Grant Wrangler
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Children Less Likely to Encounter Online Predators
From: Nancy Willard nwillard@csriu.org
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.
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.
The actual report is here:
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
Retrieved from the EdTech Listserv, August 9, 2006
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/internetprivacy/2006-08-08-kids-online-survey_x.htmhttp://www.unh.edu/ccrc/pdf/CV138.pdf