aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Just The Facts About Online Youth Victimization

More from Stephanie Booth’s reaction to MySpace removing the profiles of 29,000 convicted sex offenders.

Here she summarizes a panel from Just The Facts About Online Youth Victimization: Researchers Present the Facts and Debunk Myths [pdf transcript]:

The numbers are based on a sample of law enforcement cases which Finkelhor et al. performed research upon:

• most victims of “online predators” are teenagers, not young children
• only 5% of cases involved violence
• only 3% involved abduction
• deception does not seem to be a major factor
• 5% of offenders concealed the fact they were adults from their victimes
• 80% of offenders were quite explicit about their sexual intentions
• these crimes are “criminal seductions”, sexual relationships between teenagers and older adults
• 73% of cases include multiple sexual encounters
• in half the cases, victims are described as being in love with the offender or feeling close friendship
• in a quarter of the cases, victims had actually ran away from home to be with the person they met online
• only 7% of arrests for statutory rape in 2000 were internet-initiated

I find these figures very sobering. Basically, our kids are more at risk offline than online. No reason to panic! About this last figure, listen to Dr. Michele Ybarra, president of Internet
Solutions for Kids:

One victimization is one too many. We watch the television, however, and it makes it seem as if the internet is so unsafe that it’s impossible for young people to engage on the internet without being victimized. Yet based upon data compiled by Dr. Finkelhor’s group, of all the arrests made in 2000 for statutory rape, it appears that seven percent were internet initiated. So that means that the overwhelming majority are still initiated offline.

When I see that 73% have multiple sexual encounters and half of the victims think they’re in love with the offender it strikes me that first among the kinds of help our kids need is parents to talk to them about sex!

Instead of doing that, we look to law enforcement to solve the problem for us. It seems to me that it’s not them, it’s us.