Sex Predators: Helpful Or Harmful?

People in today’s society are oblivious or naive about the common sex predators on the internet. These naive people can include parents, grandparents, adults, young adults, teens, pre teens, and children. Unfortunately this means that almost everyone at any age in todays society can be or already is oblivious to sexual predators on the internet. This is a major issue that people all over the world are dealing with and most of these people find out who and where the sex predators are hiding when they have already become victims of online abuse. The reason why victims are finding out about online sex predators too late is because they are not informed of the dangers of social media and online chat rooms. This is the main argument of my final

The first part of the essay will explain how the internet has grown and how over the years the purpose of the internet or social media pages have changed into a gray area of communicating with friends and family and communicating with strangers and forming relationships that are solely online. Then we will go through the risks and opportunities that the internet gives us as viewers and consumers. After this I will show you some important facts about the internet and how sexual predators are using social media and chat rooms to prey on younger men and women. Then after looking at the facts we will consider what the characteristics of sexual predators online look and act like to become more aware of our surroundings. After this we will look at TV shows and how the shows expose encounters with online sex predators that help us notice how important it is to stay safe while surfing the web. Last I will go over how people are naive to sex predators online and how we can protect ourselves in the future from

This kind of technology has made it possible for us to communicate with each other around the world for free with a click of the button. In the book E-youth Balancing between Opportunities and Risks By Michael Walrave the author tells us the differences between the opportunities and risks of the internet. Walrave shows the opportunities and risks by showing the reader a graph that outlines the risks on the left and the opportunities on the right. Some of the opportunities include: “ self-initiated collaborative learning, civic engagement, educational resources, diversity of resources for global information, expression of identity, and health/sexual advice” (Walrave 15). These were shown on the right and on the left read the risks which included: “gambling, illegal downloads and other copyright infringements, racism, hate speech, cyberbullying, disclosing data, hacking, chatting/meeting strangers, sexting opportunities, porn, child abuse images, violence, pro-anorexia, suicide sites , biased information/advice, and being groomed” (Walrave 15). As you can see the list of risks of the internet strongly outweigh the opportunities. This is why people who use the internet need to use it with caution and not enough people know about these risks. In the book Walrave sheds light on examples of sexual predator encounters and how teens can also be contributing to their acts without