A mom writes: Teen solicited in MySpace

Sexual solicitations from strangers are a fact of life for MySpace.com bloggers. Why single out MySpace? Because it's the No. 1 site for teen social blogging (see numbers below), and "if teens are there, predators are there too," said John Shehan of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's Exploited Child Unit (the people who run the CyberTipline). There's no research on this yet. But there's strong anecdotal evidence being shared in the law-enforcement community: John said MySpace came up a number of times "as a point of interest" at the internationally recognized Crimes Against Children conference he just attended in Dallas. No other teen-blogging site came up, he told me. "That's not to say this isn't happening at other blogging services, but this is the one I kept hearing about." The reason why I spoke with John is because Karen, a subscriber and parent in California, emailed me that this had come up at her house. She contacted me to give other parents of teen bloggers a heads-up. Please click to my newsletter this week to read her story.