Study Outlines Safety Tips for Kids
Online study finds perpetrators are younger than you'd expect.
BY LARRY MAGID
Special to the Mercury News
June 11, 2000IF you're worried about dirty old men sexually soliciting your children on the Internet, you can relax. The bad news is that a significant percentage are being sexually solicited, but the age and the gender of the perpetrators might surprise you. The vast majority -- 96 percent -- of those who solicit teens are under 25 and nearly half -- 48 percent -- are themselves children under the age of 18. Some 20 percent are female.That's the good news from an ``online victimization'' study released last week by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (www.ncmec.org) that provides some interesting, though not terribly surprising, insights about the online experiences of youth between the ages of 10 and 17.
What we have here is not unlike the halls of any high school where, rightly or wrongly, students are frequently hitting on other students. In the physical world that can be something as innocuous or even flattering as a genuine expression of affection. But when it happens online, especially from someone you've never met, it somehow seems more ominous.
Full disclosure: Although I had nothing to do with this study, I have served as a consultant to the NCMEC on Internet-related child safety projects and am the author of its two online safety guides: Child Safety on the Information Highway and Teen Safety on the Information Highway.
The study, based on a telephone survey of a representative sample of 1,501 youths between the ages of 10 and 17, was funded by Congress and conducted by Dr. David Finkelhor of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center.
According to the survey results, one in four young people has had ``unwanted exposure to pictures of naked people or people having sex.'' These are not cases where the young person admits to looking for such pictures, but situations where they have come upon them while searching for material, or where links to such material were sent via e-mail.
That number hardly surprised me and it certainly didn't surprise my 13-year-old son Will who, since he was 9, has been getting unsolicited advertisements for sex sites in his e-mail. It also won't surprise anyone who has ever used a search engine such as Yahoo or Alta Vista to look for words like ``whale'' or ``Bambi,'' or those of us who have accidentally mis-typed the name of a Web site. Enter .com instead of .org or .gov on some popular sites and you'll be exposed to what could be an unpleasant surprise by adult Web site operators who deliberately mislead Web surfers into stumbling on their sites.
Another trick is to misspell the name of a popular site. Some porn sites with names like ``nytims.com,'' ``betscape.com'' and ``nasa.com'' have been shut down for a variety of reasons, including trademark violations, but plenty of similar sites remain. If you take your kids for an online tour of the White House (www.whitehouse.gov), make sure you don't type in .com.
For a reality check, I conducted my own admittedly unscientific survey from the driver's seat of my minivan, as I was chauffeuring my daughter Katherine and three of her friends -- all 10th graders at Palo Alto's Gunn High School.
I told them about the survey, without telling them the results. I asked them to guess the percentage of kids who reported receiving sexual solicitations via the Net. One girl guessed 80 percent, another 75 percent and a third thought the answer would be closer to 65 percent. When asked about seeing unwanted pictures of naked people, one girl thought the number would be closer to 100 percent rather than 25 percent.
In other words, this group of techno-savvy Silicon Valley teenage girls thought the survey underestimated the situation. But, like 75 percent of those in Finkelhor's study, none of the girls were particularly bothered by what they encounter online. They laugh it off and move on.
Although my daughter's friends and 75 percent of their contemporaries aren't particularly disturbed by unwanted online solicitation or exposure to sexual material, such occurrences are not only inappropriate but -- for some kids -- are deeply disturbing.
The study found 20 percent of the youths who were sexually solicited -- 5 percent of the entire sample -- were ``very or extremely upset,'' and 13 percent -- 3 percent of the entire sample -- were ``very or extremely afraid.''
Thankfully, none of the youths in the study said they actually engaged in a sexual act -- consensual or not -- with someone who solicited them online. Most, according to the study's authors, ``ended the solicitations, using a variety of strategies like logging off, leaving the site or blocking the person.''
AOL Instant Messenger and most other instant messaging services allow you to block messages from specific individuals. Blocking mechanisms are also available in some chat rooms, and most e-mail programs allow you to filter out messages from people you don't want to hear from.
Another issue, which I also consider to be distressing, is non-sexual harassment. About 6 percent of the young people surveyed said that they were ``feeling worried or threatened because someone was bothering or harassing them online.'' This included threats to assault or harm the young person or a family member, as well as efforts to embarrass or humiliate them. A third of those so affected -- 2 percent of the entire sample -- said they had been ``extremely upset or afraid'' because of a harassment episode.
As with any set of statistics, there are various ways to spin the data. On the positive side, the vast majority of the respondents said they hadn't been sexually solicited or received unwanted pictures of naked people. Yet, by extrapolating the data against the nearly 24 million kids between 10 and 17 who were online regularly in 1999, we find 6 million kids received sexually explicit material they didn't want, nearly five million were sexually solicited and more than 1.4 million were harassed.
What jumps out at me from this study is not so much that it's a rough world out there, but that many of the people making it rough are kids themselves. Although sexual harassment from a fellow young person can be just as troubling as from an adult, the statistics challenge the stereotypical reaction that we often conjure about kids being at the whim of pedophiles. I'm not denying that there are pedophiles that prey on children. It's a horrendous problem, even if it happens to just one child.
But I think we must also concentrate on how kids treat each other. I urge parents to talk with their children not only about how to protect themselves, but about how to behave. Just as most schools have rules about sexual harassment and solicitation on campus, parents need to establish rules about behavior on the Net. We need to make sure the Internet doesn't become a breeding ground for rudeness, anti-social behavior and sexual harassment.
