep need for attention, you often get a disconnect between who a girl is and how she portrays herself online.”
While teenagers have always struggled to fit in and feel accepted, the Internet has made it much easier to be part of the “cool” crowd, said Mackenzie, and that’s where real trouble often begins.
“Kids often post photos of themselves with drug paraphernalia or lots of alcohol, or they engage in inappropriate sexual talk online, bragging about what they’ll do or have done – things that may or may not have happened,” said Mackenzie. “All those things get them noticed, but not in positive ways.”
To illustrate her point, she tells the story of 15-year-old Allison,* who recently went through the New Horizons outdoor therapy program.
Like many of the kids who end up on the unsavory side of Internet social networking, Allison often felt on the outside socially and struggled with close friendships. Then she began to post sexually suggestive photos and comments on her MySpace page, and suddenly she was getting a lot of attention from a lot of people. That’s all it took to hook her and to make MySpace the center of her social life.
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| Winter 2007
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