This is the column I haven't wanted to write for two and a half years.

To begin with, I would like to explain that I've borrowed my title from a short story in Stephen King's Skeleton Crew. Mr. King, in turn, borrowed it from a story written by Ray Bradbury over forty years ago, and I'm not sure where it came from before that.

Anyhow, the King tale is about a little boy and the tigers in his school's bathroom. The kid knows perfectly well that there are huge, bloodthirsty cats in the toilets, waiting to tear him to shreds. He can sense those tigers. He can smell them, and hear them, and see their shadows. And though he has to GO – though he has to go really, really bad -- he does everything he can to avoid that bathroom, because he knows it for what it really is: a porcelain-tiled abattoir.

I chose my title very deliberately; I wanted to convey a sense of horrific danger. I wanted each of my readers, after finishing this column, to look at their computers in a different way, to think of cyberspace as a cage filled with sharp-clawed, vicious monsters with deadly fangs - and an insatiable appetite for the tender flesh of innocents.

Within The Cage

As a writer, I've made it my business to familiarize myself with the dark underbelly of the Internet. I've seen things that made me wince, things that made me nauseated, things that made me push my chair back and turn off my computer because I could not look any more.

But I've always avoided writing about the tygers. They scare me too much. I'm a mother, and the knowledge of their existence hits too close to home.

However, there comes a time when a writer needs to forget about her own discomfort with the subject matter. A close friend has been telling me for two years that I really should write about the perils of allowing children unsupervised access to the Internet. And he's right. So I've decided to tell you about what's inside that cage. I'm going to tell you about some of the people I have talked with and some of the things I have seen and heard about.

If you're a parent, I beg you to pay attention.

Because here, gentle reader, there be tygers as feral and malignant as anything your child might find in the crowded closets of his darkest nightmares.

And these beasts are very, very real.

The Girl and The Tygers

It is absolutely true that pedophiles lurk in all the dark corners on the Internet. And it is absolutely true that kids need to be protected from them, warned away from them, kept safe from them.

But they also need to be kept safe from themselves, from the natural curiosity that can lead children into places they shouldn't ever be permitted to go.

There is a girl on the East Coast, a young woman just turned seventeen. Let's call her Gretchen. I "met" her through a mutual friend (the same fellow who has wanted me to write this column for the past couple years). The daughter of a first-generation Polish couple, Gretchen has been online for over four years. Her parents saved for a long time to buy her a computer, because they foresaw, most wisely, that computers were a portal to the future.

What they didn't anticipate was the drastic alteration their precocious little girl would undergo over the next few years, precipitated by the awful things she saw online. They didn't know that she would look at photos of corpses and videos of rapes. They did not understand that she would spend hours in chat rooms created for the sole purpose of discussing the cleanest, quickest method of suicide. They could not have known that she would have access to web sites that tell her how much over-the-counter cough syrup she needs to drink before she starts hallucinating.

They could not have realized that they'd thrown their daughter to the tigers.

Though she is only seventeen, Gretchen's might well be a wasted life. She quit school last year and spends most of her time online, when she isn't passed out. She has no friends in her community, and her parents might as well be a million miles away. This past year she began to lose feeling in her hands and arms, and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; her doctors say its onset might have been hastened, or even caused, by her abuse of DXM.

That's over-the-counter cough syrup, folks.

What I'm trying to tell you is that there are things online that are just as completely inappropriate and damaging to a child as the advances of a pedophile. Physically, Gretchen is still an innocent. She hasn't even had her first kiss yet, because who would give it to her? She doesn't know any kids her own age, in real life. She doesn't know anything but the words and images that scroll past her on the screen.

Gretchen has the soul of an ancient. She is jaded and sad, and she doesn't know how to change. Her parents must be horrified by her metamorphosis, and completely at a loss as to how they can help her. The obvious answer is to take her computer away, but I don't think they will; most parents wouldn't have the fortitude to remove their sick child's only source of comfort. After all, Gretchen's only friends these days are the ones she's made online, right?

Please join me next month; I'll tell you more about what I have seen within the cage, and how I protect my own kids from the savage beasts inside.

Caroline Wright, of WRIGHT FOR YOU Word Services, is a freelance writer. A former resident of Hawaii, she now lives in rural South Carolina. Feel free to e-mail your comments to Caroline at cw@wrightforyou.com.