Victim blaming and online safety

Another day of victim blaming:

A blackmaiiler who threatened to publish intimate photos of girls he befriended online says he accepts “90 per cent” of the blame – but says his 11-year-old victim should not have been on Facebook.

“What’s an 11-year-old doing on Facebook when you have to be 13 to be on Facebook?” Brandyn Alan Stewart, 21, said yesterday.

He said he was not blaming the girls but added: “I take 90 per cent of the responsibility, but it takes two as well.”

This was not the first time this creep had been caught doing this and just shows that there are some nasty, predatory people online.

An interesting point to note for parents:

Stewart had posed as a 16-year-old on a Facebook page he created on January 7. By February he had 426 friends – all of them young females.

Putting aside the access age to Facebook (13), where is  the parental supervision?  Many of these girls are minors.  Parents need to take an active interest in their children’s online presence and talk about whether it is a good idea to ‘friend’ people previously unknown to them online.  Check out this video, it is a very powerful demonstration of how our children don’t see online strangers as ‘stranger danger’