'Unreal' internet danger

Nov 1 2009 By Alan Ross, Sunday Sun

THIS column was going to be all about Gareth Southgate, but the news this week has determined otherwise. Gareth was a true gentleman and remains Boro’s only skipper to lift significant silverware.

He might have been better loved by us Teessiders if he’d continued his "clenched fist" salute to all sides of the ground, but he stopped as he thought it gave out the wrong message. That probably says as much about him as anything. Good luck, sir!

But this week our hearts go out to Andrea Hall, the mother of the 17-year-old girl whose body was found in a field near Sedgefield on Monday night. Ashleigh, from Darlington, had set off to meet a man she’d met on the internet.

She’d clearly talked about this with her friends on the childcare course she was attending in Darlington, who said @ the man was claiming to be a fellow teenager.

Casting my mind back to when I was a teenager, the one thing I remember was that, in common with all teenagers, I knew everything, and was immortal. Is there anything Andrea could have said that would have stopped her daughter, assuming that she had known anything about what she was doing? I doubt it.

The trouble with social networking sites, message boards and the like is that they are a kind of parallel universe, an unreality in your computer screen or on your mobile phone. They also can’t be uninvented. Telling youngsters to be careful is all well and good, but they, of course, know best. It is only when we make it to 30 years of age or so, that we realise we’re pretty gullible about a lot of things. And trust is a horrible thing to lose.

The internet is a tremendous force for good in the world. If there is a message to get over, maybe it is to meet people in public, with a friend, and let people know where you are.

The world is a wonderful place. Unfortunately, a few bad apples are scattered in and amongst.