Many parents have heard that one in five children received a sexual solicitation online in 1998 and ’99. It’s a figure from a study done for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (and right now being updated) by the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center. Meanwhile, the number of US kids online has grown to 87% (or 21 million, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project), so what better time to launch a fresh nationwide ad campaign to alert girls in particular to the risk of online sexual predation (two-thirds of the children surveyed for that original study were girls)? “Created to coincide with the designation by the United States Senate of June as national Internet safety month, the campaign is the second joint effort in two years by the Advertising Council and the center, a nonprofit organization that works with the Justice Department to prevent child abduction and sexual exploitation and to help find missing children,” the New York Times reports. The print, radio, and TV campaign, launched today, is hard-hitting. One of the TV ads “shows a disheveled apartment being searched by police officers, as one of them puts a computer keyboard into a plastic bag. A teenage girl warns in the voiceover, ‘Before you start an online relationship with a guy, think about how it could end’.” Here’s the National Center’s press release about the campaign.
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