VA - Alexis Murphy, 17, Shipman, 3 Aug 2013 - #1

JoCoKSEyes said:

Another problem is that we have a missing person who was seemingly addicted to social media, specifically twitter. She has over 57,000 tweets. Constant stream of communication out to over 11,000 followers. ALL OF THAT SUDDENLY STOPPED. Not a day went by that I can tell where she failed to tweet multiple times.

The above leads me to believe she is somewhere against her will.

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ATasteOfHoney said:

Yes, and along with Twitter, had FB, Instagram, Vine (Vining?), and maybe MySpace?
How do you keep up the frenetic pace of documenting everything in your life on so much social media. It's almost a full time job......which leads me again to the same question: what was she hoping to find with all that effort?

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JoCoKSEyes said:

Another problem is that we have a missing person who was seemingly addicted to social media, specifically twitter. She has over 57,000 tweets. Constant stream of communication out to over 11,000 followers. ALL OF THAT SUDDENLY STOPPED. Not a day went by that I can tell where she failed to tweet multiple times.

The above leads me to believe she is somewhere against her will.

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Inspector Gidget said:

Attention and lots of it.For some it is like an online diary of their everyday events and feelings.

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Tonto said:

I think what happens is that they start to come of age and folks around them start noticing how 'hot' they are and aren't afraid to tell them. Since they aren't mature enough to handle the oohs and ahhs from boys (and often, grown *advertiser censored* men), they naturally start to believe the hype themselves and adjust their personality accordingly. Upon reading many of her posts on the various SM sites, she seems like a genius trapped in a body she can't quite cope with. Literally.

So she acts out the only way she knows how.

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Tonto said:

Boom. Touch em' all. Hit it out of the park with this post.

This is why I feel like this may have a sad ending. Unfortunately, I'm also starting to suspect folks that didn't necessarily engage her online (randomly anyway), and may have even been closer to her than we have been positing thus far.

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cluciano63 said:

OT but I have five (gorgeous) nieces around this age group and have snooped on their SM for years...have never seen anything the least bit racy, not even jokes. They must be really boring girls? I don't know anymore.

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cluciano63 said:

OT but I have five (gorgeous) nieces around this age group and have snooped on their SM for years...have never seen anything the least bit racy, not even jokes. They must be really boring girls? I don't know anymore.

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Tonto said:

Or they just don't display their shenanigans in plain sight.

Teenage girls are nearly uniform in their proclivity (and competence) for sneakiness.

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Tonto said:

Or they just don't display their shenanigans in plain sight.

Teenage girls are nearly uniform in their proclivity (and competence) for sneakiness.

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cluciano63 said:

There have been a number of cases here, just in the past year, where teen girls have met up with male "friends" met through their social media and ended up either running off with them and/or being kidnapped. That is the reason, IMO, that many here are concerned, worried, shocked, whatever by her SM.

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bettiepageturner said:

What a terrifying case. I'm glad so many people are working on it around the clock.

I do have to say—and this isn't to call anyone here out, merely to touch upon something that's already been brought up a lot—that it makes me so sad the way someone's social media usage is discussed as a victimization factor. I'll repeat this to the grave, but sexually motivated offenses are so so much more likely to be opportunistic rather than calculated. Serial predators select victims they believe they can overpower based on their location, body language, etc—much like a lion wouldn't waste its time watching a single gazelle while countless others present themselves as easier prey. Stalking cases are obviously different, and that's what's been discussed here, but consider the mental state of a stalker, who can build an entire fantasy out of a misinterpreted glance. If AM were the subject of a stalker's fancy, she needn't have posted a single suggestive photo of herself to fuel that to the point of an abduction/rape.

In fact, a stalker's obsession is often rooted in a need to "possess" a person wholly, to be the only one with access to their mind and body. This is further exacerbated by our culture's obsession with "purity" and our need to value women on their virginity or lack thereof (further reading: madonna/*advertiser censored* dichotomy). Even a stalker sick enough to do something like this would likely have been deterred by the fact that 11,000 other people potentially had "access" to AM. A stalker sick enough to do something like this could have become fixated on AM as she walked across a parking lot in a hoodie and jeans.

Consider some recent abduction/murder cases that were found to have been committed for this reason. You will all too frequently find that the perpetrator was someone known to the victim for completely innocuous reasons, and in some of the sickest cases, watched her grow up as a friend of the family (like the current Amber Alert case in California.)

You don't need to post suggestive images of yourself and others; you only need to accidentally make the acquaintance of a man with a debilitating sense of entitlement towards anything he finds sexually gratifying. The man probably grew up surrounded by billboards and commercials that sold women as commodities in ways far more explicit than anything AM tweeted. He grew up being rejected by these women, despite being trained by culture and media that he "deserved" them, and he grew up reading about all the horrible things that went on to happen to these women and how everybody's first question is never "who could possibly think they could do this to her?" but "what was she wearing when it happened?"

It sickens me that that's going to be the line of questioning, should something like this ever happen to me. I just graduated from a large, public university that is no stranger to constant stories of date rape and assaults. A man was posing as a taxi driver and assaulting drunk women he picked up from downtown bars. Everyone wanted to know how somebody could let themselves get so drunk they couldn't tell it wasn't a real taxi. They haven't made an arrest yet, but a man was questioned for it after attempting to assault multiple women he had offered rides to and followed home from bars. He already had a peeping tom record, but had never been arrested—just banned from the county. It wasn't very effective because he showed up at my house one night at 2 in the morning the one week my roommates and boyfriend were all out of town. (a longer story that didn't end in any crime being committed, thank god, but probably not relevant to type out here)

Regardless, I am confident that he didn't choose me because I had my workplace listed on my facebook, or because I occasionally post artistic/racy photography on my tumblr, or even because I used to be a sex/culture/humor columnist and those articles are available anywhere.

So, yeah, it sucks that if something had happened to me that night, someone would've googled me, stumbled upon sexual references I apparently so brazenly made, perhaps found that I've posted on fashion/makeup forums and made inferences about my crippling need for male acceptance, and then derailed the investigation by lamenting the failure of mothers everywhere in teaching their daughters to have more respect for themselves and be less sexual, or else (to hyperbolize a viewpoint that very offensively portrays rational men) some knuckle-dragging, sex-starved barbarian might accidentally see them doing so. There's only so much that can be done in that regard, in any case, since from the day she learns to read a girl is going to learn that her appearance and sexuality are, in fact, the (unstated) primary factors she has going for her. Shortly thereafter she's going to learn how mad men will get when she denies them of this sexuality she's been taught to simultaneously flaunt and conceal.

It was lose/lose for AM since day one. Let's hope that didn't manifest in the worst possible way, and that she'll be found unharmed.

So, LONG, LONG, story short— I put myself in AM's parents' shoes and I'm not appalled by what I didn't know about my daughter's online activities. I'm appalled by what other parents are teaching their sons about respect, bodily autonomy, and impulse control. (It's not about stranger danger and telling rapists to stop being rapists. Damaged perceptions begin in childhood.)

So um, I did NOT think this was going to end up as a rant-novel.. Mods, please feel free to remove/edit this if I just went so off-topic the conversation as we knew it is now drifting out to sea somewhere. And keep on sleuthin', sleuthers. I'm still super new to posting but am no less impressed since the time I first lurked. :seeya:

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Strangeworld said:

(snipped by me)

This is why I am SO SO SO against this rapid increase in young girls and women posting particular types of photos, images, comments, etc that may put them in harm's way. This in no way is a reflection on the TYPE of person a girl/woman is, it is more about how other may PERCEIVE them.

In an ideal world, we should all be able to walk around butt naked if we want, but it's not an ideal world. The rights we have as members of society are unfortunately outweighed now by the actions we can take to keep ourselves safe. This does not mean we have to wrap ourselves in bubble wrap, but it does mean we can take positive action to protect ourselves, whilst still living a fulfilling life.

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