I wonder how much money it took to conduct the Task Force and prepare the report that concluded children and teens are less vulnerable to sexual predation than many have feared.
Over the past couple of years, several state AGs have been looking into potential dangers to youth, and some have called for social-network sites to use age verification technology to confirm the ages of users in an attempt to prevent adults from or interacting online with minors.
… While the task force found that youth risk from predators is a concern, the overwhelming majority of youth are not in danger of being harmed by an adult predator they meet online. To the extent that young people have received an unwanted online sexual solicitation, data from a 2000 study and a 2006 follow-up from the Crimes Against Children Research Center concludes that “youth identify most sexual solicitors as being other adolescents (48 percent in 2000; 43 percent in 2006) or young adults between the ages of 18 and 21 (20 percent; 30 percent), with few (4 percent; 9 percent) coming from older adults, and the remaining being of unknown age.”
What the task force did find is that “bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most salient threats that minors face, both online and offline.”
I’m not against age verification technology. But better parenting would make it a moot point. Get a router and lock down your network at night. Subscribe to Covenant Eyes. Don’t give your children (including, maybe especially teens) a computer with an internet connection in their bedroom. All those things are good to do. But more than anything – put the computer(s) in a public room in the house, and when they’re using the computer, be in the room. That will reduce all kinds of temptation and you’ll be on the spot to assist if a pervert contacts them.
Better parenting is key when it comes to Internet safety issues. Covenant Eyes has helped many people not only stay accountability online but also model accountability for their kids. Thanks for the great post!
I wrote a post for the Covenant Eyes blog about modeling accountability if you would like to read it: http://www.covenanteyes.com/blog/2008/06/12/is-filtering-all-there-is-introducing-accountability-software/
I’m sorry, but I’m one that believes that children do not need TVs or computers in their rooms. If my child needs to go on the computer for school, I want to be able to monitor what they are doing. Call me smothering, I call it parenting. Mamashares.com features and article called “Protecting your children in the age of the internet” and includes information on ways that this can be done.