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Anorak News | Madeleine McCann: Internet Danger, Teenage Girls And Stuart Lubbock

Madeleine McCann: Internet Danger, Teenage Girls And Stuart Lubbock

by | 26th, February 2009

MADDIE WATCH – Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann, Kate McCann and Gerry McCann, featuring Stuart Lubbock and Internet teenage hell…

Yesterday the Mail manged to feature Madeleine McCann in its sotry on Stuart Lubbock, the man found dead at Michael Barrymore’s home. Readers were told:

Comparisons are now being made between Essex Police’s handling of the Lubbock case with the Portuguese police’s handling of the Madeleine McCann investigation.

Can the Mail now work Madeleine McCann into another seemingly unconnected story?

Daily Mail: “Pushed to the brink: How a family nearly lost their teenage daughter thanks to the dangerous power of the internet”

The internet is called the web because you get caught in it. You then get eaten while by “bots”. Sacrifice the mouse and run!

A smile spreads across Gill Osborn’s face as she wraps her arms around her teenage daughter, Sammy. Dramatically reunited just a few weeks ago, the family still can’t believe they have her back.

For two years, 41-year-old Gill hardly dared dream of seeing her daughter again
after she ran away to be with a man she had met on the internet.

So the web didn’t take her? A man did. Unless…the internet can disguise itself? Trust no-one. Go on, Sammy, if that is your real name…

“I used to think things like that didn’t happen to clever girls from a loving home,” says Gill, a retail manager, who has been married to Sammy’s engineer father Bob, 44, for 20 years, and also has a son Jack, 15.

An engineeer, eh..?

“Sammy was doing well at school, had plans for a career and to travel. But all that counted for nothing after she met that man.”

That man is unemployed David Manning, 21, whom the Osborns claim encouraged their daughter to leave home. Though it pains Gill to say it, he is Sammy’s husband.

Girl marries at 16! Read all about it!!

But she is quick to add her daughter has ‘seen sense’ and is starting divorce proceedings.

Phew!

Speaking for the first time about her ordeal, Sammy comes across as a typical teenager — wilful and determined at times and yet also shy and naive.

That’s her posing for a picture with her mum. That’s her mum telling Mail readers about her girl’s bedroom secrets, shyly.

And here is the crux of the matter. Headstrong teenagers are nothing new. But as the Osborns discovered to their cost, the advent of computers in bedrooms has opened a terrifying outlet for adolescent emotions.

A portal to Hell!

Her parents thought she was using her computer for homework when, in fact, she was spending hours on MSN Messenger and the social networking site Bebo.

MSN… My Secret Nightmare. Bebo… BetterBonking…

“Suddenly, I understood why Sammy had changed. She’d been bombarded with messages which turned her against the life she knew. I just prayed that wherever she was that she would find the strength to break away.”

But there was not a word. Sammy admits she saw the missing posters that appeared in town centres across the country – in one, her face appeared alongside that of…

Ready… Ready as you’ll ever be.

Madeleine McCann

And so once more the Mail has managed to work Our Maddy into a story.

Be afraid:

The Osborns have their daughter back, but how many other families will be torn apart by the men who prey on teenage girls, reaching into their bedrooms and turning them against their parents – thanks to the dangerous power of the internet?

Turn off your computer now. Power down. Step away.

Madleine McCann is missing – still missing. Full coverage of the coverage.



Posted: 26th, February 2009 | In: Key Posts, Madeleine McCann, Reviews Comments (11) | TrackBack | Permalink