Despite the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace, a smaller percentage of young people are being sexually solicited online than five years ago......The long-awaited report, to be released Wednesday (click here for a PDF of the report) is the only national study of its kind. It is by the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center, which surveyed 1,500 children ages 10 to 17 last year and compared findings with a similar group five years earlier.
About 13% (3.2 million) said in 2005 that they had received an unwanted request to engage in sexual activity or conversations in the previous year from either adults or other children. Five years earlier, it was 19%.
The story doesn't mention the DOPA legislation that was created to deal with the alleged "increasing problem" of online predators. While supporters are sure to say that if only one percent of kids where approached by predators online, than it is a percentage point too many, one can hope that this helps push the needle towards a rationalization of the debate...
More on the study after the jump, why this will give both "sides" ammo and what industry can do about it...Internet researcher Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, says the new research reinforces what he has seen: "There simply is not the volume of predators on MySpace that people imagine."
News reports won't have the space to go too deep into the study, so let's freely cut and paste. You'll see that no one is suggesting that the Internet is a crime-free zone and much needs to be done to address online-enabled crime is a judicious fashion. At the same time, we can use this study to learn alot about what can and cannot be controlled through technology mandates that strive to control technology usage.
The section on sexual solicitations and advances leads...
The dangers posed from people who use the Internet to make inappropriate and
sometimes criminal sexual overtures to youth remain a primary concern of families,
law enforcement, and others concerned with the welfare of youth. The second
Youth Internet Safety Survey shows a smaller proportion of youth who said they
were sexually solicited online. Further, the fact a smaller proportion of youth said
they went to chatrooms, talked to people they did not know in person online, and
formed close online relationships with people they knew only online suggests at
least some of this decline may be due to youth being aware of the risky nature of
online encounters with such people. Despite the decline in the proportion of youth
who received solicitations, however, the number of youth receiving the most
dangerous sexual overtures, aggressive solicitations that move, or threaten to move,
beyond the Internet into real life has not declined. The percentage of youth who
said they felt very or extremely upset or frightened because of a solicitation also
did not show a statistically significant decrease.
In YISS-2 approximately 1 in 7 youth Internet users (13%) received unwanted
sexual solicitations or approaches in the past year. Close to half of the solicitations
were relatively mild events that did not appear to be dangerous or frightening.
Four (4) percent of all youth Internet users, however, received aggressive sexual
solicitations, which threatened to spill over into “real life” because the solicitor
asked to meet the youth in person; called them on the telephone; or sent them
offline mail, money, or gifts. Also 4% of youth Internet users had distressing
sexual solicitations that left them feeling very or extremely upset or afraid. Two
(2) percent of youth had solicitations that were both aggressive and distressing.
DOPA regulates Internet usage by minors in certain libraries and schools, yet...
Most solicitation incidents (79%) happened on home computers.
Less than 10 percent happened in a school, library or "similar place."
Likewise, when looking at exposure to sexual content...
More than three-quarters of the unwanted exposures (79%) happened at
home. Nine (9) percent happened at school, 5% happened at friends’ homes,
and 5% happened in other places including libraries.
About 1 out of 3 unwanted exposures (29%) happened when youth were
“with friends or other kids [they] knew.”
Proving that anecdotes sometimes speak louder than statistics, the study includes some chilling interview snippets...
What Youth Said About Solicitations
Boy, 11, who was playing an online game with a 20-year-old man: “He asked me something personal, something about a man’s privates.”
Girl, 12: “I went into the chatroom, and they asked me if I wanted to have cybersex. I was asking them what kind of music they liked and stuff.”
Girl, 14: “I was chatting on the Internet and this guy just popped up in an instant message and started talking really dirty to me and saying things that I had never heard of before. He told me he was 30 years old and then he said, ‘LOL’ (laugh out loud).”
The report includes ten conclusions on the survey. The last one:
The Internet remained a fluid environment for youth.
When comparing YISS-1 and YISS-2, changes in experiences and behavior were
evident. This is a sign of how much the Internet environment is changing and
how norms and behaviors have yet to become fixed. The migration of youth
away from chatrooms and into instant messaging and online journal and
networking sites is a good example. This poses a challenge to make sure yesterday’s
remedies are not superseded by tomorrow’s realities. But it is also encouraging,
because it means opportunities to change behavior and better protect youth are
not yet confronting entrenched patterns.
Those collaborating on the research also provide recommendations on how to deal with the problems discussed. Most have to do with parenting, education and reporting, but industry does get singled out, too. And, again, you can't just say no to DOPA (and more onerous future regulations), you have to actively provide solutions...
Enhance Internet accountability.
In striving to enhance responsible behavior on the Internet, we should consider
ways to build in incentives for enhancing community and prosocial behavior
and establishing positive norms. In cyberspace people are not just operating in
unclaimed territory. There is organized turf, and there are jurisdictions in
cyberspace. The question is, are the administrators of these jurisdictions doing
everything they can to promote civility and deter offensive behavior? A good
example of a norm-promoting and offense-discouraging system is the one eBay
uses. It promotes feedback about sellers and allows buyers and sellers to see the
reputation of the person with whom they are dealing. eBay knows they have to
create confidence and trust in their territory or people will not use it.
There are not enough of these trust-enhancing systems. Wouldn’t it be
interesting to know before signing up with an Internet service provider how it
compared to other providers in rates of offensive behavior or customer satisfaction
for following up on complaints? Wouldn’t it be good, before going into a chatroom,
to know how many complaints there had been by participants? More online
businesses may come to recognize the competitive advantages of helping to ensure
safety in and around their environments. A positive step would be for electronic
service providers to develop internal, yet publicly visible “trust-enhancing
systems” to increase public confidence in the services they provide.
The study definitely provides some interesting points.
I worry that this study didn't capture the whole social networking boom since it only went through 2005. While the proportion of kids solicited may have gone down, the actual number might be unchanged, or higher.
It's still too high for my liking, though glad that groups like the NH Research Center and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children are working as hard as they are on this!
Posted by: K | August 10, 2006 at 12:21 PM