The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [117]
Not that patterns of abuse had changed what I reported a decade ago. The vast majority of crimes against children and adolescents—sexual and otherwise—continued to be perpetrated by parents, relatives, and other adults the child or teen knows. More than four out of five victims are abused by a parent, and another 10 percent by a caregiver, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The incidence of actual abuse as a result of an online connection is “vanishingly small,” as a sociologist who has studied the data put it.10
A group of researchers at the University of New Hampshire put it bluntly: “The publicity about online ‘predators’ who prey on naive children using trickery and violence is largely inaccurate. Internet sex crimes involving adults and juveniles more often fit a model of statutory rape—adult offenders who meet, develop relationships with, and openly seduce underage teenagers—than a model of forcible sexual assault or pedophilic child molesting.” That declaration, atop an article they published in 2008 in American Psychologist, a journal of the American Psychological Association, is noteworthy not only for its clarity but for the occasion of its writing. Fed up with frightening and misleading statements by reporters, advocacy groups, and public officials, many of whom are cited in the paper, the authors wrote the piece in part to correct the record about their own research.11
Indeed, it was a report of theirs, published two years earlier by an advocacy group, that gave rise to a favorite statistic of the fear mongers: “One in seven young people has been sexually solicited online.” Hearing or reading that sentence, almost anyone would imagine that an astounding number of American youngsters had been solicited online by the sort of dirty older men featured in NBC’s To Catch a Predator series that aired from 2004 through 2008—and later in reruns on MSNBC—and involved hidden cameras and sting operations. Actually, though, in the UNH study, nearly half of the solicitations reported were teens hitting on other teens; just 9 percent were adults. (In other cases, the age was unknown.)12
When adults do solicit minors online, the UNH researchers find, the young person almost invariably knows that the person at the other computer is an adult. Trickery about the perpetrator’s age or intentions is rare. Moreover, as an exhaustive study in 2009 from Harvard University pointed out, youths who are approached and respond are typically teens already at risk because of their own drug abuse or troubled home environments. Many engage willingly with the adult who solicits them.13
Fear mongers make online social networking scary by pretending away those sorts of findings. “Children are solicited every day online. Some fall prey, and the results are tragic. That harsh reality defies the statistical academic research underlying the report,” an attorney general from Connecticut who campaigns against Internet dangers vacuously told the New York Times when the Harvard study came out.14
While adults were being told their kids were endangering their lives online—or at best, wasting them away—studies were finding that the online activities of youths are not only nontoxic, they’re productive. A report in 2008 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation got little attention, but the extensive three-year study showed that youth use online media primarily for self-directed learning and to gain and extend friendships. “The digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills, and experiment with new forms of self-expression,” the researchers wrote.15
Even entertainment sites like YouTube