"I Was Groped by a Virtual Pervert!"

The internet is evil! Burn your modems! Destroy your routers! If continue allowing this electronic bastard free access to your house your children will be molested in the privacy of their own bedrooms! You might just as well put a fluorescent sign in your window saying 'Fresh Young Arses Here' and have keys cut for every passing sex offender! Yes folks, it's another internet peadophile scare instigated by the traditional media. This time it was an edition of the BBC's Panorama, in which Jeremy Vine took time off from inciting riots on Radio Two to show us how social networking sites like MySpace are infested with kiddie fiddlers just waiting to electronically grope your kids. Now, I don't want to make light of this issue (OK, I do. Not the abuse part, but the way in which the media trivialises it), but the whole tone of the programme bordered on hysteria. I half expected it to end with Vine exhorting Britain's parents to take an axe to their childrens' laptops.

The programme employed that hoary old ploy of setting up a fake profile for a teenage girl and then monitoring the amount of harassment 'she' suffered. Fine, but it would have been a lot more useful if they'd also used a 'control' profile of an older 'woman' to see if it is merely the fact of being female which attracts the pervs. Actually, there have been so many of these 'experiments' done that I'm beginning to suspect that there aren't any real teenage girls out there on the net - they're all really hard-bitten middle aged male reporters (who probably get a kick out of all those lewd suggestions aimed at them). Maybe the perverts are reporters, too. Who knows. Anyway, based on this exercise, the programme concluded that young girls who include their ages and pictures in their online profiles tend to get harassed a lot by pervy blokes making lewd suggestions.

No shit! I think you'll find that something similar happens in the real world schoolgirls walking past building sites, for instance, are frequently subjected to similar comments. Indeed, bearing in mind the physical proximity of those making the comments, surely such a situation is far more dangerous than online harassment. However, I don't see Panorama devoting thirty minutes of prime time TV to exposing 'high street peados'. The fact is that the programme could only come up with one case of schoolgirls being harassed by an online pervert who was able to track them down through MySpace, and even that was a fluke, made possible simply because one of the girls had mentioned online the date and venue of a school trip.

The fact is that most sexual abuse actually occurs within the family. However, this is so unpalatable to the average person that TV and press investigations of child abuse always seek, instead, to focus on the lone, predatory, peadophiles who allegedly stalk our streets, despite the reality being that they are the exception, rather than the rule. The internet is frequently invoked as this is a convenient stick with which the traditional media can beat a feared rival. And it won't stop. A few years ago they were scaremongering about the dangers of chat rooms, with social networking sites gaining in popularity they were the obvious next target. Maybe virtual communities will be next - "I was virtually buggered in Second Life!" Trust me, it's only a matter of time...