[LM_NET] Children less likely to encounter online predators

[Nancy Willard <nwillard@CSRIU.ORG>]

By Janet Kornblum, USA TODAY
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.

But children ages 10 to 17 are being increasingly bombarded with online porn
and are being harassed and bullied more ‹ often by peers, a study finds.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/internetprivacy/2006-08-08-kids-online-sur
vey_x.htm

The actual report is here: http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/pdf/CV138.pdf

Unfortunately, my stellar quote got chopped in the editing room. ;-( But I
was more interested in making sure that the points were made that 43% of
solicitations were other teens. And that teens were not overly upset by the
contacts. ;-)

Actually I think even more of the so-called sexual solicitations were from
other teens -- possibly up to 2/3rds. Here is why. 18% were age unknown.
Just comparing the current data, there is a good bet that 8 to 10% were
other teens. But they also had a category of 30% age 18 to 25. We all know
that teens lie about their age and register as 18 year olds. So I suspect
that a good portion of the sexual solicitors were from this category were
also teens. So what we have in these situations is sexual harassment -- and
age-old problem among teens. 4 out of 5 high school students reported being
sexual harassed. (AAUW Hostile Hallways 2002)

Teens tell me that they prefer social networking sites BECAUSE they are
safer than other forms of interactions, especially chat rooms. This is
essentially what it appears they said to the researchers. When teens use
social networking, they can visit the profile, view the comments, and view
the friendship links of anyone who contacts them. Most are intelligently
using this information to make assessments about whether or not they want to
maintain a friendship link.

The teens who actually respond to sexual solicitations are "at risk" to
begin with. 

Interestingly, although only 9% indicated they had been harassed (bullied),
28% said that they had sent rude comments to others, and 9% indicated they
had harassed someone they were mad at. If you add the harassment figure to
the the number of teens who are engaging in sexual solicitation, this means
we have a significant problem in the area I have been trying to address.

Nancy
-- 
Nancy Willard, M.S., J.D.
Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use
http://csriu.org
http://cyberbully.org
nwillard@csriu.org

Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats: Responding to the Challenge of Online Social
Cruelty, Threats, and Distress, a resource for educators, is now available
online at http://cyberbully.org.

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