Think of the children

With a hard revenue model and the danger of your users migrating to the next big thing, the attractions of starting your own social network may seem small. But the issue that has hit the headlines is child safety. High profile rape and assault cases in the US have led to considerable anxiety over MySpace and other social networks. In February 2006, a 14-year-old New Jersey girl was found dead in a dumpster after arranging a meeting with a stranger on MySpace. Connecticut police claim that as many as seven girls from Middletown were assaulted by MySpace men who had lied about their ages. Two further cases, in Issaquah and Snohomish County were dropped after investigation, but still hit national headlines playing up the dangers of the network. Penny Powers told me during my interview with her that her daughter’s school had written to parents saying that any child with a profile on bebo would be suspended. MySpace is banned from dozens of US school districts. The website MySpacewatch has been set up to allow concerned parents to pry into their child’s activity online. A ‘Pro’ account for $6 a month will allow you to watch up to 100 of your child’s friends, as well. I am drawn to wonder what a ‘pro’ amounts to under such circumstances.

Rape is one of the worst crimes and belittling those crimes that have taken place would be obnoxious. However, the link to online networks is tenuous, to say the least. If all of the reported rape cases that happened through MySpace were true, and they are not, then the chances of sexual abuse through a MySpace member appear to be tiny. Only ten percent of rapes are reported to the police and investigated, according to aid organisations, but even if we inflate reported figures 1000 times, they are way below the statistical average if you go to a club or bar, or even your local shop. Martin Owen of Futurelab said to me:

A child getting sexually abused by an adult on a social network takes a lot of deliberation. There are a lot of deliberate decisions. Every time a child takes a further step along that path, they have made that choice deliberately, and they are not nearly as stupid as the media makes out. If children get hurt, then one big question to ask is why they made all of those decisions?

MySpace has launched a million-dollar child internet safety campaign in response to the pressure from this moral panic. It hired a child safety expert from Microsoft, Hemu Nigam, to bolster the company’s policies in the area. Allegedly, a quarter of the company’s staff is employed to look out for sexual pests. I asked Michael Birch of bebo about the dangers to children when they get involved in social networks:

It’s a big element of what we do. We’re just setting up a customer service centre in Texas to do just this. Historically, our approach has been reactive, but we want to be more pro-active. You can block members from ever having access to your page or details again. You can send complaints to the company, but there is more to be done. We have just hired Dr. Rachel O’Connell, who worked at the Cyberspace Unit at the University of Lancaster. She’s spent the last eight years studying the behaviour of predatory paedophiles. She has the title of Chief Safety Officer, and will have the power to change company policy – that’s one of the conditions on which she joined us. On the other hand, I believe a lot of what you might think about paedophiles on the internet is media hype. We have 25mn users and not one registered case of this happening. What does that tell you? It’s another reason that we want more adults, especially parents, on our network. As soon as they get past the news headlines and understand what this really is and why people like it, then so much the better.

There is an element of risk in everything you do. Sitting at a computer, making friends with people and then even meeting them in real life remains a lot less risky than crossing a busy road. While it is true that parents and teachers need to educate children about the potential dangers in social networking, many of those dangers simply do not exist in a statistically meaningful way. Professor Larry Rosen of California State University, in his study ‘Adolescents in MySpace: Identity Formation, Friendship and Sexual Predators’ which he published in July 2006 attempted to burst the panic. The headline findings are as follows:

• Only 7% of those teens interviewed were ever approached by anyone with a sexual intent (adult or in their own age group) and nearly all of them simply ignored the person and blocked him from their page.
• Two-thirds of the parents were sure that there were many sexual predators on MySpace, while only one-third of the teenagers shared this concern.
• When asked about media coverage, 66% of the parents felt that it was either understated or close to the truth.
• Conversely, 58% of the teens felt it was vastly overblown.

Rosen concludes:

The bottom line is that MySpace is not inherently scary or dangerous. In fact, it is helping teens develop an all-important sense of their identity. Parents simply need to pay more attention to what their children are doing, set clear limits, and talk with their teenagers about their experiences. It is not sufficient to simply allow teenagers to live in a virtual world, in their bedrooms, without supervision. It is not the medium that is the problem. Teens need and crave limits and boundaries that parents are not supplying. Once parents start being aware of what their teenagers are doing and talking to them, MySpace will cease to match its negative media hype.

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Possibly related posts:

• Children safer online
• Building Safer Social Networks
• Age of Social Network Users