Grief is for the living

The news which gripped the UK for more than two weeks - the investigation into the disappearance of 10-year-old best friends, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman - came to a shocking, and some might say inevitable climax this weekend.

The case has been both helped and hindered by applications of modern technology.

Basheera Khan, UK correspondent, ITWeb

This morning residents of the town of Soham are by all accounts, stunned at the weekend`s turn of events, when it was revealed that two bodies which had been found in a neighbouring county were most likely those of Holly and Jessica.

The girls` disappearances on 4 August sparked one of Britain`s biggest manhunts, involving more than 400 officers from 21 forces. More than 14 000 calls have been made to police since the case opened.

The case has been both helped and hindered by applications of modern technology; Jessica reportedly had a mobile phone on her when she was last seen, but signal tests could provide only an imprecise location.

Then there was the four-day delay in the police interviewing a taxi driver, who had reported seeing a man driving erratically in a green car carrying two children - something which Cambridgeshire police attest to difficulties experienced with the Home Office Major Enquiry System (Holmes), which allows police to cross-reference details reported to other forces and link together relevant information.

However, this requires that all information must first be entered into the system, a time-consuming process requiring specially-trained officers - officers which Cambridgeshire police later had to draft in from around the country, as their own resources were insufficient to the task.

As officers combed through Soham for evidence, across the Atlantic, another horrific story came to light. Nonie Drummond, 14, and Spencer Lee King, 17, had met online, and developed a relationship in which for nine months, the telephone was their only contact. Kept apart by distance, and by Nonie`s protective grandfather, the two met for the first time just two weeks ago.

King made the 75-mile journey to the isolated Drummond family home, where he found that Nonie had lied to him; he had thought that she was 17.

The New York Times reports that King, telling Nonie, "I have a surprise for you," covered her eyes with a bandanna, sat her on a stool and stabbed her repeatedly in the throat with a kitchen knife. When she fought back, King told investigators, he beat her with the stool, a television and a fan. The struggle over, he wrapped the body in a blanket, set the house alight and left. He later pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder and arson.

And although there is no proof as yet that the case of Jessica and Holly is linked in any way to Web-based chatrooms, the finger has been pointed and once again, the tabloids would have parents reduced to panicky wrecks at the thought of their children becoming victims as a result of technology.

I am concerned that parents, anxious to protect the safety of their children, will at some point willingly trade in their civil liberties for the sake of the knowledge that their children`s activities and movements can be tracked at will.

There have already been experiments in micro-chipping children, albeit more with their physical health rather than their safety in mind, and with the lingering effects of these traumatic events still being felt, it seems more and more likely that children will grow up shouldering a chip of the electronic kind.

By no means do I think we shouldn`t take proactive steps to protect our children, but in blaming the technology - as some politicians already have - valuable energy is misdirected, and will merely treat the symptoms of a social ill, leaving the roots of the problem to fester.

The truth is that technology is merely a tool, and the uneducated use of any tool can lead to serious harm or injury. Trite though it may sound, both parents and children need to be educated - and then constantly reminded - of the potential dangers that exist online just as they do in the real world.