We've all heard about viruses and websites that steal our sensitive private information. Cyberstalking has also become a problem on social media sites. Blogs, Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, in particular, are prone to this sort of abuse.

But even cellphone texting can be a problem since you can forward others details where ever you want. Although there are mixed reviews of just how much of a risk there is, there is agreement there is a risk. Parents should certainly provide supervision for their kids with the youngest getting the most.

John Dvorak, a columnist at MarketWatch.com recently posted an interesting article.

If I were a professional thief, the first thing I would do is get a computer, find the folks out there who document everything they do on social-networking sites and go rob them.

There are a couple of risk that make this particular crime possible. If you tell the world what you are doing and where you are going, you are telling any criminal that might be listening when you've vacated your house. You may have already listed items in your house that might be particularly desirable by the thief, like the computer, PS3, perhaps even the type of car you have in the driveway.

Here are some rules for social media everyone should know about and practice regularly.

1. There is really only one reason to use your real name on the internet: to promote yourself or your business. Do a regular thorough search using Google of your full name, your address, and other identifying data and make sure all that you find is removed. Make sure your phone number and address are unlisted and there is no other way to find where you live. If you do promote yourself, use an email address as your contact point. To prevent misuse, change the @ sign to (at) or -at- to keep the robots from snapping up your email for spam lists. Or, better yet, use a virtual business card that has a contact form like card.ly. Then no one gets your email address until you decide.

2, Be careful about what you put on your site, like where you are, who is home, and when you go to work or go on vacation. Acquaintances who know your nick name on the internet might decide to break into your house while you are gone or share with others who you really are. Remember, personal information becomes permanently available to whomever wants it once you post it. Employers and college admission officers are regularly searching the internet for applicant's antics. Remember if you are protecting your identity in Twitter and refer to your Facebook site that identifies you, you've only delayed someone who might want to hurt you. If you post your picture on the internet, that could identify you to someone you don't want to know or could be used in a faked porn picture.

3. If you say something cruel to someone, remember that it's recorded forever for anyone who looks. Not only have you hurt another person, you have hurt yourself and your reputation forever. Your repeated insults on the internet could be turned against you and used as evidence to charge you with cyberstalking or cyberbullying and turned into civil or criminal charges.

4. Never give out personal information that could identify you. This includes:
* full name
* home address
* phone number
* Social Security number
* passwords
* names of family members
* credit card numbers

5. Keep online friendships in the virtual world. Meeting online friends carries more risks than other types of friendships because it's easy for people to pretend to be something they're not when you can't see them or talk in person. Even if you "feel" you know someone, you really can't know them as well as if you had known them face to face. Some people think they have fallen in "love" with an online friend. The only thing you can fall in love with online is your fantasy of who the other person might be. The non-verbal and contextual clues about another person is sometimes the only thing that can keep us safe in a face to face relationship. Our intuitions about trust are truly potential lifesavers. What we know about another persons history from our own and others experiences fill in the picture. These aids to judgment either don't exist online or are clouded by an 'unseen' or undocumented history. If you must meet someone you know from on line, do so as if you are meeting someone for the first time, because you are. Meet only in public preferably with someone else. And don't give out personal information like you would with someone you just met.

Let me know if I missed anything. I'll update as needed.

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This is a sad story. But it's simplistic to blame the abandoned children solely on poor mental health care. While the statistics are stunning about the incidence of mental illness in these children, another problem involved is the insufficient income of the parents, likely an inter-generational history of neglect and abuse, as well as the stigma of asking for help.

Iowa Independent

The state of Nebraska faces a situation most parents can't comprehend. At last count 34 children, ranging in age from 20 months to 17 years, have been left at Nebraska hospitals under the auspices of a vaguely written "Safe Haven" law.

The Nebraska law, which was signed in February and became effective in July, was to be the last, given that all other states had already enacted similar legislation. During debate, however, Nebraska lawmakers took a unique slant. Instead of attaching an age to the law -- ages that some lawmakers deemed "arbitrary" -- the legislators opted to write the law so that any "child" could be handed over to the state at designated drop-off points, such as hospitals, without any legal recourse against the child's guardian.

As a result, parents have driven several hundred miles -- from as far away as Miami-Dade County in Florida and Pima County in Arizona -- in order to leave their children with state officials in Nebraska.

The children left in Nebraska come from various socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. Twenty-two are considered white, 11 are considered black and one is Native American. Twenty of the 34 children are between the ages of 13 and 17.

They have three things in common.

1) Thirty-two of the children resided in or near an urban area.

2) Thirty of the children were living in a single-parent home.

3) Thirty of the children had previously received mental health services, with 11 of those receiving treatment above an outpatient level.

Recently, the NYTimes.com had an article about a malicious sort of on-line anti-social behavior called Trolling. One of the people the author interviewed was Jason Fortuny, a thirty-two year old web programmer, who's passion is trolling.

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling -- for provoking strangers online -- have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

"Lulz" is how trolls keep score. A corruption of "LOL" or "laugh out loud," "lulz" means the joy of disrupting another's emotional equilibrium. "Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh," said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity.

Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi-thermodynamic exchange between the sensitive and the cruel: "You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had."

Trolling for lulz inspired a number of malcontents to harass a family who's son committed suicide. Then when Lori Drew, a suburban wife, tormented a former friend of her daughter to suicide, she drew a counter attack from trolls.

Their personal information -- e-mail addresses, satellite images of their home, phone numbers -- spread across the Internet. One of the numbers led to a voice-mail greeting with the gleeful words "I did it for the lulz." Anonymous malefactors made death threats and hurled a brick through the kitchen window. Then came the Megan Had It Coming blog. Supposedly written by one of Megan's classmates, the blog called Megan a "drama queen," so unstable that Drew could not be blamed for her death. "Killing yourself over a MySpace boy? Come on!!! I mean yeah your fat so you have to take what you can get but still nobody should kill themselves over it." In the third post the author revealed herself as Lori Drew.

This post received more than 3,600 comments. Fox and CNN debated its authenticity. But the Drew identity was another mask. In fact, Megan Had It Coming was another Jason Fortuny experiment. He, not Lori Drew, Fortuny told me, was the blog's author. After watching him log onto the site and add a post, I believed him. The blog was intended, he says, to question the public's hunger for remorse and to challenge the enforceability of cyberharassment laws like the one passed by Megan's town after her death. Fortuny concluded that they were unenforceable. The county sheriff's department announced it was investigating the identity of the fake Lori Drew, but it never found Fortuny, who is not especially worried about coming out now. "What's he going to sue me for?" he asked. "Leading on confused people? Why don't people fact-check who this stuff is coming from? Why do they assume it's true?" [..] The willingness of trolling "victims" to be hurt by words, Fortuny argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.

What inspires people to be malicious to strangers? The question has as many answers as their are trolls. However, in this story, Fortuny demonstrated a principle I've seen demonstrated in clinical practice. Many with anti-social histories also had a history of being victimized.

"Am I the bad guy? Am I the big horrible person who shattered someone's life with some information? No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it. I've been through horrible stuff, too."

"Like what?" I asked. Sexual abuse, Fortuny said. When Jason was 5, he said, he was molested by his grandfather and three other relatives. Jason's mother later told me, too, that he was molested by his grandfather. The last she heard from Jason was a letter telling her to kill herself. "Jason is a young man in a great deal of emotional pain," she said, crying as she spoke. "Don't be too harsh. He's still my son."

No, his past abuse doesn't "excuse" his behavior towards others, but it explains a lot.

The initial trolling impulse... seems to spring from something ugly -- a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that's a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There's a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well. [..] I asked Fortuny whether a person is obliged to give food to a starving stranger. No, Fortuny argued; no one is entitled to our sympathy or empathy. We can choose to give or withhold them as we see fit. "I can't push you into the fire," he explained, "but I can look at you while you're burning in the fire and not be required to help." Weeks later, after talking to his friend Zach, Fortuny began considering the deeper emotional forces that drove him to troll. The theory of the green hair, he said, "allows me to find people who do stupid things and turn them around. Zach asked if I thought I could turn my parents around. I almost broke down. The idea of them learning from their mistakes and becoming people that I could actually be proud of . . . it was overwhelming." He continued: "It's not that I do this because I hate them. I do this because I'm trying to save them."

Some victims identify with the abuser, and employ power and intimidation tactics as if they are "pre-emptive", a way to strike first before they are victimized again. Feeling so ashamed of their own victimization, they strike out in what they see as less malicious ways and then explain their behavior as a way to "toughen" those around them so they won't feel as victimized as they did so long ago. They learn to react to fear with rage.

I've heard convicted child abusers talk about how despicable their victims were when they cowered before them, that they beat them harder to inspired them to stand up to their abuser. How many of us have heard, "I'll give you something to cry about"?

Others suppress this angry response and feel chronically powerless, prone to anxiety and depression. Still others somehow find a middle ground where they are able to live a reasonably adjusted lifestyle. There is no good explanations why people adjust so differently.

I have yet to treat a person with an anti-social past that didn't also experience chaos, repeated trauma and abuse as a child. It seems as if their own rejection of themselves as victims drives their abusiveness, as if demonstrating their own abusive power allows them to forget their past weakness.

Thats not to say that all people with anti-social histories fit this pattern. It's pretty clear their are those who never come to treatment that don't want to understand themselves. I can only begin to imagine their motivations.

Child abuse/neglect is the scourge of our world. Every time I've looked behind the most heinous crimes in history, we find an abused or neglected child. Virtually all of the recent youthful mass murderers suffered bullying, emotional neglect, and often physical abuse at the hands of peers and/or parents. Today we make blogging history. Today, thousands all over the world are Blogging Against Abuse.

Lets understand the scope of the problem.

According to DHHS in their Child Maltreatment report, during 2005, an estimated 3.3 million referrals were made to child protective services (CPS) national wide. Six million children were involved. made to CPS agencies. Sixty two percent were deamed serious enough to investigate, 25 percent were found to be substantiated. An estimated 899,000 children were determined to be victims of abuse or neglect. Here is more data and a list of promising projects:

Blog Against Abuse on September 27th, 2007. Join us!

There seems to be a lot of talk about how chaotic our society is. However, there is a heavy stigma associated with the chaos. People who are unable to function, are blamed and shunned by our society. While there is a general knowledge that alcohol and drug abuse is involved, but there is very little talk about what causes the basic problem. There is a stigmatizing assumption that people are of "weak character", inferior in some undefined way. Some related it to a lack of religious practice in their lives. Too many just write it off to laziness and a desire to live off of welfare.

Why do people self-destruct? There are as many answers as there are people who walk through the door of an emergency department. But there is one frequent common denominator. People who engage in self-destructive behavior often have been traumatized. Sometimes they are crime victims or veterans from past wars. But most have been abused, or have witnessed others, usually loved ones, suffering abuse. Sometimes, a person is very sensitive and just some calloused, isolated remark by a loved one leads to long term psychological damage. That sensitivity appears to be related to a constitutional tendency towards mental health problems. This is what is often called the "Diathesis-Stress Model of Mental Illness."

However, this is far from the whole story. Child and domestic abuse is epidemic worldwide. Nearly a million children were abused or neglected in 2004 in the US. Too many suffer the kind of repeated abuse one would expect of a poorly treated prisoner of war. The traumatic effect is overwhelming for the individual. In many ways, they are changed forever from the experience of abuse and neglect. It seems that one of the truisms about maltreatment of children is that they grow up to self or other destructive. They either have self-destructive behavior like chemical abuse and self-injurious behavior or even suicidal behavior, or they are verbally or physically abusive to others. Those who are self-abusive are likely to be so distracted by their own pain that they are neglectful of their own children.

[Click image to enlarge.]