‘Myspace led girl to Mideast’: Race,the online predator myth,and the pathologization of violence

Abstract

In June 2006 a 16-year-old Michigan girl reached an airport in Jordan in her attempt to visit a boyfriend she met on Myspace, 20-year-old Ali from the West Bank town of Jericho. The national media attention to this relationship begins with fears that Ali was an online predator, moves to stories of the pair as star-crossed lovers and constructions of Ali as a dangerous Arab terrorist, and ends with the conclusion that Ali was simply a bad boyfriend. I examine the media representations of this atypical case to illustrate the need to denaturalize and challenge typical constructions of sexual danger as embodied in racialized and pathologized figures such as the online predator.

Keywords

New media online predators race sex offenders social media

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