Published: July 17, 2008 06:02 pm            

FALLS SCHOOLS: Protection from online predators

High school students learn about staying safe at special presentation

When a 15-year-old girl met an older man named Kenneth Lashway online, she was lonely and flattered by the attention he gave her. The two had spoken for about a year and eventually she agreed to meet him.

But when police happened upon a vehicle parked on the side of the road with the girl and Lashway, they found she had been beaten and raped.

That case goes back a decade, when the Internet was still relatively new. But now with MySpace profiles becoming as common as phone numbers for teenagers, law enforcement officials are going online to prevent sex crimes.

A group of more than 100 high school students came to the Niagara Falls High School Thursday to hear a representative from the state attorney general’s office talk about online safety in a presentation sponsored by the Niagara Police Athletic League.

“Social networking sites aren’t bad,” said John Maggiore, policy advisor for the attorney general. “The point is you have to be very careful. You have to know what you should do and shouldn’t do online.”

Maggiore put a screenshot of a MySpace profile up on an overhead projector and asked the students what information they could find.

“She’s 17 years old,” one girl shouted.

“Her name is Christina,” called out another.

“She doesn’t have a lot of friends,” said one boy, eliciting laughter from other students.

But that’s a serious piece of information, Maggiore said.

“Remember, the story before,” Maggiore said. “It was a lonely girl ... The fact that she doesn’t have a lot of friends might tell the wrong person something.”

Just by looking at the MySpace page on the screen, the students knew everything from where the girl lived and went to school, to what she looked like and what her interests were.

Unless users of MySpace and the similar Web site Facebook opt to make their profiles private, anyone can see their personal information and contact them. Their friends and acquaintances will find them, but so can people like Lashway, who was a married assistant high school principal with a 15-year-old daughter of his own.

“He used the Internet, the ability to cloak his identity, as a way to carry on a double life up until the time he was caught,” Maggiore said.

Makilah Pagerogers, who was at Thursday's presentation, said she has a MySpace page because most of her friends use the site too. She said her mother was against her using the site, but she’s careful.

“I just go on and talk to my friends — I know a lot of people on MySpace,” said Pagerogers, who will be a freshman at Niagara Falls High School next year. “I don’t talk to other people that I don’t know.”

Jenniffer Berthelsen, an incoming senior at Niagara Falls, has both MySpace and Facebook pages. She limits the information she posts, but said staying online has become a necessity to stay in the loop.

“It’s just a communication tool — I keep in touch with people because the Internet pretty much runs people’s lives,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve probably lost touch with some friends because they didn’t have a computer. That’s how it works.”

But not all the users on social networking Web sites are as careful.

Nearly one in seven young people between 10 and 17 years old are solicited for sex over the Internet. Of those, about 12 percent tell a parent and 5 percent report the solicitation to police, Maggiore said.

The likelihood of online sexual solicitation has seemed to go down in recent years due to less frequent use of chatrooms, but requests to meet in person have gone up, Maggiore said.

Predators are likely to “groom” potential victims by offering attention, sending gifts, discussing inappropriate topics, sending sexual images and trying to hide the relationship, he added.

“If anybody ever says, ‘Try to keep this relationship secret,’ ” Maggiore said, “that’s a dead giveaway. That’s a dead giveaway it’s probably no good.”

        

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