'Overparenting backlash' & predator fears

It's an interesting juxtoposition, Time magazine's article about a helicopter-parenting backlash and a study showing that nearly two-thirds of US parents are concerned about online predators (see USNews.com). Which is bigger? I suspect predator fears are a bigger phenomenon, unfortunately – despite research at the Crimes Against Children Research Center "finding no evidence online predators were stalking or abducting victims based on information posted on social networking sites (see USATODAY's coverage and mine). The Center's director, Dr. David Finkelhor, also told me in an email around that time that the number of predation incidents was too low to show up in two separate national studies of US youth – "at 1 in 500 or 1 in 1000 or below we can’t estimate" the risk level of predation, he added. Certainly even one case is too many, but concerns need to reflect the facts not the hype and misinformation parents have been subjected to since the advent of online social networking.

But getting back to the study of parents' concerns and engagement, it was a national survey by the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital at the University of Michigan, and key findings include:

81% of parents say their kids 9-17 use the Net "on their own," yet...

64% of parents are either "very concerned" or "somewhat concerned" about online predators (half very concerned).

66% of 13-to-17-year-olds have their own social network profiles, and 19% of kids 9-12 do (even though MySpace and Facebook require users to be 13 to set up accounts).

Despite the fact that the 2008 Berkman Center task force report stated that online harassment and bullying are the most common risk youth face online, bullying was No. 5 on the list of parents' online-safety concerns in the Mott study, after predators, privacy, porn, and online games, respectively.

The Mott study also broke down parental concerns by gender of children and family ethnicity, finding that "black parents report greater concern for all areas of Internet safety than do white or Hispanic parents."

Internet safety ranked as the 5th biggest health problem for children in the Mott Hospital's "'National Poll on Children’s Health' annual list of the Top 10 biggest health problems for children" this year, "with 31% of adults rating Internet safety as a big problem," Mott reports.

Predators: Parents really can worry less

Be alert, certainly be engaged, but let's be realistic, is my takeaway from an interview Lenore Skenazy - syndicated columnist and author of Free Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts With Worry - gave Salon.com. I'm going to quote a chunk about predators in full because it's good to hear a prominent voice correctly citing the research for a change. Her comment could be mapped to the findings of last year's Internet Safety Technical Task Force.

Salon asked her, "What's your take on Internet sexual predators?" Skenazy: "The world online turns out to be not very different from the world offline. There are some really seedy neighborhoods where you wouldn't want your kids hanging out, especially if they were wearing high-heeled shoes and fishnets stockings at night. If your kids don't go there, then your kids are not going to be stalked by predators just looking up prom pictures on Facebook. David Finkelhor, the head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, has discovered pedophiles don't want to waste their time just flipping through MySpace pages or Facebook pages. It's as futile as trying to call up random numbers from the phonebook and trying to get a date. It's just a waste of time. They would rather go for the low-hanging fruit: young people hanging out in sexually suggestive chat rooms presenting themselves in a sexual way.... If your kid is just texting his friends, or posting pictures on Facebook or AIM'ing, it's no more dangerous than them talking to each other as they walk down the sidewalk, or at the mall." But don't miss the whole interview about raising kids in an alarmist society. [For more on the latest research from Dr. Finkelhor and colleagues, see this.]

Where will online teens go next?

Some of us are watching to see if, now that so many parents are joining Facebook, teens will migrate somewhere else (see this post, suggesting that mobile texting might be a sign of diversification vs. mass migration). In her YPulse blog, Anastasia Goodstein just asked a good (related) question: "Should Large Social Networks Give Teens Their Space Back?" Teens have always needed to have hangouts of their own, away from parents (online too, now). I posted a comment to that effect at YPulse but want to blog about this too because I think the social network space is in a bit of a transition right now, and parents and teens might want to think together about and weigh in on this.

Where online socializing's concerned, I can see merit to both sides of the debate - on one hand, that teens deserve their own space and should have their own social network sites and, on the other, that it's more "normal" or reflective of the "real world" for sites, worlds, and games such as MySpace, Facebook, and World of Warcraft not to age-segregate.

Some social sites and services - such as YourSphere.com, Teen Second Life, and a forthcoming service called "My Secret Circle" - make segregation an actual safety feature, but I think segregation for safety will slowly be replaced by segregation by interest - people sharing interests such as fairies (as in Disney's PixieHollow), slopestyle skiing (as in NewSchoolers), or teens who aspire to be professional writers (as one teen told me is her reason for spending time on YourSphere). Segregation by interest brings a measure of safety with it, I believe, but you may be asking why I think segregation for safety is losing steam....

Because it's a response to the predator panic teens and parents have been subjected to in US society, not to the realities of youth on the social Web. What nearly a decade of peer-reviewed academic research shows is that peer-to-peer behavior is the online risk that affects many more youth, the vast majority of online kids who are not already at-risk youth offline (see the 12/08 Internet Safety Technical Task Force report's Executive Summary). Segregating teens from adults online doesn't address harassment, defamation, imposter profiles, cyberbullying, etc. It may help keep online predators away from kids (even though online predation, or abuse resulting from online communication, constitutes only 1% of overall child sexual exploitation, according to UNH's Crimes Against Children Research Center), which is a great outcome, but it's not enough unless all that parents are worried about is predators. A long-winded way of explaining why I think age segregation is losing steam: the facts are emerging, and parents, schools, policymakers, and businesses will increasingly respond to reality rather than hyperbole (call me an idealist, but isn't this the way it works?) - please post if you disagree.

So my vote's with diversification. Teens will simultaneously: 1) continue to diversify their platforms and channels for socializing (social sites have lost a percentage of teens' social/leisure time to texting on phones, but I think also to a lesser degree to massively multiplayer online games and gaming communities like Xbox Live and Sony Home); 2) stay in the giant, general-interest social network sites just because that's where everybody is and these really are social utilities that for teens have replaced email, chat, IM, etc. as separate social tools; and 3) also increasingly hang out together in vertical sites and other quiet corners of the Web where parents aren't around.

As for Anastasia's question about whether the giant sites should give teens their space back? I don't know about should because I'm sure she'll agree the business question is would they? And the answer is no, because their massive-traffic business models won't allow it. The logical question is where the social Web's natives and early adopters will choose to go not just to hang out, but to do the amazing array of things they use the fixed and mobile social Web for: keeping in touch, comparing class notes, designing, software writing, fiction writing, commentary writing, video producing, being entertained, job seeking, marketing, activism, solidarity - generally just the digital version of living. The answer to that, necessarily, is a vast and growing number of social media and technologies. I don't think it's going to be a giant monolithic thing like social networking again. But I definitely could be wrong about that. Please tell me if you disagree, especially if you know what the next big thing is!

Related links

"Living and learning with social media: Many American youth are embracing a wide array of social media as part of their everyday lives," a talk given by social media scholar danah boyd at Pennsylvania State University

For some background on social networking in general: "The Life and Death of the Social Network: The Glory Days Are Over"

Major update on Net predators: CACRC study

As scary as some of the reports covering it may make it look, there's a lot of good news for online youth in the much-anticipated new study from UNH's Crimes Against Children Research Center, "Trends in Arrests of Online Predators." I hope the news coverage doesn't focus solely on the nearly five-fold increase in online predator arrests since the CACRC's last such study in 2000, but even if it does, that finding points to great preventive police work throughout the US (in 2006, 87% of those arrests involved police posing as teens, not real young people, the study found). Those arrests likely prevented crimes against children, and they're sending the message that cops are out there patrolling "the neighborhood."

But there's a lot of other positive news in the report. For example...

Between the CACRC's last study of Net-related predation arrests and this one, there was only a "modest" increase - 21% - of arrests of offenders soliciting young people, its authors report, "from an estimated 508 arrests in 2000 to an estimated 615 in 2006," at a time when the number of US 12-to-17-year-olds online went from 73% to 93%, or more than 25 million, in 2006, and when their Internet use was getting a lot more social.

Overall sex offenses against youth declined during this period, and Internet-initiated child sexual exploitation constituted only 1% of overall child sexual exploitation.

Despite all the hype about registered sex offenders, only a tiny percentage of the arrests surveyed were of registered sex offenders, which indicates that, while blocking them from sites may reduce, it by no means stops sexual solicitation (and we already knew that a significant percentage of the solicitations come from peers).

Not good news, but a notable finding in the study is that there has been "a significant increase in arrests of young adult offenders, ages 18 to 25," which also challenges the image of "predators" presented in the news media.

What about social networking?

Now let's zoom in on what the authors say about online social networking - not just because it's so important to our kids (and statistically of growing use to us too), but also because of all the hype and news coverage about predators in social network sites since 2005:

"There was no evidence that online predators were stalking or abducting unsuspecting victims based on information they posted at social networking sites.

"The nature of crimes in which online predators used the Internet to meet and victimize youth changed little between 2000 and 2006, despite the advent of social networking sites."

Going even further, USATODAY later cited the view of study lead author David Finkelhor that "ongoing studies show that being on a social networking site doesn't create risk for sexual victimization."

Where the risk is

The key to cutting through all the hype and really protecting kids from online predators is in understanding where the risk really lies. Since social networking hit the public radar screen in late 2005, the misconception has grown that the problem lies in a particular technology or "place" online. Dr. Finkelhor put it this way in an email the day the study was released: "The SNS [social-network sites] issue like the age authentication solution is all about mistaking the problem as one of 'access'," he told me. "It’s not about access. It’s about what kids do when interacting online: behaviors."

As for what those behaviors are, Dr. Finkelhor spelled some of them out in a CBS/CNET interview for Larry Magid, my ConnectSafely.org co-director: talking about sex with strangers in a lot of different places online, especially chatrooms about sex and romance, and getting into sexual relationships with people met online (see also "Profile of a teen online victim" from a talk Finkelhor gave in 2007).

"I think the messages [about online safety] need to warn kids about the very risky things they can do in their adolescent naivete and interest in exploring the world," he told Larry. Finkelhor added a risk-prevention behavior that both the Internet industry and all child safety advocates can help promote: "We also need to encourage other people online, the bystanders, people who know these young people or see these interactions on various sites, to report it, to caution the kids about what they're doing, to intervene, to begin to feel they need to take some action to short-circuit what they're seeing might happen." Watching each other's backs, I'm hearing Finkelhor suggest. One of the country's top experts on online safety is pointing to the need to foster digital citizenship.

Related links

"Social norming for risk prevention"

MySpace's PR problem

"Social media literacy: The new Internet safety"

"Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context"