Junk Email

Now I don't know about you, but I don't like being sent email that suggests I approve of child abuse for not wanting to forward junk email, especially by members of my own family.

In fact I don't see what a campaign like that clogging up people's inboxes does to combat anything. The message I'm referring to claims to be "The blue ribbon campaign against child abuse" and consists of a poem written from the perspective of an abused 3 year old girl called Sarah, followed by a request that the recipient broadcast it out to everyone the recipient knows via their email boxes. The poem is pornographic in the way the writer tries and fails to imagine what an abused 3 year old thinks, and really badly written.

Claiming that someone failing to pass on a chain email approves of child abuse, is as bad as claiming that someone failing to pass it on will get bad luck (or at least fail to get good luck) and have horrible things happen to them. Actually, it's worse. Using child abuse as the emotional hook to get someone to pass on your chain message is to my mind just plain sick, whereas tails of good luck or rewards from Microsoft are relatively harmless.

A quick browse of http://www.breakthechain.org/ (bookmark it- a fantastic site) finds their take on the poem. Apparently the poem was originally about a child called Misty but since then someone has renamed the little girl in the hope of bypassing all the "Don't pass this on" postings on the internet. This surely says buckets about the sort of people that pass these things on.

If you want to do something yourself about child abuse, visit the NSPCC (or your country's equivalents) and look into the Full Stop campaign. Don't forward sick chain emails to people.