Swim Team on Porn Site

Photos of members of an Orange County, CA water polo team have found their way to some gay porn sites, much to the alarm of students, parents, and school officials. A quick Google search will yield dozen of hits to give the details.

The article on the KNBC web site indicates that "police confirmed they are investigating whether a dispatcher, Scott Cornelius, photographed high school players for gay-oriented sites. Cornelius was granted a photo credential to the 2007 Junior World Water Polo Championships at Los Alamitos last summer"

Based on that snippet alone, you can be sure we will be hearing more about this. While those pictures may turn out to be attributed to the dispatcher is irrelevant. Once ANY picture is posted to ANY web site, for all intents and purposes the poster risks losing control of the picture. Anyone can grab it and do with it as they wish. As illustrated by my Ditherhead story and accented by this story, any picture can take on a life of its own with unpredictable results.

The simple fact is that nothing will prevent predators, creeps, and perverts from doing what they do. This sort of tragedy is bound to happen regardless of what we do, but parents and children need to be wary of what they post so as to not become unwitting accomplices to the twisted minds that do this sort of thing.

How we go about accomplishing this is not a simple matter. If I had a magic wand, every school would have a course on cybercivics where students would learn safe, responsible netizenship. But I'm not Harry Potter and even if I could magically conjure up the courses, we would still need knowledgeable teachers who are capable of understanding the online world of the teens. There are precious few of them right now and until today's teens become tomorrow's teachers, the numbers will be woefully insufficient to meet the challenge.

One thing we can do is to get kids talking to kids. That's what WiredSafety's Teenangels are doing. I'll talk more about them in the future. Until then, talk to your kids about incidents like this and have them take a look at my lesson titles Put Your Best Foot Forward.