News for the Week of May 14, 2006

As everybody scrambles to understand the Internet's latest phenomenon and its impact on teens, and as the news media broadcast and publish story after story about sexual predators in these sites, some people are beginning to ask if concerns have gotten a little out of control...

'Predator Panic'?

Could we be in the middle of a bit of a panic? Dateline's now weekly "To Catch a Predator" sends a certain message. Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, told Reuters we now have "a complete culture of fear".

This week Benjamin Radford, who "wrote about Megan's Laws and lawmaking in response to moral panics in his book Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us," wrote in science magazine Skeptical Inquirer that "Despite relatively few instances of child predation and little hard data on topics such as Internet predators, journalists invariably suggest that the problem is extensive, and fail to put their stories in context." He adds that "the issue is not whether children need to be protected; of course they do. The issues are whether the danger to them is great, and whether the measures proposed will ensure their safety.. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 'based on what we know about those who harm children, the danger to children is greater from someone they or their family knows than from a stranger'."

Key Researcher's View

I called Janis Wolak, a co-author of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center's 2000 online victimization study [link to PDF] cited by Radford and so many reporters (an update of that study is due out next month). I asked for her perspective on all the stories about online predation in social-networking sites, and her response was, "Overall, there aren't that many cases that seem related to these sites, given the millions of teens on them.. Basically, what puts kids at risk is when they talk about sex with people they meet online, and the vast majority of them don't get involved in that kind of situation." Maybe all these perspectives are worth parents' consideration, as are teens' views shared in the BlogSafety forum that maybe parents need to "chill" a bit about social-networking. There's a lot of great stuff going on in MySpace and other such sites too, some of them say (though others say they find it "boring" or "too much of a popularity contest"). In any case, the picture is a lot more granular than the news media make it out to be.