from People For Peace
Colleagues Home & Abroad Regional News
BY FR JOACHIM OMOLO OUKO, AJ
NAIROBI-KENYA
Yesterday Police in British Columbia warned parents about high school parties aimed at luring girls as young as 12 into drinking and sex. RCMP in Chilliwack, east of Vancouver, told CTV British Columbia that high school boys have been using Facebook to set up what they are calling “LG Parties” – short for “Little Girl.”
The boys do not only invite 12- and 13-year-old girls to come to the parties and ply them with alcohol in hopes it will lead to sexual acts according to the police report, many of these party invites are being sent via Facebook without the knowledge of the parents and teachers.
The boys use Facebbok to invite the girls because is the fastest way for word to spread among the teenage population. As one girl was quoted saying, what goes on at them is “mostly just drugs, sex and alcohol and then a lot of partying until they just drop” (a report from CTV British Columbia’s Peter Grainger- May 28, 2010).
Boys give them alcohol and drugs so that they can lose sight of reality and the ability to function so that they can easily lure them to sex which according to the report girls seem to be enjoying.
While countries like Kenya Facebbok may not be of a big threat to our children, sexual exploitation of children between 12 to 16 years old along the coast and pornography is. Children as young as 9 years have already known to get access to pornography, either through computers, cell-phones.
Last week report that one primary school in Ndiwa district in South Nyanza, alone had 11 girls ages between 13 to 15 years pregnant can tell a lot. According to KBC reported (written by KNA May 16, 2010) cases of teenage pregnancies continue to rise day by day. Six of the affected girls in Ndere primary school in Kobodo division of the district have already dropped out of school while five others are still learning.
Despite the fact that area District Education Officer, Benjamin Mauko who told KNA that the Ministry of Education, the police and the provincial administration are working with the school’s head teacher to ensure those responsible are brought to book, no arrest has been made since then.
The head teacher Moses Adoyo thinks if parents in the district are to work more closely with teachers they will curb the vice. Many head teachers like Adoyo had expressed similar idea, but instead pregnancies continue to increase alarmingly.
According to Mauko while confirming that when they carried out pregnancy tests eleven girls tested positive, one shocking report is that some of these girls did admit that apart from teachers most of the girls were being lured with money by their close relatives for sex.
While close relatives include cousins, uncles among others, the latest teenage pregnancy cases in Ndhiwa came hot on the heels of another one two months ago, where a 14-year-old girl gave birth to triplets. What a shame!
Yet still, Facebook is becoming more of a social nightmare, instead of network for many parents of young teens. Despite growing privacy concern most young people still use Facebook.
Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg (pictured above) at the age of 20 years-now he is 26 years and he is its chief executive. On Wednesday this week he became under heavy criticism over its privacy. Time and again, users have pushed back, complaining that some new feature or setting on the site violated their privacy.
Facebook is the fastest growing online users. It now has nearly 500 million users around the world. Despite the controversy, Facebook has raised more than $600 million since 2004. It explains why there are financial motives behind the company’s moves.
This is not the first time Facebook has been accused of crossing the line over privacy issues. In 2008 and 2009 there have been similar accusations, yet still many people still use it. Out of 500 million users, 7 million live in the UK.
Apart from Facebook, parents have also the challenge of cell-phone users among their teenagers. Recent report that school administrators in Santa Fe, Texas, confiscated dozens of cell phones from students May this year after nude photos of two junior high girls began circulating is just one of such few cases.
The girls had sent the photos to their boyfriends, who forwarded them to others according to officials. This is not to mention a case in La Crosse, where a 17-year-old boy recently was charged with child pornography, sexual exploitation of a child and defamation for allegedly posting nude photos of his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend on his MySpace page.
The girl had taken the pictures with her cell phone at her mother’s home and e-mailed them to the boyfriend according to the authorities. It was about the same time that in Utah, a 16-year-old boy was charged with a felony for sending nude photos of himself over a cell phone to several girls.
This was again about the same time a central Ohio high school teen made a sexual cell phone video of himself and sent it to female classmates. One of the girls forward the Westerville South High School’s video to at least 30 other people, while three girls ages 14 or 15 in Greensburg, Pa., were charged with disseminating child pornography for sexting their boyfriends.
Yet still, nearly one-sixth of teens who own cell phones have received nude or nearly nude images via text message from someone they know, according to a new survey on “sexting” from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. It found out that 15 percent of cell-phone-owning teens ages 12 to 17 had received nude or nearly nude photos by phone.
This is not to mention four percent of 12-year-olds reported sending sexually suggestive images by text message, while 8 percent of 17-year-olds reported texting nude or partially nude photos.
Even Yahoo which has built a collection of Web sites that serves more than 500 million people, doing business in more than 20 countries is no longer private. People can just hook your line and pass word and use it. Yet Yahoo is the No. 2 provider of search.
Yahoo came in second place after Facebook, with 490 million unique visitors, 31.8 percent of the world’s Internet-connected population, and 70 billion page views. Next was Microsoft’s Live.com, with 370 million unique visitors and 39 billion page views.
The most popular sites after Live.com were Wikipedia, MSN.com, Microsoft.com, Blogspot.com, Baidu.com, GG.com and Mozilla.com.
Founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994 while they were Stanford graduate students, Yahoo was at first a handmade directory of interesting Web sites. The site quickly evolved into the first and biggest Web portal. It offered pages on a range of topics, news, sports, music and so on.
It was shortly followed by Hotmail, a free web-based email service operated by Microsoft as part of its Windows Live group. It was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in 1996, formerly known as HoTMail. It was one of the first web-based e-mail for free services before it was subsequently acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million, and shortly after it was rebranded as “MSN Hotmail”.
Although the current version, “Windows Live Hotmail”, was officially announced in 2005 and released worldwide in 2007, like other online users Hotmail is also not a grantee for privacy.
Even the latest Gmail, a free advertising-supported webmail, POP3, and IMAP service provided by Google you cannot trust its privacy. Launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and becoming available to the general public on February 7, 2007, as of December 2009[update], it Gmail had 176 million users monthly.
With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail has not only significantly increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4 MB its competitors offered at that time, most people are sifting from other e-mail users to Gmail given that it has search-oriented interface and a “conversation view” similar to an Internet forum.
Since the Gmail service currently provides more than 7450 MB of free storage, users can not only rent additional storage (shared between Picasa Web Albums, Google Dcks and Gmail) from 20 GB (US$5/year) to 16 TB (US$4096/year) but has also added support for SMS Messaging through its integrated Chat.
On April 3, 2010, Google announced a new two-pane layout designed specifically for the iPad. As such it advertises for mobile companies. This is because if you’d like to sign up for a Gmail address, you need to have a mobile phone that has text-messaging capabilities. So you will be forced to buy such mobiles.
The Gmail has also made it easier for those who cannot acquire mobiles since you can ask a friend if you can use his or her number to receive a code. One of the reasons it is offering this new way to sign up for Gmail is to help protect their users and combat abuse. No wonder why like Facebook some young people are slowly attracted to Gmail services. I am also on Gmail and those who want to reach me can do so at omolo.ouko@gmail.com
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