Internet Safety News

Tragedy in Connecticut

by Anne Collier

There are many stories in the U.S. media these days about sexual exploitation of children whose online activities go unsupervised, but so far few of the cases reported end in the death of the child. That is why a recent story about a 13-year-old girl who was murdered by a man she initially met on the Internet became national news.

The 13-year-old victim was a cheerleader and good student who came from a broken home and was living with an aunt, her legal guardian. A local paper in Danbury, Connecticut, also described a darker side of her life, on the Internet, saying the girl "was already promiscuous beyond an adult's years, living in the fast lane in a child's body."¹ She had her own web site, "whose name includes the phrase 'sxyme4utosee.'"² Her aunt told a national audience on the "Today" show that she didn't know about this side of her niece, they'd talked about the dangers of the Internet, and her niece had said she wouldn't talk to "strangers" in online chat.

¹Eileen FitzGerald and Robert Miller. "Bright Girl Hid Her Dark Side." The News-Times. May 21, 2002, http://www.newstimes.com/cgi-bin/dbs.cgi?db=news&view_records=1&id=29005.
²Ibid.