Teens online: Major study

'Tis the season for surveys about online teens, it seems. Several have just been released, but the biggest news in Net safety this week was the much-anticipated "Second Youth Internet Safety Survey" (the first, much-quoted, study came out in 2000) from the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, sponsored by the US government-funded National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Let's look at it first because it's a milestone (in my newsletter next week: two interesting studies that fold in online parenting, one focusing specifically, and so far unprecedentedly, on MySpace).

USATODAY's coverage came with a *very* at-a-glance sidebar with three points that sum up quite effectively what has changed in kids' online experiences over the past five years: 1) Sexual solicitations are down overall (in spite of social networking's rise), 2) exposure to porn is up (despite increased use of filters), and 3) peer harassment (cyberbullying) is up. Of course some qualifying is needed. First the contact issue: Even though "a smaller proportion of youth Internet users received unwanted sexual solicitations" (13% in this study, down from 19% in 2000) and a smaller percentage are interacting with strangers (34% down from 40%), "aggressive solicitations [defined as solicitors trying to meet in person] did not decline," and 4% of young people surveyed said the solicitors asked for nude or sexually explicit photos of themselves (not surprisingly, digital photography is now showing up in the research, which means it needs to show up in Net-safety education at home and everywhere – and, parents, beware of Webcams and picture phones!). As for increased exposure to porn despite greater use of filters, my guess is this is not so much a comment on the effectiveness of filters as on the effectiveness of relying on filters installed on home computers when the exposure increasingly happens in multiple locations on multiple devices. In other words, this finding is a comment on young users' experience of the broadband, everywhere wired and wireless Web 2.0 – and on how important it is to work with our kids on *self*-protection and critical thinking wherever they access the Web. Please click to this week's issue of my newsletter for a few more key findings of interest to parents.