The 13-year-old boy sat in his California home, eyes fixed on a
> computer screen. He had never run with the popular crowd and long ago
> had turned to the Internet for the friends he craved. But on this day,
> Justin Berry's fascination with cyberspace would change his life.
> Weeks before, Justin had hooked up a Web camera to his computer,
> hoping to use it to meet other teenagers online. Instead, he heard
> only from men who chatted with him by instant message as they watched
> his image on the Internet. To Justin, they seemed just like friends,
> ready with compliments and always offering gifts.
> Now, on an afternoon in 2000, one member of his audience sent a
> proposal: he would pay Justin $50 to sit bare-chested in front of his
> Webcam for three minutes. The man explained that Justin could receive
> the money instantly and helped him open an account on PayPal.com, an
> online payment system.
> "I figured, I took off my shirt at the pool for nothing," he said
> recently. "So, I was kind of like, what's the difference?"
> Justin removed his T-shirt. The men watching him oozed compliments.
> So began the secret life of a teenager who was lured into selling
> images of his body on the Internet over the course of five years.
Am I alone in being *flabbergasted* that a 13 year old boy has that kind of private time with a computer? Especially to the point that it got that far?
Where were his parents during all of this?
No matter; this kind of thing has been going on forever -- where the parents are totally oblivious to what's going on in their childrens' lives.
This is no different than Columbine, for example. So it happened with a computer instead of homemade bombs -- it's still a parental issue at heart, and we as a society need to step up to the plate and scorn the parenting styles that create this and the parents who use such parenting styles.
The computer was the tool or outlet in this particular case, but this isn't about computers and the internet. This is about horrible parents, plain and simple.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When that article first came across the New York Times RSS newsfeed on Tuesday, that subject line 'Teenage Boy Joins a Sordid Online World' got me to thinking; maybe one of his, ummm ... 'patrons' had exposed or pursuaded the boy to read my blog
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or seduced him into reading
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where he would see a picture or ten-minute video of the Tin Hat Man as he caused embarassment and mortification for all the 'right thinkers' on the internet.
But you are right, Ron; Columbine, and a few other such incidents such as Justin Berry's case go right back squarely to the parents. PAT]