ne in five children who go online regularly is approached by strangers for sex, according to a new study. Yet most of the young people say they are not bothered by the messages and ignore or block them, another study said.
Until now, no one has presented scientific data to show how often adults seek out minors online to pressure them for sex talk and possible liaisons. One report was produced by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and appears today in The Journal of the American Medical Association. The other report, also to be released today, is by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
According to the New Hampshire report, 19 percent of those surveyed said they had received at least one sexual solicitation in the past year; that statistic has a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points. Furthermore, 3 percent of the students characterized the solicitation as aggressive.
Only 10 percent of those solicitations were reported to the police, and a majority of children and parents surveyed said they did not know how to report an incident to authorities. Child solicitation, both online and offline, is illegal in all states, although consent laws differ.
According to the New Hampshire survey, one in four of the young people reported being very upset or afraid because of the experience. And neither the presence of Internet filters nor parental monitoring of children's Internet use decreased the likelihood that a child would be sexually solicited by a stranger online, the researchers said.
The young people who are at the greatest risk of such encounters are the ones who spend the most time online and who directly communicate with others in chat rooms or by sending and receiving instant messages, the survey found. Girls, older teenagers and troubled youths were also likelier to receive such messages, the researchers found.
Although 75 percent of the young people who had been propositioned online said they were not distressed by the experience, the New Hampshire researchers said counselors should be prepared to deal with the fallout from students who were troubled by their experiences.
Parents and teachers should inform young people about the dangers of online solicitation, the researchers said, but "the concerns are not so alarming that they should by themselves encourage parents to bar children from the Internet."
None of the children surveyed were actually assaulted sexually as a result of the online contact.
"This does not mean that such abuse does not occur," the researchers said, "but that such events are probably not as common as others, such as intrafamilial sexual abuse, date rape and gang violence, that do tend to show up in surveys of this size."
The New Hampshire study, Risk Factors for and Impact of Online Sexual Solicitation of Youth, used a telephone survey involving a national sample of 1,501 young people ages 10 to 17 from August 1999 to February 2000. Preliminary data from the survey was released last year by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The Pew telephone survey of 754 children ages 12 to 17, conducted from Nov. 2 to Dec. 15, found that nearly 60 percent of young people online reported they had received messages of any kind from strangers. Like the New Hampshire survey, the Pew survey found that 75 percent of the young people who had been propositioned said they were not distressed. According to that survey, 57 percent of those who send and receive instant messages said that when they got a message from someone they did not want to hear from, they blocked further messages from the sender. That statistic has a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.
"Virtually every kid we talked to knows there are some really bad things and bad people in the online world, and know that there are some good things and good people," said Harrison M. Rainie, director of the Pew project. "When they get down to weighing the pluses and minuses, most kids will say the pluses pile up and the minuses are manageable."
The fact that children are sometimes approached by predators online is "no surprise," said Donna Hoffman, a professor of management at Vanderbilt University who specializes in online commerce.
"It's how our children are educated to deal with these experiences that is important," Professor Hoffman said.
