Six Apart / Live Journal -- No Safeguards, No Response
A company known as "Six Apart" runs an extensive participation/blogging website system called "Live Journal."

One of the primary features of Live Journal is to facilitate people participating in "role play" where participants take on various character "roles" -- such as Harry Potter characters or characters from Japanese Anime -- and proceed to create fiction story lines in which the characters interact.

The also create websites and blogs relating to their characters and to their own personal life.  In this respect, Live Journal is merely one of many "community" or "social" websites.

Role plays run the gamut from innocuous re-enactments of "Harry Potter" themes, to homosexuality, drug use and various "NC-17" behavior.  Persons acknowledging they are under 13 must have a COPPA permission form from parents to participate.  Thirteen and over are free to join.  Participants often have multiple accounts and messages can be marked as "public" or "private" to specific correspondents.

The problem for parents is that we have no idea what activities are children are actually participating in.  The official "policy" of the website owners is that any dialogue or images that constitute "NC-17" should be clearly so marked.  There are, however, no barriers to ANY Live Journal user accessing material that is marked NC-17.  It may, in fact, operate more as an invitation than a deterrent.

There are also no barriers to prevent predators from entering into the role plays.  Of course, this is true throughout the internet.  As a concerned parent who lacks the time to spend hours acquiring the knowledge of how to navigate Live Journal, I looked for any sort of FAQ or other information that would help me be aware of and monitor my child's activities at Live Journal.  I could not find any.  I also could not find a forum that parents could join to discuss these sorts of issues.

I did, however, become aware of role plays with characters pressuring other characters to have sex, with characters promoting drug use and other themes that struck me as inappropriate for my child.  Although these things are taking place in "virtual" reality and presumably not in actual reality, to what extent does "virtual reality" spill over in to real life?  In any event, although I acknowledge dialog on a typical high school campus can be rather far-ranging, these are not topics or behavior I would approve of for my child in real life; and so I am not comfortable with them taking place without restraint during hours spent on the internet.

In real life, among other things, there are some natural barriers to interaction between children and young and middle-aged adults.  These barriers do not exist on the internet.  We do not know, for instance, who the person is who is playing young "Harry Potter" in the role play.  But as various moral boundaries are crossed, it becomes more important to know who that person is and what his/her intentions are.

I wrote to Six Apart (the owner of Live Journal) requesting further information and soliciting some dialogue on the subject.  As I pointed out in my correspondence, Live Journal boasts over 11 million "journals and communities" and over 200,000 posts per day.  Yet, Live Journal management has given apparently no thought whatsoever to parental concerns.

Virtual reality and real life do, in fact, intersect.  My daughter, for instance, attends "Anime Conventions" where the participants dress up in costumes of their favorite characters and proceed to role play.

In one instance where we held a small meeting for anime "cosplayers," one (or possibly more) individuals "lurked" at a table near ours at a restaurant without introducing themslves during the meeting.  Then, one of them came over to the table and quickly introduced himself by screen name before departing.  Given that he specifically chose to lurk rather than join the meeting, that he was not in costume and that he was generally older than the young female cosplayers involved, I am left with the uneasy feeling that his intentions were not honorable.

There is a delicate line between over-regulating our children's lives and properly protecting them.  Operations such as Live Journal clearly make it more difficult to find that balance.