In an effort to prepare children and teens for the potential stranger danger on the Internet, Virginia is the first state to make Internet safety classes for all grade levels.
It’s hard being first and one might imagine all 49 pairs of eyes (assuming one set of eyes per state, of course) will be on Virginia to see how educators implement the program, the messages used, and the methods by which the program is evaluated.
According to Virginia-based WDBJ7.com, the state attorney general warned a group of high school students by showing what appeared to be the social networking profile of a 15 year-old girl, but was actually a 31-year-old serial child molester currently serving a 45-year prison term.
A half century in jail maybe fine in Virginia, but down on the bayou they’re considering castration as an option for dealing with guys like that. It’ll be fun to see who complains.
Otherwise, it seems pretty clear that other states will follow Virginia’s educational objectives, if not exactly their sentencing protocols. One day, Internet safety classes will be as normal as driver’s ed and drug abuse counseling, complete with state cops (and attorney generals these days) telling the most gruesome stories they can pull from their lemon squeezers.
(In my day, after watching a video reel where Pinocchio becomes unstrung by sniffing glue, a state trooper regaled us destined for delinquency 10-year-olds with tales of corroded nostrils and PCP-fueled bare-knuckles jail-cell brick removal. And then there was the little boy that got his head cut off….Sort of makes you long for the days when adults tried to scare you with fairy tales instead of actual events.)
