Debate Guide: Online dangers
The web is a dangerous place for children, and they should be protected by constant observation when online. Each year 1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online!
The 1 in 5 figure is an example of the all too common deception used to scare people and deny young people intellectual freedom (supposedly granted by the UNCRC).
- It originated with a study done in 2000 by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, which surveyed 1,501 Internet-using youth age 10 through 17. The actual relevant findings of the study were as follows:
- The 1 in 5 figure was the number that had received at least one instance of unwanted sex talk (including from other teenagers), or sex talk from an adult (whether wanted or not), in the past year.
- The proportion of respondents who received a sexual flirtation from an adult, followed by a request to talk on the phone or meet in person, was about 1%.
- The number of survey respondents who actually befriended an adult online and then met the adult in person for sexual purposes, was zero.[1]
Elsewhere, even establishment authorities such as David Finkelhor and associates point out that the common fears regarding the violent, involuntary nature of online solicitation as well as the myth that withholding personal information is an effective solution are all unfounded. Professional consensus is moving towards "self-victimisation" - which to any sound critical analyst, equates to the sexual agency of young people.[2]
Some, including Perverted Justice attempted to scaremonger over the now largely irrelevant networking site, Myspace:
There are nearly 100,000 Registered (US) sex offenders on Myspace!
The source for the 90,000 claim is highly contentious, and if correct, would actually have demonstrated that Sex Offenders were particularly careful not to partake in social networking. This is because in the US, Myspace was far more popular among adults than the diminutive 12% represented by "90,000" of a total "750,000" registered sex offenders at the time.
If they were to be effective in any forthcoming crusade against "predators" (as encouraged by US Attorneys General such as Richard Blumenthal and Government agencies), Myspace only had a public registry to go by, along with the Myspace registrant's purported details. The number of false positives and indeed false negatives they would have encountered would have been huge. In reality, Myspace had no way of knowing the IP addresses and other data of registered SO's. Only a very small fraction of sex offenders are inclined towards violent attacks on youngsters, and a negligible proportion of this number use the internet to facilitate this.