A Week in the life of Facebook

Facebook in child safety backlash

 

 

 

From the above article:

 

"The social networking site announced that users aged from 13 to 17 will now be able to switch their settings to share posts with anyone on the internet, rather than just their "friends" or "friends of friends".

Children's groups and internet safety experts denounced the move, saying it could leave young people more vulnerable to cyber-bullying.
Anthony Smythe, managing director of BeatBullying, told The Times: "We have concerns that this age group can now share information in the public domain.
"Something they think might not be harmful now may come back to haunt them later. This is a move in the wrong direction."
The newspaper also said Jim Gamble, former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), had expressed "concern" that the move could make youngsters more vulnerable."

 

 

This follows the stories earlier this week below

 

Now ANYONE can find you on Facebook: Outrage as site removes privacy option for users to hide their profile in search results

"

The 'Who can look up your Timeline by name?' feature was applied when people searched for someone's profile using Facebook's search bar.
Depending on the setting chosen, the profile was either completely hidden from everyone who wasn't already a Facebook friend; could only be seen by friends of friends or was only visible to certain groups or networks of people."

and

 

Facebook is a 'major location for online child sexual grooming', head of child protection agency says

 

 

"A National Crime Agency spokesman said: "There are many social networking sites and websites used by offenders to target children and young people. The NCA CEOP Command's 2013 Threat Assessment on Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse highlighted that 48.5% of online child sexual exploitation reports received were linked to social networking sites, of which Facebook is only one. "

 

 

So, a good week for online predators and groomers, who not only will be able to locate potential victims easier, but also for teens who choose to put status's and photos as "public" instead of being restricted to "Friends" or "Friends of friends". OK, maybe I should put teens or younger, as it is a fact of life that younger children also use Facebook using incorrect DOBs, but if they chose a DOB that "made them" between thirteen and seventeen, at least previously their posts were restricted to FOFs or Friends. Not any more.

 

As an extra to this post, I thought I'd have a quick check to get a selection of stories, just from the UK, and just from this week, regarding Facebook. If it is like this now, what could it be like with the changes that are being made now?

 

Man jailed for attempted rape

 

Reclusive man preyed on teenage girl through Facebook

 

How a mum snared the Facebook paedophile preying on her daughter

 

Sex offender who targeted young boys on websites is HIV positive

 

Online games pervert jailed

 

So Facebook, a big fat

 



 

 

We are far too lenient with online sex offenders (JEP 11/06/2013)

Whilst reading through todays online edition of the JEP, I happened on an excellent article by Richard Heath, that impressed me so much I thought I'd include this in my newly started blog.

We are far too lenient with online sex offenders

 

 

In this piece Richard refers to the link between viewing child abuse images/videos, and the sexually motivated murders of children, following the convictions of Stuart Hazel and Mark Bridger.

 

To any normal person, it seems perfectly plausible that someone who has a sexual "fetish" (for want of a better word) for children and looks at such images online, will, quite probably, eventually get bored of merely viewing these vile images or films, and go to the next step of actual sexual abuse of children.

 

Indeed, this seems to be further corroborated by Sunday's article in The Sun, by Jim Gamble, former Chied Executive of CEOP, who writes "a study was carried out on 155 US prisoners jailed for viewing child abuse images. At the beginning, 26 per cent admitted a physical contact offence with 75 children. By the end of the study, which used a lie detector test, 85 per cent had admitted to contact offences with 1,777 children."

 

These stats have been taken from page thirteen of The Butner study from 2005.

 

If such a link is there, it really does offer the question, why are we so lenient with offenders who make, download and share such images? It seems far to often, in the UK at least, that no matter how many images are amassed by paedophiles, all they get is a suspended sentence for a matter of months.

 

One case springs to mind to support this (in amongst the thousands that have escaped jail over the years), and that is the case of Toren Smith who had downloaded 94,000 (yes, ninety four thousand!!) images and videos of child abuse, and ended up with a 2 year suspended sentence, believe it or not.

 

Unfortunately, as well, this was also the time when I discovered that you cannot appeal against this crime as "Unduly Lenient" as per one of my previous posts, as the AGs office will not look into this crime (Although in certain circumstances the Attorney General does have the power to refer a sentence to the Court of Appeal if he considers that it is unduly lenient, the power only applies to a limited number of offences.  It does not apply to  the  offences  in this case which, we understand, concern making indecent images of children.  This means that it is not possible for the Attorney General to ask the Court of Appeal to look at the sentence in  this  case)

 

It really is time that this crime is taken more seriously than it is currently. The only people who would search for and download these images are people who are inclined towards children, i.e. paedophiles. Once a paedo, always a paedo, there is no cure, and in my opinion, sentences should be the same for downloading child abuse images as actual child abuse. Just because they may not have sexually abused a child (yet) before being caught, does not mean they won't once released. The real crime here, is not taking this seriously enough!!

 

"In times of trouble leniency becomes crime." - proverb