Never smile at a paedophile

Sex offenders face website ban

So the e-mail addresses of sex offenders are to be passed to networking sites like Facebook and Bebo, in an effort to stop paedophiles contacting children. Any paedophile found guilty of not registering their e-mail address, or giving a false one, will face up to five years in prison.

Now. Sex crimes involving children already carry a pretty hefty penalty. Possession of pornographic images of children does too. Guess what? It's not acted as a deterrant... Any paedophile is just going to set up a hotmail account or similar and take his or her chances with the law. The great majority of criminals are, I have no doubt, perfectly aware that they are breaking the law, and do so anyway. This will be no different.

A slightly more effective means of managing this would be to (ignoring the legal implications, which I'll touch upon briefly later) block the paedophile's IP address. This would not, admittedly, prevent them from accessing the sites on public computers at libraries, for instance, but then neither would registering an e-mail address.

On to the legal stuff (as I said, briefly, as I'm not a lawyer and I'm sure the far more legally minded brother-in-law will post a comment before too long!). Facebook and MySpace are both actually based in California, which is obviously outside of UK jurisdiction. Whilst the UK can ask them to comply, there can be no actual legal enforcement, so far as I understand it. This also raises issues of censorship on the internet: China would, I'm sure, very much like us to comply with their laws with regards to what they consider subversive information and have, as was reasonably well publicised here, managed to have some success with this. It met with fierce opposition though (myself included). Whilst it is, of course, incredibly important to protect our children and ensure their safety at all times, this is still an example of one country asking another country to aid it in limiting the information that certain citizens have access to. The internet by its very nature is next to impossible to police, and that is a double edged sword, as I'm sure we can all understand.

I think it's extremely interesting that the viewpoint appears to be that children have an almost God-given right to use these networking sites. I wasn't allowed to use the internet unsupervised when I was younger, for exactly this reason, amongst others. I was at least 16 before that was allowed. Why are children as young as 8 being allowed to use Facebook? What need do they have for that? Most of my Facebook usage, and most of that of my friends too, revolves around keeping in touch with people who have moved away, and embarassing the hell out of each other with photos from nights out on the ale. Neither of these are things that the average 8 year old will be doing! Therefore, if you want to protect your children from being groomed online by paedophiles, the answer is simple: don't let them use chat rooms or social networking sites. If you absolutely must, make sure they are supervised at all times.

Donald Findlater, from the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, does make a very good point at the end of that BBC News report: paedophiles need to be encouraged to live as normal, or as good, a life as possible. Preventing them from having contact with "normal" adults (though, what is "normal"?), through networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, may actually compound the issue, making them more likely to reoffend.

It's an issue that's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to deal with effectively. I don't see this latest proposal as being one that will work though.