Report Claims Online Threats to Children Overblown

[David Baxter PhD]

Report Calls Online Threats to Children Overblown
By BRAD STONE, New York Times
January 14, 2009

A task force created by 49 state Attorneys General to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.

The findings ran counter to popular perceptions of online dangers as reinforced by depictions in the news media like NBC?s To Catch a Predator series. One attorney general was quick to criticize the group?s report.

The panel, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, was charged with examining the extent of the threats children face on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, amid widespread fears that adults were using these popular Web sites to deceive and prey on children.

But the report concluded that the problem of bullying among children, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.

?This shows that social networks are not these horribly bad neighborhoods on the Internet,? said John Cardillo, chief executive of Sentinel Tech Holding, which maintains a sex offender database and was part of the task force. ?Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons.?

The 278-page report, released Tuesday, was the result of a year of meetings between dozens of academics, experts in childhood safety and executives of 30 companies, including Yahoo, AOL, MySpace and Facebook.

The task force, led by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, looked at scientific data on online sexual predators and found that children and teenagers were unlikely to be propositioned by adults online. In the cases that do exist, the report said, teenagers are typically willing participants and are already at risk because of poor home environments, substance abuse or other problems.

Not everyone was happy with the conclusions. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Attorney Aeneral, who has forcefully pursued the issue and helped to create the task force, said he disagreed with the report. Mr. Blumenthal said it ?downplayed the predator threat,? relied on outdated research and failed to provide a specific plan for improving the safety of social networking.

?Children are solicited every day online,? Mr. Blumenthal said. ?Some fall prey, and the results are tragic. That harsh reality defies the statistical academic research underlying the report.?

In what social networks may view as something of an exoneration after years of pressure from law enforcement, the report said sites like MySpace and Facebook ?do not appear to have increased the overall risk of solicitation.?

Attorneys General like Mr. Blumenthal and Roy Cooper of North Carolina publicly accused the social networks of facilitating the activities of pedophiles and pushed them to adopt measures to protect their youngest users. Citing studies that showed tens of thousands of convicted sex offenders were using MySpace, they pressured the networks to purge those people from their membership databases.

The Attorneys General also charged the task force with evaluating technologies that might play a role in enhancing safety for children online. An advisory board composed of academic computer scientists and forensics experts was created within the task force to look at technologies and ask companies in the industry to submit their child-protection systems.

Among the systems the technology board looked at included age verification technologies that try to authenticate the identities and ages of children and prevent adults from contacting them. But the board concluded that such systems ?do not appear to offer substantial help in protecting minors from sexual solicitation.?

One problem is that it is difficult to verify the ages and identities of children because they do not have driver?s licenses or insurance.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

Comment
This "study" seems to me to be another of those misguided pseudo-research efforts, however well meaning the authors and funding agencies may have been.

Does the fact that victimization of minors on MySpace and Facebook by sexual and other predators is a (thanfully) relatively rare event really mean that it's a safe place for children?

I don't think so.

It's also true that the majority of adults in your neighborhood, church, shopping malls, and youth groups are not predators. That doesn't mean we should relax our collective guard or stop street-proofing our children and trying to caution them about the dangers of predators.

 

[Jazzey]

I found these articles on the topic of street-proofing:

Street-proofing children

Stranger Danger - Street Proofing Kids - Preteen Safety Article

Street Smart Children

I particularly like telling children that an adult that asks them to keep a secret from their parents is probably not looking out for them. I also like the advice to tell a child to follow their gut instincts; they do have great instincts about people.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

Study Accused of Exaggerating Kids' Online Safety

Study Accused of Exaggerating Kids' Online Safety
by Jaikumar Vijayan, Computerworld
Jan 17, 2009 2:07 pm

A report released last week by a task force set up by MySpace Inc. paints a surprisingly benign picture of the online security and privacy threats faced by children. But the report's conclusion -- that some of the common concerns about those threats may be overstated or misplaced -- is drawing sharp criticism from some quarters.

Perhaps the most scathing critique came from South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, who blasted the report for creating a "false sense of security" about online child safety. In a letter (download PDF ) addressed to a working group of the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) -- which commissioned the report early last year -- McMaster asserted that the task force's findings are "as disturbing as they are wrong."

The 279-page report at the center of the controversy is titled "Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies" and based on a review of academic and industry research. It was compiled by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, which was created last February as part of an agreement between MySpace and the NAAG aimed at improving online safety for children, particularly on social networking sites. The AGs signed a similar deal with Facebook Inc. last May.

The task force was directed by Harvard University 's prestigious Berkman Center for Internet & Society . In addition to MySpace and Facebook -- which both pledged to add new security features to their Web sites as part of their deals with the AGs -- the task force members included representatives from companies such as Google, Microsoft and AOL and from several child safety and public policy advocacy organizations.

The report says that contrary to popular perceptions, the biggest risks that teenagers and younger children face on the Internet are cyber-bullying and online harassment -- not sexual predators . And the most frequent threats to children on social networking sites and the Internet in general come not from predatory older adults, but from their peers and young adults, according to the report.

The task force's findings shouldn't be misconstrued as a statement that the Internet doesn't pose risks for children, said John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based think tank that took part in producing the report.

The most important takeaway, Morris said, is that despite the "hype and hysteria" among the general public and the media, online risks to children are sometimes less serious and more nuanced than typically assumed. "No one is saying the online environment is risk-free," he said. "But in the end, the research shows that social networking environments are generally safe for kids and that the ones at risk online are the ones who [also] are at risk offline."

Although online sexual solicitation of minors by adults is a concern, it happens less often than popularly assumed, according to the task force's report. The number of cases that have been reported to law enforcement officials in which online contact between adults and minors leads to physical sexual encounters is relatively small, the report claims. And, it says, such situations typically involve "postpubescent youth" who are often aware beforehand that they're dealing with adults.

According to the report, the percentage of youths who said they had received sexual solicitations online declined from 19% in 2000 to 13% in 2006. More than 80% of the recipients of such solicitations are between 14 and 17 years old, the report says, and in nearly half of the cases, the youths identified other adolescents as being the solicitors.

Also, while the Internet may increase the availability of illegal and inappropriate content, that doesn't always mean minors are automatically exposed to such materials, the report says. Often, it adds, children who do view pornography online -- such as older male minors -- were actively seeking out the content.

"The research doesn't bear out this notion that social networks are cesspools of predators," said Larry Magid, co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a Web site and forum operated by the nonprofit Tech Parenting Group. Instead, what it reveals is a more nuanced situation, in which the children who are most at risk or are engaging in dangerous behavior online also have a tendency to be at risk in the physical world, Magid said.

And more often than not, the biggest threat children face online comes in the form of cyber-bullying by their peers, Magid said. He added that understanding such issues is important because most of the policy decisions surrounding the online privacy and security of young people are being influenced by misconceptions about the nature of the threats they face.

For instance, from a policy perspective, the idea of requiring social networking sites to use age-verification technologies to protect minors is misplaced, Morris contended. "When you start looking at the actual risk, you realize that technologies such as age verification don't do much to address the problem," he said. "That's because you don't have a huge rampant problem of 40-year old men tricking 15-year olds to have sex [with them]."

As a result, using age-verification tools is likely to succeed only in driving away teenagers and other children away from what are relatively safe and healthy social environments for them, Morris claimed.

Not everyone agrees, though. McMaster, the South Carolina attorney general, said in his letter to the NAAG that the report's conclusions are at odds with his state's data on the subject of Internet child safety.

In South Carolina, at least, Internet predators "pose a clear and present danger" to children, McMaster wrote. He noted that a task force of 43 state and local law enforcement agencies formed in South Carolina in 2004 has made 147 arrests for online child solicitation thus far. Sixty-six of the arrested individuals have been convicted to date, while the rest are awaiting trial, McMaster said.

In addition, the increasing prevalence of mobile phones, PDAs, video gaming systems and online social networking sites is putting children more at risk than anytime previously, according to McMaster. Because of what he characterized as the report's incorrect conclusions "and the troubling false sense of security that they create," South Carolina is withdrawing from the 49-state working group within the NAAG that commissioned the task force's report. (The Texas AG's office hasn't taken part in the working group.)

Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington, said the report's findings were tainted by the involvement of social networking sites and technology vendors that have a vested interest in keeping regulators at bay. "This is a flawed report that calls out for a renewed effort to come up with policies to protect youth online," Chester said. "It's unconscionable that a company like MySpace can simply rent out Harvard's Berkman Center as its own kind of private think tank and get the results it wants."

But Kathryn Montgomery, a professor at American University's School of Communications in Washington and a former director of the Center for Media Education, said it's important to keep a sense of perspective about the report's findings.

Because the report was compiled by a task force so heavily laden with industry representatives, it needs to be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism, Montgomery said. "It doesn't surprise me that it has reached these conclusions," she said. "This is indeed what the industry wanted. Clearly, it was designed to assuage concern and keep any regulation from happening."

At the same time, the report is accurate in stating that the online security risks faced by children are overblown, Montgomery claimed. She added that social networks do give children a healthy environment in which to interact with one another, and that the public image of such sites has been diminished by an unmerited focus on security risks by policy makers and the media.

"The press likes this stuff," Montgomery said. "It's about Internet safety and kids as victims. [But] it tends to get blown out of proportion, and everybody thinks that social networks are only about that."