A tale from New Zealand
Dad’s plea for police to check Net sites:
A horrified Christchurch dad whose teenage daughter invited a stranger home for sex wants tighter policing of social networking websites � some of which are now being banned in Australian schools.
A Christchurch father, who contacted The Press because he wanted to warn other parents of the dangers of social networking sites, said he had been forced to place his daughter under “house arrest” after she invited a stranger home for sex after meeting him on Bebo. com.
His daughter started using Bebo about five months ago and initially everything seemed OK, he said.
“We are quite an open family, so we keep an eye on things that are happening. It was just like making a website. That’s all I was aware of,” he said.
The parents arrived home one night to find a boy in their house with their daughter.
“Then we started finding condoms lying around. We questioned her a bit further and it came out,” the father said.
He forced his daughter to show him the website, and he was horrified at what he found. She was acting like “something off Manchester Street”.
“The whole school is in on it, hooking up left, right and centre. They post messages like ‘Fancy hooking up?’ and they come around to the house when Mum and Dad are out to make whoopy,” he said.
“They go to the chatrooms, see if they are attractive enough and go from there basically. It’s unbelievable.”
His daughter “was actually making the first moves”.
“They are all talking about sex, who they had sex with or were going to have sex with,” he said.
Police, schools and the Government needed to take steps to crack down on the sites before something “blew up”.
“I don’t think police have picked up on it, but it’s obvious to me the websites are dangerous,” the father said.
“The cover of the web page might look innocent enough but there is an insidious dark side to these sites. Police don’t know what the threats are because they are not looking at the sites.”
His daughter had told him she often accessed the sites at school when the teachers were not looking.
As well as banning his daughter from the internet and a cellphone and removing her details from the internet, she was also getting counselling and a health check, he said.
“Despite our daughter reading all the safe-surfing jargon, teenagers being teenagers, she decided to put her health and safety at risk,” he said.
“For God’s sake, parents, wake up, get on the internet and get your kids off these sites.”
I think you know what my opinion on the story is but I’d like to hear yours.
Related Stories
POSTED IN: Safety
4 opinions for A tale from New Zealand
Tina
Jul 10, 2006 at 7:33 pm
When are parents going to take responsibility and check up on what their kids are doing online? It shouldn’t have taken the father in the story five months to follow up on what his kid was doing online.
My daughter’s myspace is well monitored by me, and if there’s anything there that I think is inappropriate, it gets nuked right away. (Unbeknownst to her, I know her password.) If it got to the point where it truly got out of hand, I’d take down her profile in a New York Minute.
Furthermore, I’m so tired of hearing stories of parents who want the police to raise their kids for them. Parents need to be that — parents — to their kids, not their friends. I’ve also said too that if I haven’t pissed my kids off at least 3 times a week, I ain’t doing my job.
Not DaMama
Jul 10, 2006 at 9:07 pm
It’s too bad this happened but why didn’t Daddy know what his kid was doing online?
Why is it the government’s responsibility to know what teenagers and children are doing online??
If parents want to point fingers they’d better be looking in the mirror when they’re doing it.
Ashley
Jul 11, 2006 at 8:54 am
I was a teenagers not too many years ago and I gotta tell ya I would have gotten my ass whooped for doing any of the stuff that these teenagers are doing now. WOW. My daughter is 7. She is never gonna use the internet LOL
BW
Jul 11, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Except for the fact that he was apparently a stranger(?) this sounds about the same as what I was doing as a teenager, just without benefit of computers. I mean, just because I didn’t have MySpace or whatever, doesn’t mean I wasn’t trying to hook up with every girl I met in high school :) That’s one reason why it’s different for a young girl inviting strangers over.
But yes, my parents would have flipped if I snuck a girl home during those years.