I totally agree that in situations of internet predators, girls are seen as victims, police as sole heroes, and eliminating basic right to privacy as the much-needed solution. I think a show like Dateline’s How to Catch a Predator and other news media do perpetuate these social norms and how girls and predators alike deviate from them.
I’m not sure what other literature on the subject is out there and I get the feeling this is an early text from the girls’ perspective either way, but I do think that parents and young girls and people in authority have to read this book. Not because it is incredible in presenting anything they don’t know from the news, but that it is insightful in giving so much more context to how these things happen. Without context of how a girl like Katie, as an adolescent is looking for an equal and for a deeper relationship, how Mark builds a relationship with her over months of constant communication, people have this idea that predators show up with a pack of beer and are easily identifiable as clear lunatics instead of crafty deceivers or even men who just think that kind of behavior is acceptable or something that can't be helped.
I kept thinking about the book Lolita when I read this and the perception people have of it. That novel was written in the 50s and when I would summarize it for people while reading it they still found it totally provocative. I think a lot of what allows people to be predators, namely men, is the way we as a society don’t understand and don’t want to try and remedy the thought process that goes into how predators think and why mainly men think they are entitled to certain actions or reactions from females, especially girls. I think Tarbox’s book shows through her not wanting to ruin his life and being concerned about how they had both been traumatized by the incident that they did undeniably have a relationship and that even though it was manipulative and deceptive, it had been very solidly established.
The other side of the whole Lolita coin is the victimization and blaming of the girls involved. When I was reading Tarbox’s book, I was infuriated at the way people were treating her. I thought it was legitimate that some of the problem was probably that her family and community didn’t know how to react or what to do with her or how to understand, but it didn’t seem that anyone except her friend Ashley was trying. I wanted to slap everyone too. I think a lot of the problem is the victimization. Tarbox put me right back at 13 when it came to making decisions based on building esteem and avoiding things that inflamed insecurities, but more than that was remembering how much people condescended to me at that age. Treating the girl like a victim and a dishonorable deviant doesn’t help anyone. I did find some of her decisions naive though, from my own experiences online. I was calling it off much earlier in the book than Katie was. Still, it’s clear she knew that what she was doing was dangerous. I was also mad about the girl who was assembling bombs in the “Victims, Villains, and Vixens” chapter was seen as a deviant, a sick girl who had something wrong with her. If that girl were a grown man or even just male she would not only be seen, aside from being criminal or crazy, as in a way very intelligent and rebellious in a good sense. Instead she’s some parent’s problem, there’s no way she could have realized her actions.
I think if parents really understood better what the contexts of those kind of relationships were like, police and the government wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) have any say in a person’s privacy. Honestly child blocks are bad enough, the same way censorship can be. Instead of ushering safety, they just cut off all contact, something repulsive and unreasonable online, especially for adolescents and adolescent girls who use it so heavily for communication. I remember I started emailing a guy I met in a chat room feeling exactly what Katie was, knowing very well the situation I was putting myself into. My mom somehow found out or saw an email and told me she would rather I met someone my own age any other way (I wasn’t even allowed to date technically). I suddenly felt the impact of what I was getting into. That nipped it in the bud for me and I’m glad my mother said it in a way that showed concern about the danger instead of just creating a stigma about who I could or couldn’t talk to, my feelings for boys, or what I could and could not do. In fact, I went into chat rooms a lot and talked to strangers provocatively at will that my parents and most of my friends didn’t know about (I took better precautions than Katie) and to this day I’ve never heard anyone REALLY ask someone, myself included of course, why they want that relationship, how it makes them feel, what the interactions are like. It’s so strange how differently we treat online relationships from in-real-life ones. They should be treated differently, not with stigma of what we see in the news, but with a new set of questions and and intent to understand.
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