Search Results for: suicide

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline has 1,434 MySpace friends - and counting (1,417 at the beginning of this week). That means 1,434 MySpace users have a link on their profiles to the Lifeline. This past year, just one of those profiles referred nearly 14,000 people to the national hotline. "Our site received more than 128,000 unique visitors from MySpace in the past 12 months," the … [Read more...] about The social Web’s ‘Lifeline’

Parents who have seen "To Catch a Predator" on Dateline NBC are asking how much they should be worrying about their social-networking kids. They need to know that the Predator series is no representation of risks to youth on the social Web. It's not even presenting a credible picture of sexual predation in general, we find in an in-depth look at the social costs of producing "The Shame Game" in … [Read more...] about Predators vs. cyberbullies: Reality check

The Associated Press story leads with this cyberbullying tragedy: the suicide of Ryan Patrick Halligan at the age of 13 after being bullied online for months. Classmates sent him "instant messages calling him gay. He was threatened, taunted and insulted incessantly by so-called cyberbullies," the AP reports. Across the US, states are considering various sorts of crackdowns against cyberbullying, … [Read more...] about Cyberbullying laws considered, US-wide

People who want to ban the social networks might consider what can be learned on them about at-risk youth. Peers and adults can detect and have found threats in blogs and profiles in time to avert violence, and law-enforcement people certainly are monitoring the sites. The challenge is the obscurity of some of them, such as VampireFreaks.com, where shooter Kimveer Gill posted many hints about … [Read more...] about Social Web: Early warning system?

There have been many such convictions - this is just a recent example so parents can be on the alert for danger signs. A 32-year-old man in Texas was convicted for criminal solicitation of a minor, the Texas attorney general's office reports. In this case, the minor was a 12-year-old girl in Missouri. She went to her mother distraught because the man, "who has sent her more than 200 sexually … [Read more...] about Online predator convicted