Message Is Clear in N.Va.: IM 'Threats' Can Bring Teens Trouble in an Instant

Most agreed that the boy's stunt was unwise, but a few signers also made cutting criticisms of the girl who received the message and of her parents, who they said had called police too rashly.

On Wednesday night, Liz Nelson, 15, a Yorktown freshman, sat in her basement juggling IM conversations with eight or 10 friends, switching quickly between screens to groan with one about a math test, make flirtatious plans for camp with another and agonize with a third about a romantic debacle that ensued when she inadvertently sent an IM to the wrong friend.

"It's the easiest way to talk to everybody," she said, her fingers fluttering over the keyboard to type out messages in typically truncated IM-speak: "what r the topics? lik do u remember ne of em" and "lol." That stands for "laugh out loud," and she inserted it every time a friend's message made her smile.

Like many teenagers, Nelson has a "buddy list" of screen names she recognizes. If an unfamiliar name pops up, she has to approve it. "Usually it's a friend of one of the people you know," she said. "It's pretty rare that it's somebody bad."

The conversations crackled through the evening, and by 9:30 Nelson's mother, Priscilla Hoffman-Stowe, warned that it was time to shut down.

"It interferes grossly with homework time," Hoffman-Stowe said, adding that she increases or decreases her two teenage daughters' IM time depending on their grades and behavior. After the Yorktown evacuation, she had a talk with them about its perils. "I don't think they understand how public it is," she said.

Paul Attewell, a sociology professor at the City University of New York who studies youth and technology, said the dangers posed by IMing's potential anonymity are ironic, given the creators' original intent.

One of the fears was that predators would be able to horn in on these conversations and track down the kids. "So IMing was designed with screen names that are anonymous," he said, adding that the technology aimed at protecting kids also gives them great leeway.

"If you could click on an IM and there was a profile that included a name," Attewell said, "it would limit the prankster capacity."

Some Yorktown students said they plan to attend their classmate's next court hearing, wearing the protest T-shirts and bringing along the petition.

"We support and care about him a lot," said Laura Shinners, 14. She said the boy had been a good friend of the girl he IMed and that the message had contained a quote from a preview of a scary movie.

Laura said that after the incident, her parents had a conversation with her.