APA Paper Challenges Preconceptions About Online "Predators"

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February 28, 2008

APA Paper Challenges Preconceptions About Online "Predators"

McClatchy has a summary of a recent paper published in American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association. The paper's entitled "Online 'Predators' and Their Victims," and it seems to present a view of online sexual solicitation that makes all the hysterics over social networking sites, online communications in general, seem even more ill advised.

From McClatchy's summary:

Internet predators are driving up child sex crime rates.
Finding: Sex assaults on teens fell 52 percent from 1993 to 2005, according to the Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey, the best measure of U.S. crime trends. "The Internet may not be as risky as a lot of other things that parents do without concern, such as driving kids to the mall and leaving them there for two hours," Wolak said.

Internet predators are pedophiles.
Finding: Internet predators don't hit on the prepubescent children whom pedophiles target. They target adolescents, who have more access to computers, more privacy and more interest in sex and romance, Wolak's team determined from interviews with investigators.

Internet predators represent a new dimension of child sexual abuse.
Finding: The means of communication is new, according to Wolak, but most Internet-linked offenses are essentially statutory rape: nonforcible sex crimes against minors too young to consent to sexual relationships with adults.

And Slashdot has some commentary from Bennett Haselton regarding the widely cited, seldom attributed "Each year 1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online" "statistic" we've seen on all the billboards:

"The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has been running online ads for several years saying that 'Each year 1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online', a statistic that has been endlessly repeated, including by vendors of blocking software and by politicians who often paraphrase it to say that 1 in 5 children 'are approached by online predators'. While others have quietly documented the problems with this statistic, lawmakers still bring it out every year in a push for more online regulation (preempted this year only by the topic du jour of cyberbullying), so it's time for anti-censorship organizations to start campaigning more aggressively against the misleading '1 in 5' number. That means two things: framing the debate with more accurate numbers, and holding the parties accountable for disseminating the wrong ones -- and that means naming names, including those of organizations like the NCMEC that are normally beyond reproach."

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