JB, you probably know that you are a pioneer in this area. I'm so glad you're in the forum and asking these questions! But that doesn't help you much. I'll tell you the little we know.
First, data. There is very little. I'm trying to find a figure for child-exploitation cases involving social-networking nationwide myself. So first I called our friends at the UNH Crimes Against Children Research Center to get an update on a 2000 figure of Internet-related child-exploitation arrests nationwide vs. non-Internet-related (see this NetFamilyNews item). Those figures were 500 Net-related arrests vs. 65,000 arrests for crimes against children that had nothing to do with the Net. They're working on an update now, they told me, but it won't be publicly available for over a year. Next I called the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. They don't have that figure but kindly ran a Lexis-Nexis search for me that also turned up no such figure. I now have a call into CT Attorney General Blumenthal's office (he's leading a group of more than 30 state attorneys general threatening MySpace with a lawsuit). I figure if they're considering legal action they'll have figures. We'll see.
One of my objectives is to help move the discussion beyond sexual predation to peer harassment, which I suspect will affect a great many more young people than predation (I'm not discounting the latter as a risk but feel not enough attention is being given to the former and want to see the public discussion broadening!). So all I've been able to come up with so far is a comparison of two figures - one from two criminology professors' 2005 study of cyberbullying (they found that 33.4% of US teens say they've been victimized by cyberbullying) and that 2000 figure of 500 child-exploitation cases. Multiply the latter by 5 for growth since the year 2000 and you get maybe 2,500 Net-related child-exploitation arrests nationwide (not necessarily social-networking), and compare that to 33.4% of the 20.6 million young people online (Jupiter Research 2006 figure), or 6.8 million, and we have a pretty good argument for moving the discussion on to peer harassment and cyberbullying - 2,500 vs. 6.8 million, respectively, and I supect 2,500 is high.
If you read what the UNH researchers have found about the sexual predation cases (see my item "Net-related crimes against kids: Reality check"), you find that the young people most at risk of sexual predation are the biggest risk-takers, the kids who are actively seeking out high-risk activity for whatever reason, the kids not reached by all those safety tips out there (the kids you probably work with most); every single case we know of is not an abduction case but rather a runaway one, social media researcher danah boyd said in a recent interview.
The researchers at UNH in an email conversation just last night confirmed our thinking that safety tips and curricula have got somehow to include higher-risk teen social networkers. They're the minority "cluster" of social-networking teens danah talks about in her interview - "the marginalized and ostracized kids who are actually actively seeking out a community of peers online because they don't have one offline" - but they're not high risk only in the area of online criminal activity (predation). There are other risks for youth in this group if they're seeking reinforcment or validation online, e.g. for substance abuse, cutting, eating disorders, etc.
The other, majority, group who are getting the healthy validation or support they need in "real life" are just replicating their offline social lives online. The main risk for them is the peer-related behaviors that are noncriminal but can have a lot of impact psychologically and on reputations and future prospects.
This is way too long a post, but it's really just a snapshot of what we know and are needing to address right now. The public discussion and solutions are way behind even this. I suspect the online-safety curricula currently taught in schools are too narrow, focusing on "stranger danger," but you might look at what they're working on thereto at Carnegie-Mellon's Cylab, which works with i-Safe America on school online-safety curricula, or talk to the NetSmartz school program people at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Tech educators are beginning to call for the teaching of ethics and media literacy in tech education (see this item), and it sounds like you're thinking in that direction too - broad instruction on critical thinking in online behavior toward peers, self-presentation (what one uploads), information consumed (media literacy), academic ethics (plagiarism, attribution), cyberethics (hacking), PC security, etc. Hear, hear! It can't just be about stranger danger, when we know that fails to persuade the high-risk teens that msg is really targeting and fails to cover all the other "risks," in the peer-to-peer sense, that most teen Net users face (seems like we need a better word than "risk," but then look at this rare but tragic case of two teens in Florida that really falls more in the category of peer activity than criminal activity to my mind). Did that answer any of your questions? Let's keep this discussion going - or email us via admin@blogsafety.com.
Anne
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Anne Collier
BlogSafety co-director
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Edited by Anne at 02/23/2007 10:35 AM
