Headlines from todays news reports

Christina Longs' life was full of promise. The popular 13-year-old from Connecticut was an honor student and cheerleader. But Christina had a troubling, secretive side. She was meeting strangers over the Internet. Christina was strangled to death, and police believe she met her killer online.

Katie Tarbox was living an upper middle class life of quiet desperation as she sought company on the Internet. When she slipped away during a school trip to meet the boy she had corresponded with on the Internet for the past 6 months, she found herself in a situation a 14 year-old could not have imagined. "Our lips met... I felt a few stray whiskers... and suddenly I realized that this was a grown man who was giving me my first real kiss... Something inside me snapped. Now I didn't want this at all. But I couldn't speak."

With technology moving forward at an ever increasing rate and the advent of new, easy-to-use interactive applications for the web, a rapidly developing virtual world has become the new social scene for children and young adults. MySpace, Second Life, there.com and the multitude of online chat-rooms have created a new society in which children live and interact with one another. In most cases cyber space is a world most young adults navigate freely and easily, and yet parents are still ignorant to the ease with which their children invite strangers into their house.