News for the Week of March 11, 2007

The top story in kid-tech news this past week (and in the news every week, it seems): online predators. Let's unpack this loaded issue a bit...

Predators vs. cyberbullies: A closer look

Parents who have seen "To Catch a Predator" on Dateline NBC are asking how much they should be worrying about their social-networking kids. Bottom line: If they're worried about predators, most parents' concerns are misplaced. I'll tell you where engaged parenting should be focused in a minute, but first a word about Dateline...

Columbia Journalism Review builds quite a case showing that Dateline is fueling public fears not because it's representing reality but because it's representing reality TV. In doing so, CJR suggests, NBC is doing the public a disservice. One way is in playing it fast and loose with the numbers. "When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a speech about a major initiative to combat the 'growing problem' of Internet predators, he cited a statistic that 50,000 such would-be pedophiles were prowling the Net at any given moment and attributed it to Dateline."

An investigative reporter looked into that 50,000 figure General Gonzales used and found Dateline had gotten it from "a retired FBI agent who consulted with the show" and who, when asked, suggested he kind of pulled it out of the air (Dateline has since disowned the figure, CJR adds). The only figure state attorneys general have for actual cases of child sexual exploitation related to social networking is 100 cases in 2005, all MySpace-related because the number came from a Lexis-Nexis search of news media reports (parents may have noticed that the news media have focused largely on MySpace). The Uniform Crime Reporting System hasn't caught up with cybercrime, I was told by an attorney general's office (see this at FBI.gov).

One hundred cases is 100 too many, but parents also deserve to hear how these cases occur (please read this week's editorial in NetFamilyNews to get a better understanding of this).

The peer-to-peer risk

Which takes us to the part about where parental attention needs to be focused: peer harassment, or cyberbullying. Compare the figure of 100 adult-to-minor predation cases in 2005 to 6.9 million "cases" of teen-to-teen cyberbullying. The latter number comes from a 2006 study by criminology Profs. J.W. Patchin and S. Hinduja which found that 33.4% of US teens have been victimized by cyberbullying (see "Bullies Move Beyond the Schoolyard"). According to Jupiter Research, there were 20.6 million US teens online by the end of last year. One third (33.4%) of 20.6 million suggests 6.9 million incidents of cyberbullying. These are the best figures we have on the noncriminal, peer-to-peer side of the social Web's risk spectrum, but are actually much better numbers (based on sound research methodology) than the 100 cases of sexual predation referred to in the news media. The Crimes Against Research Center researchers tell me they've started work on a study that will update and vastly improve on that 100-cases figure, but it won't be publicly available for over a year.

However, even if the 100-cases figure is multiplied 10-fold and the 6.9 million one isn't conservative enough, we can still safely say that a great many more teen social networkers are at risk of harassment by peers than by sexual predators. This suggests to me that the focus of parents' concerns at least needs to widen. Yes, there are predators out there. That's good to know, because online teens need to know to delete any sexual solicitations and not talk about sex online (see "How to recognize grooming"). But parents and teens also need to calmly, fearlessly discuss things like: what can happen online among tweens and teens, how we present ourselves online (see "Protecting teen reputations on Web 2.0"), what's is/isn't appropriate to upload (see "Teens' child-porn convictions upheld"), how people try to manipulate others (see "How social influencing works"), and how we all need to think about how we're treating each other online just as much as offline.