Be aware on the streets and on the internet

It had to have been 12 years ago because my youngest daughter was only a year old. My other two girls were four and six, and our neighbor’s four-year-old niece had come out to play too. So I had four little girls running around our court in the late afternoon sun. Suddenly, I noticed a light blue station wagon parked at the far end of the cul-de-sac, near the main road. I’d never seen the car before. It was a Guam bomb – old, needed a paint job, in general disrepair. Inside it sat a haole guy – that much I could tell because the windows were rolled down and his arm was resting on the door. He was holding a fast-food drink in his left hand. At first I thought maybe he was waiting for one of the neighbors. But after a while, the car didn’t go away. I made a mental note not to go into the house unless I took everyone inside with me. We were outside for a good hour, and that guy just sat there in his car. I wanted to approach him and ask if he needed any help. I don’t know why I didn’t. When my husband drove into the court, I walked up to his truck and he immediately said to me, “Who’s the guy in the car?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “But he’s either watching the kids or the houses or me and he’s been there a while. I’m going to call the police.” I marched toward the house carrying the baby, and something about our brief exchange must have alerted the guy, because he drove off. Stupid me, I didn’t think to get the car’s license plate, so I never called the cops.

Fast forward a dozen years. My baby is now 13, and because of the internet, our “neighborhood” is a lot larger, and potentially a lot more dangerous. She has a private MySpace on which only people she invites can participate. The other day, she came to me and asked what “friends with benefits” means. “Where did you hear that?” I asked. She told me she was adding several of her friends and must have clicked someone she didn’t know, too, because then somebody sent her a message asking if she wanted to be “friends with benefits.” WHAT?! AHH!! She told me she blocked the sender right away because she didn’t know the person (I constantly preach that you do not invite anyone to your MySpace unless you know who they are) and the accompanying tag was of some sexy male abdomen. I explained that the phrase meant the person was looking for sex, and that he had to have known that she was 13, because her MySpace says so and is full of things clearly adolescent. “Eeww!!” was her reply. I tried to retrieve the email address but we didn’t know how to undelete on MySpace. I told her if she ever gets another invitation like that, to tell me right away so I can copy the email address and turn it over to the FBI.

I called the FBI and an agent told me that if you think someone is trying to solicit sex from your child, or suspect any other type of internet crime, you can go to www.ic3.gov, an internet crime reporting web site, and file a complaint. Or just call the police.

One of the great things about living on Guam is that for all the talk of this huge military buildup and exponential growth, we are still a small island. Within our villages, we still have a sense of community. As a general rule, kids don’t get kidnapped here because we notice things like a stranger sitting in a car at the end of the street. So as this summer starts, and our children are outside playing, just be aware. That goes for when they’re sitting inside the house at a computer, too. Tell your kids that if something doesn’t seem right, they should tell you about it. In this day and age, even on our tiny little island, awareness is everything – both on the streets and on the information superhighway.