Frivolous Lawsuits

According to the news over the past day or two, MySpace, along with its new corporate owner News Corp., is being sued by four families because at least one underage girl in each family was (allegedly) sexually abused by an adult that the girls met via MySpace. According to a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, "In our view, MySpace waited entirely too long to attempt to institute meaningful security measures that effectively increase the safety of their underage users."

Now let's think about this for a second. MySpace is a networking site, providing a place for people to meet each other, usually friends to keep in touch with each other. Some underage girls apparently met some above-age men and were then sexually abused by these men -- outside the internet, obviously. According to the article, "The lawyers who filed the latest lawsuits said the plaintiffs include a 15-year-old girl from Texas who was lured to a meeting, drugged and assaulted in 2006 by an adult MySpace user, who is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Texas after pleading guilty to sexual assault." From reading this, I have to ask: Wouldn't the most appropriate person to be sued be the man who sexually assaulted the girl?

Instead, there seems to be this idea that MySpace has a secondary responsibility in this case (after the rapist) for the rape. Fine. Let's say that MySpace was negligent in protecting children across the country. But then, it seems to me that the parents are at least as responsible for being negligent in how they monitored their children's internet usage and in monitoring their children's comings and goings from the house. Certainly, they were negligent in "allowing" their children to be lured from their house and assaulted. Shouldn't the parents, who I thought had primary responsibility for the well being of their children, have done a better job paying attention to who their children were meeting online? Shouldn't the parents be sued as well? Of course, the parents would have to sue themselves, and that wouldn't work. The parents obviously don't see any reason to sue the main perpetrators of the crimes either, most likely because there is little to gain monetarily from such a lawsuit. Instead, the parents sniffed around and realized MySpace was a great, wealthy target.

These kinds of lawsuits, and the feigned outrage by the lawyers, families, and media at the behavior of companies like MySpace, sicken me. MySpace did nothing wrong and, in my opinion, is far less responsible for the terrible acts that occurred than the parents themselves or even of the girls themselves. Yes, that's right. I said it: The girls bear a secondary responsibility as well. It was negligent of their own persons and their own well being to engage in such risky behavior as meeting strangers off their internet. My statement does not, in any way, diminish the horrible nature of the crimes perpetrated against them or decrease the ultimate responsibility of the crimes that rest with the men who committed them. Nonetheless, we have to ask ourselves: Why are these girls putting themselves in such known risky situations? We should also ask: Why are the parents not doing a better job making sure that the girls avoid such risky situations? Frankly, if these families want to start talking about secondary responsibilities and who should be sued, MySpace falls well below second place in that contest.