Kids

This page considers infocrime, security and kids online.

It covers -

• digital stranger danger
• messaging
• offensive content
• benchmarks
• life online
• organisations

We are recurrently asked about online threats to children and regimes for their protection, ranging from supervision by parents/guardians to special areas in cyberspace (eg US proposals for a dot XXX, dot sex or dot porn TLD).

Many claims about the incidence of online solicitation are poorly based, although it is common to see assertions in the mass media such as "in 1999, one in five children with Internet access were sexually approached on the web" by adults (a claim that is based on a distortion of more nuanced - albeit worrying - research findings).

     digital stranger danger

The 2001 report on Online Victimization: A Report on the Nation’s Youth (PDF) provides one point of reference.

The report was produced by David Finkelhor, Kimberly Mitchell & Janis Wolak under the auspices of the Crimes Against Children Research Center (NCCRC) at the University of New Hampshire in the US. It was complemented by an account, from the same authors, on Risk Factors for & Impact of Online Sexual Solicitation of Youth in 2001 Journal of the American Medical Association (the JAMA abstract is here). The findings drew on an interview-based survey of 1,501 US youths aged 10 to 17 who use the net regularly.

It sought to measure the extent to which young people were exposed to explicit content, received sexual solicitations from other users and were distressed by the incident. 25% reported having had at least one unwanted exposure to sexual images in the year prior to the survey, a figure consistent with a 2001 Kaiser Family Foundation/NPR survey in which 31% of those aged 10 to 17 with computers at home reported seeing a "pornographic" site.

The very broad definition of "pornographic" means that the figure should be used with caution. Commercial studies, for example a 2001 Netvalue report indicate that around 20% of surfers aged under 18 deliberately visit adult content sites.

One in five reported receiving a sexual solicitation or approach during the preceding year, with one in 30 receiving an aggressive sexual solicitation. (The latter concerns offline contact with the perpetrator through the post, by phone, in person or requests for offline contact). Girls were solicitated at around twice the rate of boys (66% v 34%). Under 10% of those solicitations were reported to law enforcement agencies.

The one in five figure has received considerable attention. It is important to note that solicitation is broadly defined and that it covers contact by peers, adults or contacts whose age/identity is unknown.

75% of the solicited youth were not troubled. Those who were tended to be younger children or recipients of more aggressive solicitation involving attempted/actual offline contact. Distress was higher when solicitation occurred on a computer at someone else's home.

The Kaiser study suggested that 45% of those aged 14-17 had encountered an 'adult' site (broadly defined), compared with 15% of those aged 10-13. Another Kaiser study (PDF) indicated that among online teens (ages 15-17) around 70% say they had accidentally come across "pornography" on the web, though 77% said they have never come across it or come across it "not too often."

Notably, only 6% of the NCCR youth reported that accidentally viewing a sexually explicit image was distressing to them. 75% of those who had experienced an online solicitation were not "very upset or afraid". (The second Kaiser study found that 55% of those who'd encountered such images indicated that they were not at all upset or "not too upset.")

A 2001 study by UK children's charity claimed that one in four British kids had been "bullied or threatened via a mobile phone or PC.

16% of the 81 participants indicated that they had received bullying text messages, 7% indicating harassment in chat rooms and 4% via email. 29% of those surveyed told no one. Of those who did report the harassment, 42% told a friend and 32% told a parent.

WiredPatrol, an offshoot of the US CyberAngels group, claims that

in a survey 10,800 teenage girls conducted in 1998 ... 12% of the teen girls polled admitted to meeting Internet strangers offline.

Few details of that survey by Berson, Ferron & Aftab, involving visitors to the Seventeen magazine site, are available and the figure should thus be used with caution.

Elsewhere WiredPatrol claims that

there are 200,000 real life stalkers in America today. That is out of a population of around 250 million, so that is 0.008% of the United States population. In other words there are roughly 1 in 1250 persons is a stalker. Statistics also show that over 1.5 million Americans today have been or are currently stalking victims: that is 0.6%, or 1 person in 166. If these ratios were reflected on the Internet (and no one actually knows these figures), then out of the estimated population of 79 million people worldwide on the Internet, we would find 63,000 Internet stalkers traveling the information superhighway, stalking approximately 474,000 victims

The 2000 New Zealand Girls on the Net study (PDF) - hailed as "a clear warning that there is no time to waste in moving forward with this national Internet Safety initiative" - claimed that 35% of 347 female respondents aged 11-19 had a "personal face-to face meeting with someone they met on the internet".

Of that group 86% met with males, 38% met with someone 18 or older, 5% met with someone 25 or older. Figures on outcomes of that contact - adverse or otherwise - are not available. Critics have commented that such figures are not significantly different from meetings following contact on a bus, at a sports event, a cinema or other occasion.

     messaging

As preceding paragraphs suggest, much contemporary concern regarding kids and the net relates to messaging, in particular chat and instant messaging (IM). Specific questions are discussed in a more detailed profile elsewhere on this site.

David Finkelhor's 2007 testimony to a US Senate Commerce Committee argued that -

• teens rather than young children are the typical online sex crime victims, with crimes rarely involving violence or abduction (which occur in 5% and 3% of cases respectively)
• most adult offenders do not conceal their intentions, with 80% being "quite explicit about their sexual intentions towards these kids"
• contact may be lengthy, with an adult typically engaging in weeks of "very often quite explicit online conversations that play on the teen's desire for romance, adventure, sexual information and understanding"

Finkelhor commented that

What puts kids in danger for these crimes is being willing to talk about sex online with strangers, and having a pattern of multiple risky activities on the web, such as going to sex sites and chat rooms, and interacting with lots of people there

He noted that "Half the victims were described by police as being in love with or feeling close friendship with the offender" (in 25% of cases the teen "ran away from home to be with the offender") and were often "troubled youth with histories of family turmoil and physical and sexual abuse".

He suggested that

We also have to go beyond bland warnings about not giving out personal information.  Our research with youth suggests that giving out personal information is not what puts kids at risk

and that having a blog or a social software presence was not a high risk factor.

     offensive content

The extent to which minors are exposed to (and affected by) online offensive content and the appropriate mechanisms for addressing that exposure remain contentious.

In discussing online censorship and free speech elsewhere on this site we have highlighted particular legal and technical questions (eg filters), along with debate about current and past regulation of pornography, games, film and comics.

     benchmarks

Statistics about any child abuse are sobering, although there is considerable disagreement about particular figures, their interpretation and data collection methodologies.

Other research from the NCCR claims that kids aged 12-17 constitute 25% of all US violent crime victims and 11% of all US homicides in 1997 were of people aged under 18. The sexual assault rate for those under 18 was 2.7 times higher than for adults (3.2 per 1,000) and the majority of sexual assaults reported to police involved juveniles (70% of forcible sex offenses and 95% of non-forcible sex offenses in 1995). One self-report study suggests that 51% of lifetime rapes occur prior to 18 and 29% prior to age 12, with 20% of adult females and 10% of adult males recalling a childhood sexual assault/incident.

Examination of the report suggests - in line with the Pew Internet study noted below and the 2002 US National Academies' Youth, Pornography & the Internet report discussed in our Censorship guide - that most kids and their parents are managing exposure to inappropriate content (e.g. adult images or text) and online meetings.

Much of the concern underlying 'digital stranger danger' tracts such as Katherine Tarbox's Katie.com: My Story (New York: Dutton 2000) is not specific to the net and indeed, like murder, most sexual offences are likely to involve a family member or friend. 10% of the NCCR subjects did not use chat rooms. 9% did not talk to online strangers.

Perhaps the most useful conclusion from the documents is the comment that

Professionals and parents should be prepared to educate youth about how to respond to on-line sexual solicitation, including encouraging youth to disclose and report such encounters and to talk about them

     Life online

A more positive set of figures appears in Teenage Life Online: The Rise of the Instant-message Generation and the Internet's impact on Friendships and Family Relationships, a report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. It suggests that the net is an integral part of the lives of most US teenagers, challenging the telephone as a means of communication.

The report drew on phone interviews and focus sessions with 754 youth aged 12 to 17 and 754 of their parents. It estimates about 17 million US teens are online, 73% of that age group compared to 56% of adults. Being online plays a major role in relationships with friends, families and schools. Both kids and their parents generally think use of the net enhances the social life and academic work of children, although both worry that the technology is "not an unqualified good".

• 76% of online teens say they would miss the net if they could no longer go online.
• 75% use instant messaging
• 48% say being online improves their relationship with friends
• 32% say the net helps them make new friends.
• 55% of parents with online teens think that the net is a good thing for their own children; 6% say it has been a bad thing.
• 55% of parents indicated that use of the net is "essential" if their kids are to be successful. A further 40% believe it is "important"
• two-thirds of parents think online content is at least as worrisome as that on television
• 64% of online teens said use of the net takes away from the time spent with their families.

In contrast to some accounts highlighted in our Censorship guide, few of Pew's respondents appear to be passive.

Most of the online teens used different screen names and email accounts to manage their communications and the information that comes to them. 24% said that one of those addresses or screen names was a secret one used when they did not want mates to know they were online.

Many reported pretending to be different people and are aware that they may have been given false information by others. 33% for example reported that someone had given them fake information, although that primarily relates to members of their own age group.

24% of Pews's online teens had "built their own web pages'.

15% of Pew's online teens (25% of older boys online) had lied about their age to access a web site.

57% of parents worried that strangers will contact their children online, a figure consistent with figures about fears of contact offline. Around 60% of teens had received an instant message or an email from a stranger. 50% report emailing or instant messaging with someone they have not met before. 52% of online teens said they were not at all worried about being contacted online, with 23% expressing any notable level of concern.

Parental content management strategies were consistent with the Australian Broadcasting Authority's 2001 Families@Home study, with 70% of online families locating the internet-connected computer in an open family area of the house such as a den. 41% of families have installed filters or activated ISP-based controls on their computer to restrict access to some kinds of content.

     organisations

Bodies with a particular interest in protection of kids online include

Australian community awareness body NetAlert

Childnet

the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and NCH childrens' charity

the EU-based INHOPE organisation concerned with action against child pornography. 

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