The nation's foremost academic researchers on child online safety presented their research and answered questions over a luncheon panel on May 3 regarding the myths and misperceptions about online predators that are driving adults to misguided efforts to protect young people.
The host of the panel, the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee, is an Internet industry association whose mission is to work with lawmakers on Internet issues.
This research changes everything American families have been force fed by our political leaders and the media, for that matter.
Read more regarding this study atiTNews Australia and Information Week.
Here's a brief snapshot of the story. Read more at the provided links.
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Myths and misperceptions about online predators are driving adults to misguided efforts to protect young people, according to researchers.
The public impression is that online predators are "Internet pedophiles who've moved the playground into your living room," said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes against Children Research Center (CCRC) at the University of New Hampshire.
The common wisdom is that predators target young children by pretending to children themselves, and they lure children in using personal information gained by trickery or gathered from the Internet, Finkelhor said. Likewise, society thinks believes predators stalk children, abduct, and rape them, "or even worse," he said.
But, actually, teens, rather than young children, are usually the victims of the crimes, Finkelhor said. Victims often run away from home to be with adults they met online, fall in love with the offenders, and work against police efforts to help them, Finkelhor said.
Only 5 per cent of cases involve violence, only 3 per cent involve abduction, and only 4 per cent of offenders concealed their ages from victims, Finkelhor said. And 80 per cent were "quite explicit" about their sexual intentions.
While authorities work with parents to try to protect kids, the kids most at risk have little trust in their parents. They've been victims of physical or sexual abuse, or have substantial conflicts in their family, he said.
Young people often go online to escape from bad situations at home, said danah boyd, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies how young people interact online.
While society views the home as a safe haven, and the Internet as a dangerous jungle filled with predators, for many at-risk young people, the reverse is true. They go online to escape from abusive or absent parents, or - in affluent homes especially - to escape the overwhelming pressure to achieve.
Internet predation needs to be put into perspective. Only 7 per cent of statutory rape arrests were the result of Internet-initiated activities, said Michele Ybarra, president of Internet Solutions for Kids, a non-profit for promoting new methods of improving health and safety of young people.
Cyberbullying is an equally serious threat that's underemphasized.
Young people are often resistant to sexual solicitations, Boyd said. They lump sexual solicitations with online marketing, as nuisances that they delete and move on.
When Getting Tough Backfires
When a child is abducted and killed, or a young woman is brutally raped, lawmakers scramble to crack down on sex offenders. Sometimes, the new laws actually make things worse.
Read more at Minnesota Public Radio here.
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"Sometimes what happens is lawmakers don't want to know the facts, or the facts don't make any difference. There really are two things that affect public policy. One is the facts. The other is the feelings and political pressure. There are legislators who will say, 'Don't confuse me with the facts. I've made up my mind.'"
"These public policies have to be discussed. And the citizens have to start influencing their legislators to use facts, to use research, to use an approach that actually works, not an approach that just gets more votes. We have to make sure we aren't shooting ourselves in the foot by being righteous, but making things worse."
North Dakota State Sen. Tim Mathern
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"When you're looking at a sex offender registry online, and you see a pedophile with several arrests and many, many victims, right next to a picture of the 19-year-old with the 15-year-old girlfriend. It becomes very difficult for the public to differentiate and know who's truly dangerous, and how to protect themselves from those people."
Jill Levenson, author of "The Emperor's New Clothes
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"Everybody is concerned about the postcard going into their neighborhood that says, 'Your state representative or state senator is soft on sexual predators, and they had a chance to vote for this bill and they didn't do it,' or 'They had a chance to be tougher and they didn't do it.'"
"We all just, frankly, took it for granted (current Iowa residency restriction law) that it would have some benefit, because of the number of states that had it. We just felt like if it was good enough for other states and it was working, and we took it for granted it was working, we should do it here."
Iowa State Sen. Jerry Behn
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"I call it the 'Me, too' law. One state does it. It logically sounds good, but it's a waste of resources." My bottom line is, I want to know if it's going to reduce crime. If it's not, I don't want to put my energy in it. Please, let's use research-based, proven tools that will reduce sexual harm."
"The question I'd like to ask the public is, where do we think these guys are coming from? They're coming from our homes. We've got to get over some of the fear, and find the right words to have really important conversations so none of us are raising sex offenders in our homes. because that's where they're coming from. If we can't help fix this problem, who can?"
Nancy Sabin, Minnesota-based Jacob Wetterling Foundation
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"After you have a child kidnapped and or murdered, somebody will come to you and say, 'Do this; this will make it all better and your child will not have died in vain. You are very desperate and vulnerable, so part of me wants to protect other parents from falling into that. Let's not make bad laws. All the parents agree, their number one goal is no more victims."
"Don't pass laws in our kids' names and then not put any money into it. That's such an insult. All that is is a photo op so you can look good. Everybody pats each other on the back and there are no dollars there. It's infuriating."
Patty Wetterling
Wetterling says she hopes to convince lawmakers to pass effective sex offender laws, and spend more money on programs to protect kids who are abused and might grow up to be violent sex offenders.
Wetterling goes to speak with lawmakers armed with pages of statistics and research. Surprisingly, that information is sometimes missing from the debate over sex offender laws.
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"What we don't do, however, is to put those events in a larger context. The fact is child homicides are so rare, and sexually related child homicides are even rarer, and I'm not sure it's misinformation we give the public as a lack of information. We just don't give them enough information to understand risk appropriately."
Lisa Sample, a criminology professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha
Sample examines where lawmakers get their information about sex offenders. Most of the legislators in her study said their primary source of information was the news media. Sample says in many cases, lawmakers did not read studies or reports relevant to legislation they supported.
She says it's clear most sex offender legislation follows the abduction and murder of a child, and the resulting public outrage.
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