|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() |
The term "minors" spans an enormous developmental range. Specialists in child development distinguish between infancy, early childhood, childhood, preadolescence, early adolescence, and late adolescence. summarizes some important characteristics of different age ranges. As a general rule, young children do not have the cognitive skills needed to navigate the Internet independently. Knowledge of search strategies is limited if not nonexistent, and typing skills are undeveloped. These factors tend to limit young children's potential exposure to sexually explicit material on the Internet until about age 10, the transition from childhood to the preadolescent years. The years between preadolescence and late adolescence can be turbulent times in which youth struggle to develop their own identities. They are eager to be heard, seen, and taken seriously but often lack the experience and maturity to make responsible choices consistently. They test boundaries in developing their emerging adult personalities, and they take risks that adults would deem unwise. They are often socially uncertain, and they value peer approval highly. And, in pre- and early adolescence, hormonal changes generally stimulate their interest in sexual matters. Because of the intensely personal nature of such matters (both sexual and social), the "at-a-distance" nature of Internet communication and the anonymity with which one can seek out a great variety of information on the Internet are highly appealing to very social but also sensitive individuals. Note also that adolescence is a cultural invention--in earlier times, people aged 13 and 14 were regarded as small adults. Children and teenagers had jobs. Many older minors (minors by today's standards) were getting married, having sex, and raising their families. Put another way, these older minors had the rights and the responsibilities of adulthood. Also, there is some debate in the scientific literature about how rebellious adolescents are. For example, even in later adolescence, youth often agree with their parents on very important decisions such as where to go to college. The storm-and-stress view of adolescents is tied to particular theoretical views, namely Erikson's psychoanalytic theory, but not so much to social learning theory, which argues for more continuity in development. American youth from preadolescence to late adolescence are also intense consumers of various media. As do other individuals, youth use media--including the Internet--for a variety of purposes, for example, news, education, entertainment, information, stimulation, relief from boredom, and emotional arousal. Media use is heavy among adolescents, with television, music, teen magazines, and movies as well as the Internet and video games being important elements. Television use tends to peak at about age 12 and decreases during middle and late adolescence, and use of other media--music, music videos, magazines, and the Internet--increases during this period. Further, there are some gender differences and differences of socio-economic status (SES). Adolescent girls read teen magazines and watch soap operas more than boys do, while boys play video games and watch television more than girls do. Lower SES tends to correlate with more watching of entertainment television,1 and African Americans watch more television than other Americans, even when SES is controlled for.2 Children and adolescents also prefer watching programs with characters from their own ethnic group.3 American adolescents use various forms of media primarily because of their entertainment value. But media use also helps to socialize adolescents into various adult roles and relationships, contributes to the formation of their individual identities as adolescents, provides assistance in coping with their problems and emotional mood states, and helps to assimilate them into various youth subcultures. For example, private, solitary use of both music and television by adolescents is important in providing them an opportunity to deal with the stress and intense emotions of this stage of development. Teen girls use their bedrooms to read magazines, watch television, listen to music, do their homework, and talk on the phone. For such girls, the bedroom is a place where they use media to help them make sense of themselves and their lives. Preference for certain kinds of music and films helps to connect youth from across the country and the world into a common youth subculture. In short, media are part of the process by which adolescents acquire, or resist acquiring, the behaviors and beliefs of the social world and the adult culture in which they live. Most children's media use--including time on the computer and online--does not involve parental supervision. Many children have radios, CD players, a television, and even a computer in their rooms. As a result, many parents are not in a position to monitor their children's media activity, nor can they readily provide any feedback or support for children's online activities. The Kaiser Family Foundation's report Kids & Media at the New Millennium: A Comprehensive National Analysis of Children's Media Use (1999) described the children's media landscape, identifying how much time young people spend with media and what types of media draw their attention. The average child spends about 5.5 hours daily using media, including television, radio, CDs, or the computer. Young people often use more than one type of media at the same time (e.g., listening to a CD while surfing the Internet) which means that children do a lot of parallel processing in their media use. Children aged 8 to 14 tend to spend more hours using media than teens aged 14 to 18. This is likely because of the busier and more diverse schedules of older teens.4 Perhaps surprisingly, time using the computer in all venues averaged only 31 minutes per day for children aged 8 to 18, with only a portion of that time devoted to online and Internet activities. Television, by far, was still the most commonly used form of media, and this age group had the television on an average of 3.25 hours per day. In this study 62 percent of children had a computer at home. Of families living in affluent communities in which the community income averaged above $40,000, 81 percent had computers compared to 49 percent of families in communities with an average income under $25,000. Schools seemed to mitigate some of these differences, often providing access for children who did not have a personal computer in their homes.5 Of the 31 minutes spent on the computer in recreation, children used the computer primarily for games but did spend some time in chat rooms, sending email, and surfing Web sites. Of the group of children who reported using the computer the previous day, games occupied the majority of their recreational time online. The 8 to 13-year-olds using a computer in the previous day logged the longest average recreation times on the computer (over 1 hour), spending 32 minutes playing games, 14 minutes looking at Web sites, 11 minutes in chat rooms, and 8 minutes sending emails.6 Note also that time spent online may increase in the future as the result of two factors: a greater dependence on Web-based information sources and more interaction with online electronic devices (e.g., Nintendo games) that are not online today. The amount of time children spend using computers and going online is likely to increase as computer use continues to penetrate homes and schools. For example, a 2002 survey by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration found that 89.5 percent of all children aged 5 to 17 use computers, and 58.5 percent of all those children use the Internet.7 The report also found that Internet use is particularly high for teens and preteens (75.6 percent of 14- to 17-year-olds and 65.4 percent of 10- to 13-year-olds, up from 51.2 and 39.2 percent, respectively, in 1998). Furthermore, computer usage (and possibly Internet usage as well) varies by age: in one national survey, 26 percent of 2- to 7-year-olds reported using a computer out of school the day before compared to 44 percent of 14- to 18-year-olds.8 According to a survey by Grunwald Associates, family decisions to purchase computers and to obtain Internet access were based on parental perceptions of their children's educational needs.9 While children and youth are most likely to use the Internet for schoolwork, an important (and large) percentage of their online time is spent for other purposes, including e-mail, chat, and entertainment.10 A report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that about half of regular Internet users of any age (an estimated 52 million) use the Internet for information on health issues such as diseases, clinical trials, treatment, and nutrition, as well as for assistance in making health-related decisions.11 According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, about two out of three young people (aged 15-24) have used the Internet to search for health information, and 25 percent say they get "a lot" of health information online.12 These data suggest that the Internet is of great use to adolescents seeking health-related information (including information related to sexual health).
This report is concerned with the protection of children from inappropriate sexually explicit material on the Internet. But children share a cultural space with adults, and so it is helpful to understand a contemporary society in which sexual images and references are common. Media images of sexuality abound, and the children of today are exposed to a wide range of images through many media, including entertainment television (especially sitcom and dramatic programming in prime-time broadcasts, soap operas, music videos, and talk shows), magazines, advertising, film and movies, and news.13
Although sexual images and behavior are common in the media described above, most of those media generally do not portray sexually explicit material involving full frontal nudity. Rather, they are important elements of a culture at large that seems to accept such portrayals of sexuality. On the other hand, media portrayals of easy and loose sexuality are not generally reflected in the actual sexual behavior of Americans, and in fact the statistics on actual sexual behavior have changed far less over the last 30 years than media portrayals of sexual behavior. For example, Americans do have more sexual partners in their personal histories than they had two decades ago; nevertheless, most Americans report that in the past year that they had zero or one sexual partner. The reason for this phenomenon seems to be that on average, Americans are marrying later but are nevertheless engaging in monogamous sexual activity prior to marriage.14 Although 80 percent of individuals have intercourse by age 20, the mean age of first intercourse has dropped only from age 18 for those born in the period from 1933 to 1942 to age 17 1/2 years for those born two and three decades later. Furthermore, teenagers have intercourse only sporadically during the teen years. For example, 19-year-old men surveyed in 1978 had sex on average four times in the past 4 weeks, while a comparable group surveyed in 1988 had sex three times in the past 4 weeks.15
It is hardly news that adolescents are very interested in matters of a sexual nature, and, beginning in early adolescence, go through a developmental process in which they begin to look for information on sex and their bodies as they begin to develop a sense of themselves as sexual beings. Most people would agree that in an ideal world, young people would seek out their parents for information on sexuality. Parents and children would be able to talk about sex, sexuality, and relationships in a mutually respectful manner in an atmosphere of shared values. In this world, children could raise questions without fear and parents could answer them without embarrassment, anger, or apprehension. However, in practice, parents are often reluctant to talk to their children about sex. When they do, the information they provide is often more about physiological changes than about the emotional terrain that accompanies sexuality or about managing one's own sexuality appropriately and healthfully. Adolescents are trying to find out if their bodies are developing normally, and they also begin to have questions about relationships and how to manage sexual interactions. They want answers to personal and even embarrassing questions such as, Am I normal? Is my body normal? Am I developing appropriately at the right speed? What is a tampon and how do I use it? How do you date? How do you kiss? How do you say no without hurting someone's feelings? What is a sexually transmitted disease? How do you use contraception? In addition, because it is often difficult for parents to talk about passion and desire and other such matters with their children, young people sometimes find it difficult to "buy into" a clinical discussion.17 Considering that young people are often surrounded by media images of sexuality that are completely centered around desire, it is not hard to understand why parents and children often do not communicate effectively about sex.18 Sex education provided in schools also does not provide a comprehensive picture. Indeed, sex education in schools is sufficiently controversial that its content is very tightly prescribed in terms that will generate the least amount of political argument and heat. For example, 14 states have required that sex education (if it is taught) must teach abstinence or abstinence-until-marriage. These states do not, however, also require that schools teach information about other forms of contraception, though abstinence-based curricula do emphasize contraceptive failure rates.19 In practice, if parents and schools are not providing young people with answers to the questions that they actually have, many will turn elsewhere to get additional information about sexuality. These other sources include their friends--who often have much misinformation to share--as well as the media.20 The media may be a particularly appealing source of information for adolescents because it can be accessed anonymously.21 One can imagine (or perhaps even recall) the types of reactions and resulting feelings of embarrassment that might accompany questioning a peer or parent about sexuality (e.g., from a peer, "You mean you don't know that," or from a parent, "Why are you asking that?"). The anonymity of the media, and of the Internet especially, offers a way to obtain information about very sensitive matters about sexuality and sexual health and allows the adolescent to avoid embarrassing face-to-face encounters.22 (A major disadvantage of media--especially Internet media--as a source of sexual information is that its accuracy is often not verified. School-age children may be far less cognizant of this fact than would be appropriate, and they are likely to search out information, aware of the advantages of anonymity but unaware of the disadvantages of potential inaccuracy.) In the absence of other comfortable venues for seeking information, media sources help to fill information gaps for young people, providing information about topics that parents and schools are not discussing. As early as 1980, studies documented the strong influence of the media on an individual's sexual self-evaluation and the lack of influence exerted by family variables.23 Given the increasing role of the Internet as a source of reliable information for young people as they conduct research for school papers and seek homework help, one can imagine that the media's influence will only increase. In fact, more recent studies have documented that the mass media is a particularly significant resource for sexual information for adolescents.24 Research on print media suggests that turning to the media for information on sexuality is also a normative behavior among teens. The majority of adolescent boys have seen at least one issue of Playboy, while girls tend to turn to women's magazines--for example, Seventeen Magazine for young teens, and for girls older than 14 Glamour and Cosmopolitan. Magazines like Glamour provide very explicit information on topics such as relationships with boys and content devoted to sex, flirting, and various romantic aspects of relationships. The fact that young people often turn to the media to help deal with some of the issues associated with their changing selves has both positive and negative dimensions. On the one hand, many young people may find reassurance that their curiosity about sexuality, and the changes in their bodies, are normal and they need not feel ashamed of their changing physiques. Television and movies in particular, and to some extent print media, may provide information about "scripts" for romantic interaction by depicting scenes in which these activities take place.25 Teens can watch to see how other people resolve these situations and make judgments as to whether they feel this is an appropriate path to resolution for their situations.26 In searching the Internet, young people also have a very good chance of finding valid and responsibly presented information on sexual health from reliable sources such as the Surgeon General,27 Planned Parenthood,28 or the American Social Health Association,29 all of which can be reassuring and also may help young people to be more responsible in the choices they make with regard to their sexuality. On the other hand, using the media as a primary source for information about sexuality has a variety of risks. It can create unrealistic expectations for oneself. For example, bodies portrayed in the media as sexually attractive are often unattainable (e.g., very thin physiques for girls and well-defined, sizable muscles for boys), and a young person who perceives his or her body as not fitting into these norms may be troubled rather than reassured.30 Another study found that virgin adolescents who believed that media characters experienced high levels of sexual satisfaction were less satisfied with their own state of virginity.31 Still another study found that adolescents were most likely to be dissatisfied with their first sexual experience (intercourse) if they relied on media messages about sexuality.32 Perhaps more important, media sources often depict in a positive light behavior that is inconsistent with the stated values of many parents and other adults. The messages about sexuality contained in the traditional media romantic script tend to be irresponsible and potentially emotionally and physically unhealthy. These sources answer adolescents' questions about sexuality with messages that do not always represent safe or healthy choices. Adult-oriented sexually explicit material may "up the ante" in that the messages are very explicit and overt, and certainly this type of material can be found easily sonline.
As noted in Chapter 2, individuals obtain access to the Internet through an Internet service provider (ISP). However, it is quite common for many individuals to have more than one. For many youth, multiple venues for access to the Internet are likely, with home, school, and library access as perhaps the most common channels but with many others as well, all of which have (potentially) different ISPs and thus may offer different terms of service. For example, youth are likely to have access to the Internet at the homes of a friend, in which the operative rules of supervision and/or access are most likely to be those governing the friend. Internet cafes are open to anyone willing to pay access fees by the hour. Museums (especially those with after-school or weekend programs) often provide Internet access and operate under less stringent rules than do libraries or schools. Many youth after-school programs and other community-based programs are providing Internet access and courses on how to use the Internet. Even commercial establishments are beginning to provide terminals for Internet access.33 The most frequent venues for youth Internet use are home (74 percent) and school (73 percent). Almost as many youth use the Internet from someone else's household (68 percent). Public libraries account for a much smaller fraction of Internet use--only 32 percent of youth used a library for Internet access in the last year. Internet usage is frequent, with 76 percent using the Internet in the week prior to being interviewed, and with an average frequency of 3 to 4 times per week. On the other hand, 61 percent reported that their typical Internet usage is an hour or less on a typical day--26 percent reported spending 1 to 2 hours on a typical day.34 One important distinction to make about different venues is the degree to which any given venue is private (or can be made so). A person wishing to view material that may be subject to social sanction is highly unlikely to do so where he or she can be seen doing so. For example, an Internet access terminal in a mall that faces a walkway with many passers-by is unlikely to be the venue of choice for viewers interested in becoming sexually aroused (though it might well be the preferred venue for someone intending to shock those passers-by). By contrast, someone with unsupervised access at home (e.g., in a bedroom with a lockable door) is not subject to social sanctions, and thus can view material free of such constraints. Note also that the availability of multiple venues of private and/or unsupervised access means that venue-specific approaches are easily circumvented. A child denied access to various types of content at school, for example, is likely to seek it in another venue where it is more easily available. For this reason, approaches to protecting children from exposure to inappropriate material that are venue-specific are not likely to be effective in serving their stated purpose.
Sexually explicit material can be made available to youth from a variety of different sources and in a variety of ways. One major distinction that often drives the means by which sexually explicit material is made available is whether the source carrying such material is doing so for commercial purposes or has no financial motivations. The commercial online adult entertainment industry that makes sexually explicit material available for profit is generally thought of as the most significant source of sexually explicit material that may be regarded as inappropriate for minors. As described in Chapters 1 and 3, the type of content on such Web sites includes images equivalent to those viewed in music videos and those seen in R-rated movies, as well as other images that are extraordinarily graphic, are sexually explicit, and cater to specialized sexual tastes. In most cases, the images that are available for free serve as "teasers" for subscription Web sites that contain much more of the same. Less graphic but still sexually suggestive images may sometimes be found on Web sites associated with firms with a significant "bricks-and-mortar" presence that are using the Web essentially as an advertising medium to draw attention to their products and services (for example, Frederick's of Hollywood and Victoria's Secret). Noncommercial carriers of sexually explicit content are much more varied--as varied as the motivations for carrying such content. For example:
The channels through which individuals can be exposed to such content are also diverse. Because the Internet is not merely a repository of Web sites to be passively browsed, but rather a dynamic and interactive system, the opportunity for users to be exposed to inappropriate content is not limited to viewing commercial Web sites alone. For example:
The role of Usenet is important as well. As a broad generalization, the frequency with which minors access sexually explicit content through Usenet is low, especially if these individuals are younger than high school age. The reasons are that Usenet often requires some technical sophistication to use (and is generally text-based), and that the sexually explicit content on the World Wide Web is much easier to obtain and more interesting in addition. (To the extent that minors do use Usenet, it tends to be for the downloading of information objects such as popular music, blockbuster movies, and pirated software.) This should not be taken as an assertion that young people never make use of Usenet, but the committee believes that the primary use of Usenet with respect to sexually explicit material tends to be among adults--and it is a prime channel for the exchange of child pornography and other highly "extreme" material.
In 2000, the Crimes Against Children Research Center (CACRC) conducted a nationally representative, interview-based survey with 1,501 youths aged 10 to 17 who use the Internet regularly ().37 This survey measured the extent to which young people came in contact with sexually explicit material, received sexual solicitations from other users, and were distressed by the incident. Twenty-five percent of youth reported having had at least one unwanted exposure to sexual pictures in the year before the survey was taken. These figures are approximately consistent with findings of a Kaiser Family Foundation/NPR survey taken in 2001.38 In this survey, 31 percent of children aged 10 to 17 with computers at home reported seeing a "pornographic" Web site, even if by accident. Breaking down by age, 45 percent of those aged 14-17 had seen such a site, compared with 15 percent of those aged 10-13. Another study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that among teens (ages 15-17) online, 70 percent say they have accidentally come across "pornography" on the Web, though 77 percent said they have never come across it or come across it "not too often."39 One in 5 young people reported receiving a sexual solicitation or approach in the last year, and 1 in 30 received an aggressive sexual solicitation.40 (In the lexicon of the CACRC study, a solicitation is defined as a request to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that was either unwanted or made by an adult whether wanted or not.) An aggressive sexual solicitation is a sexual solicitation involving offline contact with the perpetrator through regular mail, by telephone, or in person or attempts or requests for offline contact--all of which constitute a potential risk of physical safety for young people.) Girls in the survey were targeted for sexual solicitations and approaches at almost twice the rate of boys (66 percent compared with 34 percent respectively). In general, the young people participating in this study were not very distressed by these experiences. Notably, only 6 percent of youth reported that accidentally viewing a sexually explicit image was distressing to them, and 75 percent of youth who had experienced an online solicitation were not very upset or afraid. (Another survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that of online youth aged 15-17 who have been exposed to pornography, 45 percent reported being upset by the experience, with 55 percent saying that they were not at all upset or "not too upset."41) More young people were very or extremely upset by aggressive solicitations (36 percent), and 25 percent were very or extremely afraid. Younger users (aged 10 to 13) were more distressed by solicitations than were older users--although 22 percent of youth surveyed were 10-13 years old, they reported 37 percent of the distressing episodes. This may suggest that younger users have not learned coping strategies for such incidents and have a more difficult time shrugging off such solicitations and that preadolescents are the age group most emotionally vulnerable to sexual solicitations. The CACRC and Kaiser reports are generally consistent with what the committee heard during its site visits. For example, the children to whom the committee spoke during site visits (mostly older adolescents) were in general not particularly concerned by exposure to sexually explicit material. Some were upset by what they saw, but the large majority brushed it off. (In general, there was a correlation with age--those in the 16 to 17 age bracket tended to be much less bothered by sexually explicit material than those aged 14 to 16.) Of course, self-reporting can be questioned on the grounds that these teenagers would not have been likely to tell a group of adults about an abiding interest in sexually explicit material or about being upset by such exposure (it would be too "uncool" to do so). On the other hand, what today's adults remember about their own searches of sexually explicit material in their own youths does not necessarily apply to the youth of today. Today's social environment, compared to that of 30 to 40 years ago, is a more sexual one, and much of the material that today's adults sought as teenagers is much more freely available and is thus arguably much less of a "big problem" than in the past.
The impact on children of Internet exposure to sexually explicit content must be seen in the context of a much greater availability and wider range of sexual content than in the past. Although it has long been normative behavior for adolescents to seek out images that are sexually explicit (e.g., viewing one's first National Geographic and Playboy were once rites of passage for many boys), adolescents are bombarded with sexual content in everyday media sources that are to some extent difficult to escape. Images meant to tantalize are embedded in most advertising in television, billboards, and print media and programming such as music videos, soap operas, and movies contain highly sexualized images and content. The Internet containing original material and content from many forms of media also contains a broad range of sexual content. For many it would appear that the range of content--including nudity, romance, and depictions of sex and intercourse, as well as a variety of sexual proclivities (rape, bondage, bestiality, and so on)--seems to be larger and more accessible than what was easily available in the past. Such changes lead some to speculate that there may be a wider range of social mores and a greater permissiveness about sexuality today.42 Given both a broad range of sexually explicit material on the Internet and the numerous ways in which this content can be viewed and accessed, it is worth considering two broad categories of how young people come into contact with this content. Exposure to sexually explicit material on the Internet can occur inadvertently or intrusively (as when one user deliberately seeks to expose another user to this content), or it can occur as a result of a young person's deliberate choice to seek and view sexually explicit material. summarizes the various types of inappropriate sexually explicit materials and experiences discussed in this report.
Deliberate access results from a child's conscious choice. For example, a child learns of a Web site providing sexually explicit materials that does not require a password, and uses an Internet browser to view that Web site. He or she may search for sexually explicit material using a search engine, typing in terms likely to return links to such material (such as "sex pics"). A minor in a chat room might broadcast a message to other chat room participants asking for pictures with explicit sexual content. He or she may visit a chat room named so as to attract visitors interested in sexual dialog. He or she may sign up to be on a mailing list known to send via email to its members sexually explicit images. Eight percent of those surveyed in the CACRC survey acknowledged choosing to seek out X-rated Internet sites.43 Less than 1 percent said they had used a credit card without permission. Of youth who said they talked online with people they did not know in person, 12 percent had sent a picture to someone they met online, and 7 percent had willingly talked about sex online with someone they had never met in person. Five percent had posted a picture of themselves for general viewing; eleven percent had posted some personal information in a public Internet space, mostly their last name. Twenty-seven percent of e-mail users knew that they had posted their e-mail address in a public place on the Internet. Some of the paths for deliberate and inadvertent exposure to sexually explicit material on the Internet are described in .
Inadvertent exposure occurs through no deliberate action on the child's part. In the reference scenario described in Chapter 2, the student intends to search for information on a particular (innocuous) topic, but because the term he uses to search is ambiguous, information on more than one topic is returned to the user. A poor search strategy or misspellings in the terms used for a search can also result in the inadvertent receipt of sexually explicit material: links to sexually explicit material may be returned even if they were not desired by the child. A child may misspell the address of a Web site, and the mistakenly spelled Web address points to an adult-oriented Web site that has obtained the misspelling.44 Domain names that are most likely innocuous have been appropriated by owners of adult Web sites.45 Confusion between .com and .gov or .edu suffixes can also be exploited to the advantage of the adult Web site owner.46 A user may also mistype the address of a Web site, or improperly guess the address of a Web site,47 and receive inappropriate material as a result. From time to time, e-mail containing sexually explicit material can be misaddressed. Intrusion occurs when another party "pushes" such material on the child even though he or she has not asked to receive it. Spam e-mail with links to Web sites containing inappropriate sexually explicit material is one example. Web sites that have pop-up windows that open as quickly as a user can close them are another way this exposure can occur. As stated earlier, users can also send IMs to each other and attach images or provide a link to a sexually explicit Web site. Inadvertent exposure is not an uncommon experience. According to the CACRC survey, one minor in four (about 25 percent) had at least one inadvertent exposure to sexually explicit images in 1999, with the majority of these exposures occurring to youth 15 years of age or older. In the vast majority of cases (94 percent), the images involved naked persons; in a substantial minority of the cases (38 percent), they involved people having sex. About 8 percent of the images involved violence, in addition to nudity and/or sex. The children who inadvertently viewed these images saw them while searching or surfing the Internet (71 percent), and while opening e-mail, or clicking on links in e-mail or IMs (29 percent).48 Most of these exposures (67 percent) happened at home, but 15 percent happened at school, and 3 percent happened in libraries. For those surfing the Web, the inadvertent exposures happened as the result of searches (47 percent), misspelled addresses (17 percent), and links in Web sites (17 percent). And, in 26 percent of these exposed-while-surfing incidents, youth reported that they were brought to another sex site when they tried to exit the site they were in. For those receiving e-mail that resulted in inadvertent exposure, 63 percent were associated with an e-mail address used solely by the individual; for 93 percent of the inadvertent exposures resulting from e-mail, the sender of the e-mail was unknown to the individual. Note that the line between deliberate access and inadvertent exposure is not always clear. For example, many search engines return links to Web pages that include a few lines of text associated with each page. If the child intends to search for an innocuous topic, but uses a search term with ambiguous meaning (e.g., "beaver"), a number of links to sexually explicit pages may be returned, along with those few lines of text. If that text includes terms such as "hot sex" and "XXX," careful users can avoid such materials.
About 3 percent of youth Internet users surveyed by the CACRC received an aggressive sexual solicitation, a rate of exposure far lower than the rate of exposure to sexually explicit material. In addition, 5 percent of youth Internet users were approached sexually, e.g., by being asked sexual questions in a way that caused them to be very or extremely upset or afraid. Girls were aggressively solicited or approached at almost twice the rate of boys, and most of those individuals solicited (77 percent) were 14 or older. The CACRC survey found that adults were responsible for 34 percent of the aggressive solicitations, with most of the adult solicitors reported to be aged 18 to 25. About 4 percent of all solicitors were believed to be older than 25, and 67 percent of all solicitors were believed to be male. Children made 48 percent of the aggressive solicitations. However, in almost all of the cases where the surveyed youth gave an age or gender for a perpetrator, the youth had never met the perpetrator in person, thus leaving the accuracy of the identifying information in question. (For perspective, a report of the University of Pennsylvania Center for the Study of Youth Policy found that 47 percent of confirmed sexual assaults on children (defined as those under the age of 18) were committed by relatives and 49 percent were committed by acquaintances, such as a teacher, coach, or neighbor, while only 4 percent of sexual assaults were committed by strangers.49) The concern with solicitations is based on a troubling pattern of behavior that often characterizes a child's online conversation with a solicitor in a chat room or via instant messaging. In a typical interaction between predator and victim, the predator begins with dialog that is entirely innocuous.50 Over time (perhaps weeks or even months), the predator grooms his target, seeking to build rapport and trust. No single piece of dialog is necessarily sexual or even suggestive, but as the victim begins to trust the (anonymous) predator, conversations become increasingly personal. A young adolescent is strongly motivated by the need to separate from parental authority and to gain acceptance for his or her growing adulthood. Further, he or she is usually inexperienced in dialog with adults (especially adults with cunning and guile) and is likely to be relatively honest in sharing his or her emotional state or feelings. The predator plays on this need for acceptance and a child's naivete. Sexually explicit dialog and/or material is unlikely to be a part of this dialog in its early stages, and may never emerge. When it does, it is introduced gradually and slowly in order to reduce the inhibitions of the victim and make him or her more likely to be willing to meet.
In addition to encountering sexual solicitations and inadvertent exposure to sexually explicit material, youth on the Internet are subject to other threatening or offensive behavior directed toward them, including threats of assault aimed at them, their friends, family, or property, as well as efforts to embarrass or humiliate them. Six percent of regular youth Internet users experienced either feelings of worry or of threat because someone was bothering or harassing them online, or because someone used the Internet to threaten or embarrass them by posting or sending messages about them for other people to see. Boys and girls were targeted about equally, while about 70 percent of the episodes involved youth 14 and older. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of those harassing youth were other juveniles, and almost a quarter of harassment perpetrators lived within a 1-hour drive of the youth. The primary forms of harassment were IMs (33 percent), chat-room exchanges (32 percent), and e-mails (19 percent). About 12 percent included an actual or attempted contact by telephone or regular mail, or in person. According to the CACRC, an important feature of harassment is that, more than sexual solicitation, it involves people known to the youth and people known to live nearby. Some of the threatening character of these episodes stems from the fact that the targets do not feel completely protected by distance and anonymity, and that the harasser could actually carry out his or her threats.51
Boxes
Tables
Notes1 A.C. Huston and J.C. Wright. 1997. "Mass Media and Children's Development." Handbook of Child Psychology, 5th Ed., Vol. 4, W. Damon, I. Sigel, and K. Renniger, eds. Pp. 999-1058 in Wiley, New York. 2 G. Comstock, 1991, Television and the American Child, Academic Press, Orlando, Fla.; J. Condry, 1989, The Psychology of Television, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, N.J.; Huston and Wright, 1997, "Mass Media and Children's Development." 3 J.E. Brand and B.S. Greenberg. 1994. "Minorities and the Mass Media: 1970's to 1990's." Pp 273-314 in Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, J. Bryant and D. Zillmann, eds. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, N.J. 4 Donald F. Roberts, Ulla G. Foehr, Victoria J. Rideout, and Mollyann Brodie. 1999. Kids and Media at the New Millennium: A Comprehensive National Analysis of Children's Media Use. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Menlo Park, Calif. 5 Roberts et al., 1999, Kids and Media at the New Millennium. 6 Roberts et al., 1999, Kids and Media at the New Millennium. 7 National Telecommunications and Information Administration. 2002. A Nation Online: How Americans Are Expanding Their Use of the Internet. U.S. Department of Commerce, Washington, D.C. Available online at <http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/dn/html/anationonline2.htm>. 8 Roberts et al., 1999, Kids and Media at the New Millennium. 9 See <http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/demographics/article/0,,5901_390941,00.html> for a summary of the Grunwald study. The full study is available online at <http://www.grunwald.com/survey/index.htm>. 10 National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 2002, A Nation Online. 11 Susannah Fox and Lee Rainie. 2000. The Online Health Care Revolution: How the Web Helps Americans Take Better Care of Themselves. Pew Internet and American Life Project, November. Available online at <http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/pdfs/PIP_Health_Report.pdf>. 12 Victoria Rideout. 2001. Generation Rx.com: How Young People Use the Internet for Health Information. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Menlo Park, Calif. Available online at <http://www.kff.org/content/2001/20011211a/GenerationRx.pdf>. 13 Material in the list below has been adapted from Aletha C. Huston, Ellen Wartella, and Edward Donnerstein, 1998, Measuring the Effects of Sexual Content in the Media: A Report to the Kaiser Family Foundation, The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Menlo Park, Calif. Available online at <http://www.kff.org/content/archive/1389/>. 14 Robert T. Michael et al. 1995. Sex in America: A Definitive Survey. Warner Books, pp. 88-91. Sex in America: A Definitive Survey is based on a scholarly volume by Edward O. Laumann et al., 1995, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States, University of Chicago Press. 15 Michael et al., 1995, Sex in America, p. 94. 16 The discussion in Section is based largely on Aletha C. Huston, Ellen Wartella, and Edward Donnerstein, 1998, Measuring the Effects of Sexual Content in the Media: A Report to the Kaiser Family Foundation, The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Menlo Park, Calif. Available online at <http://www.kff.org/content/archive/1389/content.html>. 17 J.D. Brown, K.W. Childers, and C.S. Waszak, 1990, "Television and Adolescent Sexuality," Journal of Adolescent Health Care 11: 62-70; V. Strasburger, 1989, "Adolescent Sexuality and the Media," Adolescent Gynecology 36: 747-773; J. Strouse and R.A. Fabes, 1985, "Formal Versus Informal Informational Sources of Sex Education: Competing Forces in the Sexual Socialization of Adolescents," Adolescence 20: 251-263; B.M. King and J. LoRusso, 1997, "Discussions in the Home About Sex: Different Recollections by Parents and Children," Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 33: 52-60. 18 For example, one survey indicated that 72 percent of mothers believed that they had talked with their teenagers about sex, while only 45 percent of those teens agreed. See J. Jaccard and P. Dittus, 1993, "Parent-Adolescent Communication About Premarital Pregnancy," Families in Society 74(6): 329-343. 19 M. Sutton et al., 2001, "Shaking the Tree of Knowledge for Forbidden Fruit;" Brown and Stern, "Sex and the Media," in press; Kaiser Family Foundation, 2000, Sex Education in the U.S.: Policy and Practice, Report number 3049, available online at <www.kff.org/content/2000/3048/Issuepercent20Update.PDF> (October 3, 2001). 20 Sutton et al., 2001, "Shaking the Tree of Knowledge for Forbidden Fruit;" Brown and Stern, "Sex and the Media," in press. 21 As one data point, consider that sexual health information is rated by online youth as "very important for people their age" in larger percentages (84 percent) than any other type of online information. (Information about drugs and alcohol are regarded as very important by 75 percent of online youth.) See Victoria Rideout, 2001, Generation Rx.com: How Young People Use the Internet for Health Information, The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Menlo Park, Calif., available online at <http://www.kff.org/content/2001/20011211a/GenerationRx.pdf>. 22 On the flip side, the anonymity of the Internet is highly attractive for children actively seeking sexually explicit materials for fantasy purposes. This anonymity provides a freedom to explore a wide range of material without having to reveal one's identity or to engage an adult to assist in the search. Consequently, the embarrassment or shame that he or she might feel is absent (though some of those to whom the committee spoke expressed concerns about "getting caught"), and with it many of the social inhibitions against seeking such content. 23 J.A. Courtright and S.J. Baran. 1980. "The Acquisition of Sexual Information by Young People," Journalism Quarterly 1: 107-114. 24 J.D. Brown, K.W. Childers, and C.S. Waszak, 1990, "Television and Adolescent Sexuality," Journal of Adolescent Health Care 11: 62-70; V. Strasburger, 1989, "Adolescent Sexuality and the Media," Adolescent Gynecology 36: 747-773; J. Strouse and R.A. Fabes, 1985, "Formal Versus Informal Informational Sources of Sex Education: Competing Forces in the Sexual Socialization of Adolescents," Adolescence 20: 251-263; B.M. King and J. LoRusso, 1997, "Discussions in the Home About Sex: Different Recollections by Parents and Children," Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 33: 52-60. 25 L.J. Heinberg and J.K. Thompson, 1995, "Body Image and Televised Images of Thinness and Attractiveness: A Controlled Laboratory Investigation," Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 14: 325-338. A script is a set of expectations about how certain kinds of interaction will unfold and about how one will act in those interactions. More discussion can be found in Chapter 6. 26 Heinberg and Thompson, 1995, "Body Image and Televised Images of Thinness and Attractiveness: A Controlled Laboratory Investigation"; Hofschire and Greenberg, 2001, "Media's Impact on Adolescents' Body Dissatisfaction." National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. 2001. Nontechnical Strategies to Reduce Children's Exposure to Inappropriate Material on the Internet: Summary of a Workshop. Board on Children, Youth, and Families and Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. Joah G. Iannotta, ed. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C. See also the discussion by Jane Brown on pp. 21-26, C. Pardun, 2001, "Romancing the Script: Identifying the Romantic Agenda in Top-grossing Movies," in J.D. Brown, J.R. Steele, and K.W. Childers, eds., Sexual Teens, Sexual Media, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, N.J. 27 See <http://www.sexualhealth.com/>. 28 See <http://www.plannedparenthood.org/health/>. 29 See <http://www.plannedparenthood.org/health/>. 30 L.J. Heinberg and J.K. Thompson, 1995, "Body Image and Televised Images of Thinness and Attractiveness: A Controlled Laboratory Investigation," Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 14: 325-338; L. Hofschire and B. Greenberg, 2001, "Media's Impact on Adolescents' Body Dissatisfaction," in Sexual Teens, Sexual Media, J.D. Brown, J.R. Steele, and K. Walsh-Childers, eds. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, N.J. 31 S.J Baran. 1976. "Sex on TV and Adolescent Self-Image," Journal of Broadcasting 20: 61-8. 32 Aletha C. Huston, Ellen Wartella, and Edward Donnerstein, 1998, Measuring the Effects of Sexual Content in the Media: A Report to the Kaiser Family Foundation, The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Menlo Park, Calif. Available online at <http://www.kff.org/content/archive/1389/content.html>. 33 See, for example, <http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010412S0040> and <http://siliconvalley.com/docs/opinion/techtest/ml071201.htm>. 34 Joseph Turow with Lilach Nir. 2000. "The Internet and the Family: The View of U.S. Parents," in Children in the New Media Landscape: Games, Pornography, Perceptions, Cecilia von Feilitzen and Ulla Carlsson, eds. UNESCO International Clearinghouse on Children and Violence on the Screen, Sweden. 35 Note also that there can be private chat rooms, in which those who participate do so by invitation or because they know of its existence. For the most part, such chat rooms are not generally subject to intrusions from uninvited guests. Some high school students to whom the committee spoke commented that "when they were younger" they participated in public chat rooms, but as they had become older, they found private chat rooms more congenial and better matched to their interests and needs. 36 In Napster-like peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, a central server holds a publicly accessible index to the files available from end users (but not the files themselves). (Napster was originally designed to handle sharing of digital music files, but there is no particular reason that the files in question must be music files--and indeed, extensions of the Napster protocol can handle other file types.) Other peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, such as Gnutella, eliminate even the centralized server index function. Users of Gnutella-like systems are connected in a Web (rather than to a centralized index), and a query from one user goes to an immediate circle of possible respondents. If not satisfied, the query then goes from those respondents to other respondents. Furthermore, such queries are highly anonymous, though file transfers between end users are not. 37 David Finkelhor, Kimberly Mitchell, and Janis Wolak. 2001. Youth Internet Safety Survey. Crimes Against Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire. See <http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles1/ojjdp/fs200104.txt>. 38 See <http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/poll/technology/>. 39 Victoria Rideout. 2001. Generation Rx.com: How Young People Use the Internet for Health Information. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Menlo Park, Calif. Available online at <http://www.kff.org/content/2001/20011211a/GenerationRx.pdf>. Note the use of the term "pornography" in a survey questionnaire is subject to all of the problems discussed in Chapter 1 regarding the definition of "pornography." As that discussion indicates, different people have different understandings of what counts as "pornographic," so one party (but not another) might regard a Victoria's Secret's advertisement, the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated, or a site devoted to gay and lesbian rights as "pornographic." The author of Generation Rx.com (personal communication, March 2002) spoke with a 14-year old girl who reported that a lot of kids her age had seen "porn" movies. When asked to provide an example, she said "you wouldn't believe how many of them have seen American Pie." ("American Pie" and "American Pie 2" carry movie-industry ratings of R, which indicate admission forbidden for minors without a parent or guardian. The enforcement of such ratings varies across communities and even across theaters within an individual community, and even if enforcement were uniform, the rating--by assumption--indicates that minors can obtain access to such movies with parental permission and consent verified by the parent's presence.) Perhaps the most that can be said from a survey based on an undefined term such as "pornography" is that those who reported coming across "pornography" on the Internet have some sexually-oriented concept in mind, even if that concept (and hence the material in question) may vary definitionally (and substantially so) from person to person. 40 Note also that these figures may well underrepresent the actual incidence of solicitations, because many youth who know that adults are concerned about such solicitations, and may worry that reporting such incidents could lead to greater parental restrictions on them. Since many older teens think they can deal with such situations, they may not think they are worth reporting. 41 Victoria Rideout. 2001. Generation Rx.com: How Young People Use the Internet for Health Information. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Menlo Park, Calif. Available online at <http://www.kff.org/content/2001/20011211a/GenerationRx.pdf>. 42 One suggestion of such a wider range comes from the case of a Utah video-store-chain owner who was indicted in 2000 for selling obscene material. At trial, his attorney sought and obtained records demonstrating a large consumption of erotic video through the pay-per-view channels of a local hotel chain and through cable and satellite television providers. According to these records, residents of Utah County--by all accounts a highly conservative area of the nation--are larger per capita consumers of such material than the rest of the nation. Thus, his attorney argued, the community standards of Utah County in fact were not breached by the sales of erotic video, which could not be held to be obscene under those standards. The chain owner was acquitted on all counts. See Timothy Egan, 2000, "EROTICA INC.--A Special Report: Technology Sent Wall Street into Market for Pornography," New York Times, October 23. 43 Even though the survey was anonymous and privacy was guaranteed to the survey respondents, such figures are likely to understate the true incidence of such behavior, because of concerns that promises of anonymity might not be kept and reluctance to admit this activity to anyone (anonymous researcher or not). 44 Note that exploitation of misspellings is a time-honored tradition in marketing. One of the most famous stories in this area involved the AT&T 1-800-OPERATOR advertising campaign for collect calls. By dialing 1-800-O-P-E-R-A-T-O-R, the caller was connected to an AT&T operator. MCI owned the number 1-800-O-P-E-R-A-T-E-R (note the misspelling) and took enough of AT&T's business that AT&T discontinued the ad campaign and switched numbers (Business Week, June 13, 1994, p. 78). 45 For example, the name of an indoor professional football team in Texas with a .com suffix leads to an adult-oriented Web site. 46 For example, the New York Times reported on a children's financial Web site--designed to teach children about money--that had been closely associated with a Web site offering adult-oriented sexually explicit material. The original Web site for children, produced by Ernst & Young, was located at <http://www.moneyopolis.com>, while the adult Web site was located at <http://www.moneyopolis.org>. See Susan Stellin, 2001, "Pornography Takes Over Financial Site for Children," New York Times, October 26. 47 A common method of guessing the address of a Web site is to try "www.searchterm.com", where "searchterm" is a term of interest to the user. 48 In 17 percent of all incidents of unwanted exposure, the youth said they did know the site was X-rated before entering, but it is not clear to what extent inadvertent exposure resulted from curiosity or navigational naivete despite prior knowledge of the site's X-rated nature. 49 Richard J. Estes and Neil Alan Weiner. 2001. The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, University of Pennsylvania, School of Social Work, Center for the Study of Youth Policy, Philadelphia, September 18. 50 See, for example, Kenneth V. Lanning, 2001, Child Molesters: A Behavioral Analysis, 5th ed., National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Alexandria, Va. 51 D. Finkelhor, K.J. Mitchell, and J. Wolak. 2000. Online Victimization: A Report on the Nation's Youth. Crimes Against Children Research Center and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Alexandria, Va. 52 For example, the report noted that on one day sampled by the Special Investigations Division, 6 of the top 10 searches were for "porn," "sex," "xxx," and other terms intended to elicit pornography. One search for the term "porn" on a particular file-sharing system yielded over 25,000 entries, more than 10,000 of which were video files.
|
![]() |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() |
![]() |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||