Charles Wright gives columnist Ruth Ostrow a serve about online sex in his Bleeding Edge blog. Ruth gets her knickers in a twist after she and her significant other posted their details on a raunchy website. Charles is quite right to point out that this happened before the arrival of the Internet.
Where I would criticism Ruth is that she's got the wrong end of a serious issue. We all hear warnings about children being stalked on line, but we find the kids are quite savvy with online creeps. The people who trash their lives due to someone they met on the net are more likely to be adults in unhappy relationships.
Personally, I've seen almost a dozen families broken by the results of an online affair. One client in Sydney had his wife leave him to join a bloke in Wisconsin: She left the kids but took the computer. Her new relationship turned out to be worse, which is a typical result.
It's not just affairs either. I've never heard of a kid sending millions of dollars to a Nigerian scam or blowing the mortgage on online gaming, but I know of adults who've done both. This is probably as a big a problem of online stalking or philandering.
The real story here is that you need to watch all your family member's computer use. Your husband, wife, girlfriend or boyfriend is as likely to get into trouble on the net as your kids are. If you are concerned about anybody's use, you need to talk to them and take measures to reduce or monitor their use.
