Sex Offenders

We've all been made painfully aware of the dangers of social networking sites like FaceBook and Myspace.com; Dateline's Series "To Catch a Predator" drove this point home to millions of Americans.

But recently in Wisconsin, a local mother learned that it's much worse than she could ever have imagined.

The sex offender that went to prison for assaulting her daughter was apparently showing other inmates photos of the girl, along with her address. His friend, another sex offender, used that information to send letters to the girl. In them, he advised her to go to Myspace, the most popular of the social networking sites, to see his profile.

And it's all legal.

Thankfully, he sent the letters the old fashioned way, and the mother could intercept them before yet another sexual predator could approach her child.

Last month, a similar phenomenon was discovered in Massachusetts, where registered sex offenders were found to be posting profiles on Myspace, which is especially popular with teens and tweens. This demonstrates, loud and clear, that in spite of their positive influences social networking sites provide the perfect venue for Internet predators.

There are no laws right now prohibiting sex offenders, prison inmates, or other Internet predators from advertising themselves in this way. And even if there was, catching them all would be near impossible. According to the FBI there are in the neighborhood of 50,000 Internet predators trolling the net at any given time.

Clearly it will take a great deal of vigilance on the part of parents to keep their kids safe online, even if legislation does catch up to these and similar situations. Thankfully this is what parental control software is for. Web filters are too easy for kids to get around, but WebWatcher allows parents to block pages and simultaneously record everything that happens on their computer.

The incident in Wisconsin aside, most sex offenders won't send letters when they're hunting your child, they'll send email.

Hopefully, with parental control software, spy software, parents can intercept these too.