Teaching about sexting: Social Web lesson plan

Ever wonder how to teach young people about what can happen to information they post online? Canadian author and journalist Cory Doctorow has a great idea: show them on/with the Web. In a video interview he gave the European Commission's Net-safety program, Insafe, he talks about how we can now literally watch the diffusion of communication, behavior, and information in real time on the social Web - a sociologist's dream come true. So parents and educators might consider this sociology lesson plan:

"You could sit down with your kids and say, 'Last month this school was in turmoil about some rumor, some terrible thing some student did, or some health risk - someone had cooties or swine flu or something else. Let's watch the diffusion of that information. We have the social network, right? Who wants to volunteer to go through your email box, your instant-messenger record, your twitter stream, and tell me about the first time that rumor or information appeared - when you heard it next, how it mutated? Let's do a big class project and find all the ways that information spread.' And then say, 'Who here was thinking about putting a naked picture of yourself online? Look at this diffusion of information - look at what's happened here.'" He continues: "You can teach an awful lot about epidemiology and social idea diffusion by starting a harmless rumor and then tracking its growth through a network [community of people, not necessarily an online social network] and using a hashtag or distinctive term [e.g., a fake word like "mixoplex" and "come up with a bunch of characteristics it has"] and watch it spread ... 4 cases in Hertfordshire ... it's spreading and what are we going to do about it ... have a daily class project .... and think together about how a flu would spread from person to person, then how an idea would spread from person to person and then a naked picture of yourself and how it would spread from person to person." The simple aim being, he told insafe, to "turn the thing that they're already obsessed with into a tool that teaches them to use it better, rather than telling them they need to stop it. Telling kids that the thing they love is wrong is probably a non-starter.... It just doesn't work very well." But don't trust my transcribing - listen to the whole fascinating video!

Sexting repercussions: Update

Here's a sampler of sexting cases (in three states) in the news this past week: Two Ohio 15-year-olds pleaded guilty to "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" and have been sentenced, the boy to 30 days' house arrest and the girl to writing a research paper for the court on the dangers of sexting and both to 100 hours of community service and no cellphones for 30 days, WHIO Radio reports. Investigators from the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office showed up at the homes of five Florida teens aged 14-16 with search warrants and "seized their cell phones and home computers, in a stunning sexting investigation," a Fox TV station there reports. As of Tuesday they had not been arrested, but the stakes are high in Florida if they are (see "FL teen a registered sex offender for sexting"). And in Nebraska, a 15-year-old high school freshman has been convicted and sentenced to 12 months' probation for sending nude photos to a 13-year-old girl, the first sexting conviction of a minor in that part of the state, the North Platte Bulletin reports. See also "Sending of Explicit Photos Can Land Teens in Legal Fix" in the Washington Post and our "Tips to Prevent Sexting" at ConnectSafely.org. You might also appreciate this meaty conversation on sexting on Capitol Hill, offering three important perspectives: that of law enforcement, from Monique Roth, senior counsel at the US Justice Department; Donna Rice Hughes, president of Enough is Enough, on the sexualized media environment; and Ting-Yi Oei, assistant principal of Freedom High School in Loudoun County, Va., on sexting incident at his school (see also "Asst. principal tells his own story").

How 1 county is dealing with sexting

In western Massachusetts, the Berkshire County district attorney plans to "produce anti-sexting programs that will begin airing in county schools this spring," the Berkshire Eagle reports. His goal is to keep the problem from growing - he told the Eagle "he would prefer to deal with such matters outside the criminal justice system. If need be, though, offenders could be charged with any of a number of felony crimes." He didn't name the high school where the incident happened because he said he didn't want to stigmatize it, but "more than a dozen students were implicated in the sexting incident, which involved the circulation of explicit photos of a local girl.... No one has been criminally charged in connection with the case. [For other perspectives on the subject, see Slate's "Textual misconduct" and The American Culture blog's "Normalization of Pornography Cited in Texting Issue."]

MySpace's PR problem

MySpace's image problem is partly everybody's problem. It says something about how we view teens - and how willing we are to accept the complexity of teens-on-the-social-Web and our unprecedented inability to assert control in this space. Though the headlines suggest otherwise, this story is not just about crime. It's more about growing up more publicly than ever and maybe a bit of denial on our part that it's the heightened exposure that's new, not the adolescent behavior, and that that exposure - like everything in this picture - is both good and bad. But let's drill down a bit....

1. The myths we develop

Increasingly, the Web is a mirror of all of human life - not just a communications technology or a global collection of hyperlinked documents or even a channel for individual and collective self-expression. So what we're seeing, learning, worrying, and mythologizing about teens in "real life" is directly related to their online experiences as well.

In "The Myth of Lost Innocence," New York Times commentator Judith Warner describes the experience of two Philadelphia sociologists and specialists in teen sexual behavior, Kathleen Bogle of La Salle University and Maria Kefalas of St. Joseph's University. Even though "teens are, in truth, having sex less and later than they did a decade or two ago," Warner reports, Bogle and Kefalas have "had to struggle mightily to get people out of their 'moral panic' mindset, and make them understand that teens are not 'in a downward spiral' or 'out of control'." People "just don’t believe you," Bogle and Kefalas told Warner. The same is true for anyone trying to present the big picture of online teens. In the current moral panic about predators, the fact that overall child sexual abuse has declined by 51% since the Web took off (between 1990 and '05), according to the National Data Archives on Child Abuse & Neglect), and the fact that Internet-related abuse is well below 1% of the overall child-sexual-exploitation figure get drowned out in 1-millimeter-deep reporting about 90,000 predators having been deleted from among some 150 million MySpace profiles. [No one knows, much less reports on, the more important question of whether those profiles led to any communications with teens or how teens deal with them (delete, ignore, block, or reply?). In fact, there have been zero reports that any of those 90,000 offenders have been prosecuted for illegal contact with teens on MySpace (and that would be covered if it happened). For a sample of what we do know about predation risk, see this.]

Meanwhile, amid all the numbers-out-of-context noise, parents, counselors, educators, and social workers can't hear or don't know where to listen for the signals they do need to hear. As Warner puts it, "details concerning exactly which children are suffering, flailing or failing, and in what numbers, and how and why, and what we can do about it – are lost."

In focusing on worst-case scenarios and making them the reality of all online teens, we do parents a disservice and teens a double disservice - by selling them short and distorting the picture of teen social-networking in the eyes of those with authority over them. See also "Chances are, your kids are savvier online than you think" in the Toronto Globe & Mail and New York Times health reporter Tara Parker-Pope's "The Myth of Rampant Teen Promiscuity."

2. How did we get here?

MySpace has become the subject of this kind of hyperbole-fueled, negative myth. Having watched its emergence as a vibrant social and media-sharing tool and music community from mid-2005, I've puzzled over how MySpace got from there to here - how it has come to be almost demonized in the eyes of the adult population, or the portion of it that views the social site through either a strictly law-enforcement lens or that of an adult with no interest in trying to understand social networking in young people's terms.

Its first full year as a Fox Interactive property, 2006, was telling. MySpace found itself, I later told Business Week, in the middle of a "perfect storm" of parental concern development. The converging conditions were:

Its sudden arrival out of nowhere (only as far as parents and other adults - including reporters - were concerned, and adults did not understand this social-networking thing).

Its exponential, viral growth that year (a story that a lot of uncomprehending reporters were compelled to write, well before there was any known social-media research to cite).

A high-profile news story out of Connecticut about a police investigation into whether "as many as seven teenage girls" had had sexual encounters with men they'd met in MySpace. It was a tipping point (see my commentary on that, 2/3/06). Though similar stories have been rare since then, this Connecticut one led to Fox hiring former federal prosecutor Hemanshu Nigam as its chief security officer and turned state attorneys general into social-networking watchdogs (Connecticut's attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, co-leads the AGs' Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking that created the Internet Safety Technical Task Force on which I served).

The launch of Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator" series, which in no way represented risks to youth on the social Web or even child sexual exploitation in general, but distorted associations were made (see "Predators vs. cyberbullies: Reality check").

DOPA and a mid-term election. All the above made for great stump speeches about championing child protection, an uncontroversial way to garner votes, and the ill-conceived Delete Online Predators Act, which never reached the Senate but passed the House with an overwhelming majority (maybe partly because voting against it would've somehow looked in the voting record like a vote for predators?). The law would've done more to delete teens from social-networking sites at school than to "delete online predators" (see this item).

Interestingly, though, the clouds of that perfect storm started gathering much earlier on - right at the beginning, in fact. Besides the lifelike picture she paints, I'm seeing in danah boyd's account of what drew teens to MySpace, in her doctoral dissertation, that the site's roots in the music scene have a role in the challenge it faces today too: "Most early adopter teens were attracted to MySpace [in 2004] through one of two paths: bands or older family members. Teens who learned of MySpace through bands primarily followed indie rock music or hip-hop, the two genres most popular on MySpace early on. While many teens love music, they are often unable to see their favorite bands play live because bands typically play in 21+ venues. MySpace allowed these teens to connect with and follow their favorite bands.... Given its popularity among musicians and late-night socialites, joining MySpace became a form of subcultural capital.... Early adopter teens who were not into music primarily learned about the site from a revered older sibling or cousin who was active in late-night culture. These teens viewed MySpace as cool because they respected these family members.... While teens often revere the risky practices of [older nightclub and concert goers], many adults work to actively dissuade them from valuing them. By propagating and glorifying 20-something urban cultural practices and values, MySpace managed to alienate parents early on."

This takes us back to my first points about 1) how behavior, culture, and perceptions offline are mirrored online, and 2) how myths develop out of fears and too much emphasis on the negative part of a phenomenon, which is only a fraction of the reality. Which brings me to the final factor I've seen in MySpace's PR problem: the development of the online safety field itself. The field got its start in and is still dominated by law enforcement and its expertise - all those good people in local police departments and state Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Forces giving Internet-safety talks in schools about criminal activity in chat, instant messaging, on cellphones and on the Web. Law enforcement people are experts in crime, not adolescent behavior and development (so should they really be giving talks about cyberbullying?), and the latter, certainly not crime, is the lionshare of what's going on with and among teens in social network sites - good, bad, and neutral. What's happening with teens on the social Web is infinitely more about adolescent development than about technology or crime.

Yes, we need to teach children how to keep away from predators of any form, online and offline, but the public discussion has to broaden to reflect reality, from the negatives - the full spectrum of online risk (including noncriminal bad behavior like bullying and harassment) - to all the rest, teen online socializing in general. As for the dark side, even one exploitation case is too many but, for perspective, it helps to keep in mind that what the attorneys general are talking about - social-networking-related crime involving minors (see Newsweek) - represents only a fraction of Internet-initiated sexual crimes against minors, and the latter figure itself, the Crimes Against Children Research Center tells me, "was too low to calculate" in two national samples it used in studies on child sexual exploitation (for more context, see this).

3. MySpace's child-protection record

At my last check of Google News, nearly 900 news outlets around the world ran reports this week that MySpace "evicts," "boots," "deletes," etc. 90,000 predators (the headline at India's Techtree.com was "No space for sex offenders on MySpace"). For brevity, the headlines are in the present tense, of course (I used to write headlines at a newspaper), but the present tense suggests this just happened this week.

What MySpace wrote in a letter to Attorney General Roy Cooper of North Carolina about all this offers another perspective that rarely gets play in the news media:

"Some reports wrongly suggested that there are 90,000 RSOs [registered sex offenders] on MySpace today. This is wildly inaccurate and irresponsible. All 90,000 profiles were removed from MySpace upon discovery and preserved for law enforcement investigations. Such inaccurate reports send the message to other sites that they will be publicly criticized and punished for taking similar steps to protect teens online. While much is being made of the increase in the number of RSOs removed from MySpace since the inception of our program, the fact is that as long as the program is working, the aggregate number of RSOs removed will increase - it is a cumulative number representing all of the profiles deleted over time. The program has been a tremendous success: not only have 90,000 RSOs been removed from MySpace, but MySpace has seen a 36% reduction in RSOs attempting to access the site year over year."

Concerned parents may be interested in this lengthy bulleted list of child-safety steps MySpace has taken on the site, at its headquarters, and in Washington. But short of shutting down its site (which wouldn't "help," because there are zillions of social network services, tools, and technologies provided by businesses worldwide), MySpace or any other social-media business couldn't possibly bar all hurtful or criminal activity from its site - anymore than the phone company can keep people from having any arguments on the phone. Technologies, good business practices, and laws may be able to help keep users safer, but they can't change human behavior or nature. That takes education.

Related links

John Palfrey, author of Born Digital: a print interview in ComputerWorld, a video interview at CNET, and a YouTube video of a keynote he gave at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which he directs

Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital: a video interview on YouTube

Larry Magid and me: 2006 was also the year I met and first interviewed danah boyd, who was a source for our book published that year, MySpace Unraveled: A Parent's Guide to Teen Social Networking.

Tech parenting going forward

Just a heads-up on something that might be useful to parents: bNetS@vvy, a project of the National Educational Association Health Information Network, asked me to write "Net Savvy Parenting in the New Year: Five Things You Need to Know" for its Web site and newsletter. Here are two more things we can look forward to:

More and more virtual worlds. There are more than 150 kids' and teens' virtual worlds now or soon-to-be available, and all the videogame online services - Sony Home, Xbox Live, and Nintendo Wii's "Mii's" - have avatars moving around in some semblance of virtual worlds. This is a serious trend: fun, compelling, but - as with anything online - involving a certain degree of risk. Parents will want to look into what those avatars can look like and do (what state of dress or undress and what actions and communications they're allowed). See also "Top 8 work-arounds of kid virtual-world users."

More and more mobile. This can't be news to any parent with a kid hounding him or her for a cellphone. Unless the Web is blocked (as it can be by every major cellphone carrier), everything that's online is also on more and more phones - including social networking, blog posting, content uploading, media sharing, and video producing. But game consoles and media players are connected to the Net, too. So everything we online-safety advocates say about kids on the Web holds for kids on just about any other connected device too. Wherever they are, the Internet is - including friends' houses, where your rules don't apply.

[Along these (parenting) lines, see also a Live Discussion my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid and I had with parents at the Washington Post last month.]

New online-safety-education tool

Canadian children's advocacy organization the Media Awareness Network has an interesting approach to online-safety education for elementary and middle school students. Called "Passport to the Internet," it's a graphically appealing virtual environment for which students in grades 4-8 earn their "passports" by choosing avatars that walk through lessons in safety, ethics, bullying, critical thinking, and privacy management in "MyFace" - lessons that simulate "online environments used by young people on a daily basis," the Media Awareness Network told me in an email conversation. The curriculum can be licensed in either English or French by schools, districts, or education departments or ministries. Based on viewing the demo, it seems to me the curriculum would be more effective - at least here in the States - at the younger end of the targeted grade spectrum. Two reasons occur: "Passport" suggests we're talking about a different country or space to which one travels, and teens, at least, make less and less of a distinction between the online "space" and the "real world" one; social networking is just part of socializing. The other reason is that this is a curriculum by and from adults to kids, more effective in elementary school. I think for the middle-school level we need collectively to figure out how to work social norming into online-risk-prevention education.

Age verification: An attorney general's concern

The headline chosen by the European Commission's QuickLinks blog certainly cuts to the chase: "No Adults Allowed. (Marketers Welcome)." What it links to is a timely New York Times piece about the potential unintended consequences of the age verification that state attorneys general are calling for (consequences that would not please many parents). What the headline refers to is the alleged business model of some of the 2 dozen+ companies who want to help (and involve US schools in helping) verify American children's ages - apparently for the purpose of protecting them online but also reportedly to make a business out of selling data they gather on kids to marketers. Kids' social sites, virtual worlds, and other services would pay the age-verification vendor a "commission for each [child] member" a school signs up; "the [kids'] Web site can then use the data on each child to tailor its advertising," the Times reports. One of the age-verification companies the Times talked to, eGuardian, says kids are exposed to ads anyway (well, in some, not all, kids' sites), it just makes sure they're appropriate. The question is, how can that "appropriate advertising" be guaranteed? There's a pretty sexualized media culture and a lot of obesity in this society anyway, to name only a couple of issues. One of the remarkable things about this piece is the quote at the bottom from Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a leading proponent of age verification, saying that verifying kids' ages online to promote marketing to them would be very concerning. This is the first qualifying statement about age verification we've seen from the attorneys general since they started calling for its implementation more than two years ago.

Good online-safety law passed

Actually, online-safety education is only one part of the just-passed "Broadband Data Improvement Act" designed to improve our understanding of how much of the US has high-speed Internet access so the government can "ensure the continued rollout of broadband access, as well as the successful deployment of the next generation of broadband technology," as one of the bill's sponsors, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), put it, ConsumerAffairs.com reports. The bill charges the Federal Trade Commission with establishing (within 90 days of enactment) an Internet safety and tech working group of experts in public and private sectors, creating a nationwide Net-safety public-awareness program, and promoting best practices within the Internet industry. The news media may not have noticed this part of the bill, but the Family Online Safety Institute, the Consortium for School Networking and the International Society for Technology in Education, and the National PTA certainly took note. Search for the bill's full text here (I'd give you a direct link, but all links are temporary in the Library of Congress search engine).

Public humiliation or Net-safety ed?

It appears that student online-safety education took a harsher tone in Windsor, Colo., recently. The principal of Windsor High School apologized that "some of the ways" John Gay, a Cheyenne, Wyo., police officer, approached his presentation about Internet dangers "offended, embarrassed and are hurting some of our kids," Windsor Now reports. Two accounts of what happened in an all-school assembly - Officer Gay's and that of the father of one of the students present "and a lot of other people in Windsor ... don't match."

What isn't in dispute is that the officer used the social-network profiles of students at the assembly as examples of material that encourages predators, his language was sexually graphic beyond references to rape, and one of the students left in tears. She told the paper that Gay showed the 500-student audience her phone number and "read her blogs and comments out loud." Gay told the paper that he "apologized for causing [her] any grief, but he said he would never apologize for the way he presents his material because of the seriousness of the crimes." Her father's account was that, after the officer asked her to identify herself in the assembly and she raised her hand, Gay displayed her profile and told the students she could be "raped and murdered" because of how accessible her content was. The father added that "Gay gave the example of a girl in another state who had been targeted on MySpace, and the girl was taken to an empty warehouse, was raped and shot dead," according to Windsor Now. Because she'd apparently put her phone number in her profile, Gay called her cellphone from the stage to "see if she'll come back." The father told the paper he "had no problem with the topic of the assembly, and that he doesn’t want to see [the principal] lose his job over this."

The Denver Post reports that the principal "essentially backs up" Officer Gay, and teachers present at the assembly "corroborated Gay's version of events." [Here's Denver's Channel 7 News on this story.]

The officer's presentation in Windsor was not unique. Windsor Now reports that Gay "travels to schools and has talked to 4,000 to 5,000 people, mostly kids." And I remember reading of a similar singling-out-specific-students methodology used in social-networking-safety assemblies in Ireland.

The story raises plenty of questions about online-safety ed. Even if the consensus is that teens need to "wake up" to online risks, is that best done by making an example of one child among his or her own peers? And if the answer is yes, what should the tone of that exposure be? Humiliation is one of bullies' goals for their victims. An instructional tone or approach that comes anywhere close to bullying is modeling the very behavior that online-safety advocates are trying to teach youth (and adults!) to avoid. Empowering youth to think critically about what they see and post online and to be respectful of self and others - in other words, to be good citizens online as well as offline - will go much further toward keeping kids safe online than humiliating them in front of their peers.

But it'd be great to get your views - in the ConnectSafely.org forum, where two police officers have already commented.

Related link

"Online safety as we know it: Becoming obsolete?"

P2P online-safety ed program

By "P2P," I mean by peers, for peers, and I'm referring to the logical idea of teen-communicated online safety ed, not the adult-taught kind - though it starts with young adult trainers. What's even more intelligent about the LEO Project in Syracuse, N.Y., is that it's really leadership training with online citizenship and safety folded in (safety in a holistic sense, involving critical thinking and behavior that protects reputation as well as well-being), the Syracuse Post-Standard reports. "LEO" loosely stands for "The Leadership, Education and Etiquette - On and Offline," and it's a project of Power Unit for Motivating Youth, a Syracuse after-school and mentoring program co-founded by a school district staff member, Akua Goodrich, who told the Post-Standard the program's about developing youth leadership in "the city and the state and the nation and the world" simply because the Internet's not just local. In one four-day class, 26 "ambassadors" who are high school students learn about "cyber safety and social networking issues as well as peer-to-peer marketing and career preparations. They are now developing a Web site [as well as individual blogs] to help educate their peers on the same issues and plan to visit elementary and middle school students this year to pass on Internet safety messages." It seems to me this is the kind of program that gets closer to reaching more at-risk youth (since research shows it's the young most at risk offline who are most at risk online - see "Profile of a teen online victim").

'The talk' revisited

It's not what you might think it’s about. It's not even a single, now-you-get-it conversation. It's an ongoing, long-term conversation families need to have about safe, constructive use of the Net and communications devices because both kids and technology keep changing. Marian Merritt, Symantec's chief online-safety evangelist, recently wrote about it, and I agree with her: "Your goal," she suggests to parents, "is to understand how your child is using technology, recognize any potential risk factors that need addressing and ensure you are the person your child can go to if something weird should happen when they are on the Web." All of that's important, especially that last point, because research shows that kids don't talk to parents about bad stuff that happens online, and we need to do everything possible to encourage them to. Merritt offers talking points for "the talk(s)" in the form of some questions you can start off with, but don't forget another good bit of advice: "Have the conversation during a quiet time when there are no time pressures," have the online computer at hand in case you want to check things out together, and "keep the chat neutral, not confrontational" so your child will continue the conversation willingly the next time!

Virginia's Net-safety first

Virginia is the first US state to require online-safety instruction in its public schools, reports WDBJ 7 TV News in Richmond. The mandate "initially stemmed from concerns about sex offenders preying on children online and a general increase in Internet-based crime." Instruction has already begun. The Associated Press reports that, "nationally, Texas and Illinois are among states that have since passed their own Internet safety education laws, but unlike Virginia they don't make the courses mandatory. It took effect this school year.

Student 'tech sherpas'

Senior Jayson in a Freeport, Me., school district "says he wants teachers to see that technology isn't as hard as they might think." He's a "tech sherpa" for his high school, a group of students that support the district IT department, help teachers with classroom tech, and earn credit in the process, the Christian Science Monitor reports. "This fall the group also launched a weekly live Web-stream show called 'The Tech Curve,' in which students field questions about various Internet teaching tools and the new Mac laptops that the state is issuing to high school teachers (see www.nokomiswarriorbroadcasting.com)." Each year an organization in Olympia, Wash., called Generation YES helps about 200 schools to set up the curricula behind the tech-sherpa program, the Monitor adds. This is the kind of tech-training program that empowers youth as well as educators. The program in Maine is clearly a confidence builder for the "sherpas," who also learn patience and diplomacy in working with adults. "They're relating to people, not just computers," working collaboratively to solve real problems. The school's tech coordinator told the Monitor that "the most valuable assignments he can give are 'authentic' tasks – of real use to the school or the community."

Schools, state laws & cyberbullying

A Texas schools superintendent said that any online behavior that detracts from learning in school is going to get school action, and his schools have detailed but one-page Internet-use contracts students have to sign. State legislators are taking action too. Rhode Island is considering one of the toughest anti-cyberbullying laws, the Chicago Tribune reports. "Under the proposed legislation, students and their parents could be prosecuted if the student is caught sending Internet or text messages that prove disruptive to school," whether or not they send those messages from school. As for other states, "South Carolina recently passed a law that mandates school districts to define bullying, including cyberbullying. In Oregon, lawmakers have backed a bill that would require all schools to adopt policies that ban cyberbullying and allow for expulsion of those who are caught doing it." School policy and state laws may be kicking in because courts have "proved reluctant to get involved in what many may see as an age-old problem," and courts and prosecutors "have largely agreed, concluding that the 1st Amendment covers even the most offensive online speech." It might be a good idea for all adults - parents, educators, policymakers - to start thinking of online kids more as participants than as potential victims and start working with them on online citizenship as much as online safety - involve youth too in the public discussion about online behavior and the First Amendment. For more information, the Washington Times has a thorough look at cyberbullying, including how it differs from the traditional kind. And here's National Public Radio on how Virginia is out in front as "the first state to require public schools to teach Internet safety."

US Congress: Net-safety push

We can expect to see some online-safety legislation coming out of Congress this fall, lawmakers themselves are saying. "Expect a new push … for laws aimed at keeping sexual predators off the likes of MySpace.com and elevating fines on Internet service providers that don't report child pornography," CNET reports, saying Democratic lawmakers are focusing particularly on anti-predator and -child pornography legislation. Meanwhile, Sens. Ted Stevens (R) of Alaska and Daniel Inouye (D) of Hawaii introduced a bill that, among other things, "calls on the Federal Trade Commission to oversee a government-directed public awareness campaign" on Internet safety, PC Magazine reports. The bill would also 1) require the Commerce Department to "review industry efforts to produce online parental control technology; report evidence of child pornography; keep tabs on data collected about Internet-related child crimes; and support the development of new Internet safety technologies"; 2) require schools that receive federal Net-connectivity funds to teach students about appropriate online behavior; 3) would triple fines for Internet service providers that fail to report evidence of child pornography.

Online victimization: Facts emerging

It was great to see the Associated Press's "Net threats result of kids' online behavior." It means newspapers and broadcast media worldwide just may run this story, and more parents will be getting facts instead of scary messages based on ignorance, politics, well-intentioned guesswork. Here are some facts we have now:

Fact No. 1: Posting personal info online isn't actually what makes kids most vulnerable to predators. "Rather, victimization is more likely to result from … talking about sex with people met online and intentionally embarrassing someone else on the Internet," the AP reports. The first form of aggressive behavior - talking about sex with strangers online - is about predation, the second about harassing or cyberbullying, which affects a great many more teens (about one-third of all online youth, according to the latest Pew/Internet study - see this).

Fact No. 2: "Online victims tend to be teens with troubles offline, such as poor relationships with parents, loneliness and depression" (see "Profile of a teen online victim"). The kids most at risk online are already risk-seekers and -takers in real life.

Fact No. 3: A lot of sexual-victimization cases happen at the hands of peers, not adults, the AP reports, citing the work of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center. It also cites a 2004 study by the CACRC finding that, even when offenders are adults, they "generally aren't strangers, and pedophiles aren't luring unsuspecting children by pretending to be a peer."

Certainly nobody's saying kids should completely relax about posting personal info about themselves. It's common sense that the more discreet they are the less info there'll be to use against them. But the reality is, sharing - thoughts, media, experiences - is what today's very social, user-driven Web is all about, and a lot of parents can breathe easier knowing that posting personal info online is not as high-risk as once thought.

So what we are saying is that it's time to look at the facts we now have and adjust our child-protection strategies accordingly at home, in schools, and in policymaking. We need to…

…think of our online kids less as victims and more as participants on the participatory Web, of which they are the key drivers.

…think more in terms of online citizenship than online safety. Good citizenship includes safety; knowing that aggressive behavior puts kids at risk, we see that ethical behavior protects them.

When Web participants become cybercitizens, with a sense of responsibility toward fellow participants and their collective space, the social Web will be a safer, better place for everyone on it.

Related links

• The study the AP refers to, published last February in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine: "Internet Prevention Messages: Targeting the Right Online Behaviors," by Michele L. Ybarra, Kimberly J. Mitchell, David Finkelhor, and Janis Wolak
  
• "New approach to online safety suggested," by SafeKids.com's Larry Magid, posted in BlogSafety.com 2/10/07
  
• "Cyberbullying in the US: Fresh insights"
  
• "Profile of a teen online victim"
  
• "Predators vs. cyberbullies"
  
• "Responsible social networking: Mounting evidence"
  
• "Net-related crimes against kids"

Requests for teens' sex photos: Study

Four percent of US online youths have been asked to send sexually explicit photos of themselves over the Net, and about 1.5% have done so, the Associated Press reports, citing a new study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center. That's not just extremely unwise; those photos could be considered illegal child pornography, distribution of which is a federal crime. One of the study's authors, Kimberly Mitchell, told the AP that kids need to know this. "Mitchell said kids also may not be aware of how quickly such photos can circulate, mistakenly thinking the image is only for the personal use of the requester," according to the AP. Here are the conditions that she and her co-authors identified as making kids more likely to receive these requests for explicit photos of themselves: "having a close relationship with someone known only online; talking with someone online about sex or having a sexually suggestive screen name; and experiencing physical or sexual abuse offline." The study, which is being published this week in the Journal of Adolescent Health, is an analysis of data from a 2005 phone survey of 1,500 Net users aged 10-17, the AP reports (its authors said the numbers could be higher now, with greater use of camera phones, Web cams, and other digital-photo devices). The study's margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.