Internet not full of pedos, the statistical edition
This conclusion angered many who sincerely believe that the Internet is full of pedophiles, and they're attacking the study. danah boyd, one of the researchers, responds:
Now, let's do some math. The National Alert Registry has over 491,000 registered sex offenders on its list. In data collected in December, Pew found that 35% of American adults are on social network sites. If sex offenders were a representative population, we'd expect that 172,000 of them would be on social network sites. Now, I know nothing of who is on that list, but if they were to skew younger or more urban, we'd expect even more of them to be on those sites. Regardless, the number announced by MySpace should not be unexpected or shocking.doing the math on MySpace and registered sex offendersOne of the worst parts of dealing with quantitative numbers of any kind is our tendency to read into them what we want to read into them. We see a number like 90,000 and expect that it's high and outrageous. But it is not more than would be expected by statistical patterns. And it's not an automatic indicator of a problem. We need to know WHO those registered sex offenders are and WHAT they are doing to get a critical assessment of the risk. By focusing solely on the number, we introduce a red herring and, in doing so, miss the whole point of our report: there are children online engaging in risky behavior who desperately need our help. Blocking adults who have raped other adults, while likely desirable in general, does NOTHING to help at-risk kids.
Why are we so obsessed with the registered sex offender side of the puzzle when the troubled kids are right in front of us? Why are we so obsessed with the Internet side of the puzzle when so many more kids are abused in their own homes? I feel like this whole conversation has turned into a distraction. Money and time is being spent focusing on the things that people fear rather than the very real and known risks that kids face. This breaks my heart.
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Wait until these doofuses find out how many convicted drunk drivers are online. We'll all have to get breathalyzer interlocks on our internet connections.
Thanks for blogging this Cory. I've been listening about it on 2600 and Search Engine too. Interesting stuff.
The WaronPedos Industry is already established? Well, I guess the DEA scumbags are planning ahead for some kind of employment.
Folks needs their witch hunts. Witchhunting is an epidemic disease, not an endemic disease.
say, you hear about the Evil Alien Overlords? They've established a base on the dark side of the Moon and the only way we can stop the threat is to carry the battle to them.
If they were all on the internet then why would we need all those camera's in the park?
zo ve can chek!
I agree with Danah Boyd, people tend to lose sight of the facts. Here in New Zealand children in primary school are taught the dangers of talking to strangers, with the idea that this will reduce their risk of being assaulted and/or sexually abused. The statistics on child sex abuse, however, tell us that most children are abused by people they know: stepfathers, mum's boyfriend, uncles, school teachers, fathers of school friends etc (yes most are male). Very few are abused by strangers. I suspect people are just too uncomfortable facing up to this, and don't like the idea or warning kids to watch out for mum's boyfriend.
I actually worked in a male sex offender treatment facility as part of my clinical psychology training. I saw a lot of abusive fathers, stepfathers and family friends. There were very few strangers (there were a couple who met young girls on the internet which then lead on to offending, so it does happen, just not commonly).
If you REALLY look at the statistics for sexual abuse in the UK and the US (they aren't much different) then what you see is that while most abuse of children (which includes neglect, physical punishment, domestic servitude) involves parents or people with parental responsibilities, only 3% of sexual abuse takes place within the immediate family. Check the statistics out for yourself, they are available online.
It is true that in general the men who abuse children (and it is, overwhelmingly, men) are known to them, and not strangers. It is NOT true to say that they are likely to be in the immediate family - and those cases that are, nearly always involved stepfathers/brothers who have not been brought up with the child concerned. There is a powerful taboo in our society against sexual activity between close family members that is reflected in the statistics.
However, I think we are in a no man's land at present where we don't have the information about what's going on, and we aren't really looking for it either. There has in the UK been a vast increase in prosecutions for possession of child pornography, and the majority of men so prosecuted appear to be people who were not known to be sexual offenders before their convictions. There is something odd going on in our society, I believe, at present.
There was controversy surrounding Second Life when it emerged that some adult people were playing child characters and engaging in sexual behaviour within the virtual world, and that was, eventually, banned, along with depictions of cartoon children engaging in sexual behaviour which are part of the hentai tradition in Japan.
The thing is, I would rather - of course - that someone had an online outlet for their wish to have a sexual relationship with a child, than that they should seek out a real child for that relationship. But no one knows whether having an online outlet for such behaviour would make someone less or more likely to offend against a real child.
They are distasteful things for most people to have to think about, but I think that looking at the causes and roots of this behaviour, and how best to deal with it, should be of prime concern to us as a society.
Currently society ignores the differences between the sexes and their differences in the type of offences they commit, as though to acknowledge the difference between the sexes is to be sexist. However, I think that it is something that requires attention, research to be funded, and real science, rather than opinion and emotional reactions - on either side.
Most adults have a strong instinct to protect and care for the children in our society, and it is hard to imagine that there are people who dont feel that way - or don't accept how much damage they may do if they pursue sexual relationships with children. But facing up to it is necessary, and we need to do it now.
jajaja Pedos!!! pedos is mexican slang for FARTS. ROFLMAO
"sexual predator" is a really vague term. if a 17 year old wants to meet and hang out with a 20 year old, just to hang out because of common interests or just a date, the 20 year old could be considered a sexual predator just for meeting someone who isnt at least 18. its not all middle aged men telling some young child what they want to hear so they can steal them for who knows what.
Parents have many fears and most parents barely know how to use the internet. so really what i believe most of the hype is that parents fear the unknown and want to protect their kids.
dont get me wrong on this, there are bad people out there who talk to kids and "prey" on them. but as with everything there are going to be people who misuse things so kids need to be educated and not scared into not doing something.
oh and btw that To Catch a Predator show is horrible. Sure the guy is trying to have sex with someone underage(bad i know) but whats even worse is that people are pretended to be those kids, lead the guy on then punish him.
The Internet just toppled the government of one of the most powerful nations in the world. Some politicians are scared shitless of it, and rightly so. Little Brother is watching. Protecting the children from sexual predators is one way to try to close pandora's box and put things back the way they were, so it's unsurprising that some legislators are trying to do that.
Where to start in the world's most crap-filled debate? The Israeli-Palestinian disputes are models of civility and rational thought compared to the "Child Porno" wars.
Let's try these observations out for starters:
1 - Almost all child abuse is committed by women. They have far, far, more in the way of motive, method and (most of all) opportunity because they're the primary care givers and are in constant contact with the children. Pretty much none of this abuse is sexual in nature as female sexual malfunctions don't work that way: it's just straight violence, torture and murder. As is the case with murder in general, women get away with this much more easily than men do since people have more difficulty envisioning this kind of deviancy from the gender-norm in women than they do with men. The stereotype of a woman as a harmless caregiver is much easier for a monster to hide behind than anything available to a male. The fact that homicide squads are mostly staffed by block-headed guys helps too as they have difficulty fathoming some female psycho's motivations. In the original "Angel of Death" evil nurse case the motive was not the classic guy motives of power, money or sexual thrills but rather a heightened social status as a martyr: "Poor me! All my patients are dying!!!".
But sex sells so let's just concentrate on that small angle of child welfare. Very handy for advocating censorship and the regulation of other people's sex lives too.
2 - There's never been much in the way of actual evidence that consumption of any amount of any kind of porn has any influence on people's real-life behaviour. The FBI agent who was in charge of a lot of Urban Myth children's issues (Satanic baby-snatching rings, internet porn...) remained unconvinced until his retirement that there was any correlation between people viewing child abuse porn and them rushing out into the street and doing it but argued, rather, that child porn should be stomped on to remove the financial incentives for creeps to abuse children in it's production.
3- I'm unaware of any Anglo-Saxon government at any level caring at all about children's quality of life except as a slogan at election time or an excuse to curtail civil liberties. If one percent of one percent of the time and money spent on Child Pornography issues was spent on general child welfare then you'd easily get 100,000 times the results. For example, are children going to school in rat-infested dumps? Who cares! What's that got to do with sex anyway?!
Here in "Ontario the Good" we have three duplicate child welfare systems based on religion: Jewish, Catholic and Other. So the first question a battered child must be asked is "Are you Jewish or what?" so that the appropriate agency can be called in. This results in enormous financial waste through duplication. Not that funding levels could be aggrandised by calling them "pathetic" in any case. The average case worker has 1/2 hour per week per client: and that includes paperwork time.
So for, example, things like printing up a pamphlet for foster-children with the central phone number that they can call if Mommy Dearest is beating the crap out of them with a wire-hanger doesn't get done. Not even if the lack of one gets mentioned every four years in the Auditor General reports.
So every time the bloody corpse of some poor orphan is sent screaming to Hell a Royal Commission, or some such, is convened which turns a few colourful phrases such as "It's easier to kill a child than a dog in Ontario" (too true, the Animal Rights people would be on you in a flash) and then gets completely ignored. Rinse, repeat. This has been going on here for a least a century.
But we DO have a great anti-interNet-child-porn unit here in Toronto. Simply World Class!
Why are we obsessed with the adult internet side? Simple, because the child at home side is something we're responsible for. By focusing on the internet, and adults, we effectively make it up to the government to regulate, instead of our own lazy asses.
We want to assume we raised our kids right, and that we're great judges of character. We often don't, and contrary to popular belief pedophiles can be charismatic.
So in summary, people suck.
The 90,000 estimate is still too high for the facts. The NAL just compiles a list of state registries and the threshold and list of offenses to be but on the sex offender list varies from state to state. Partly as a result of paranoia about online sex offender, this threshold is set very low -to the point where two consenting adults who are caught having sex in a parked car might be placed on the list and permanently barred from employment in careers involving children or obtaining a government security clearance. Police and prosecutors this threshold kept low because it often allows them to plea bargain an admission of guilty to petty offenses, in order for the accused to avoid being placed on the registry.
So if we figure at most 2/3 of the registered are actually sex criminals. Let's be generous and say 75% are for incidents involving minors, and not minor sexual assaults (groping), adult date rape, or spousal rape -which while all serious crimes, are hardly indicative of being sexual predator.
Of the 45,000 that remain, and theoretically should be made of only those convicted of sex crimes involving minors, most of these will involve offenders who are with 4-5 years of age or their victims. Again this is the result of a patchwork of conflicting laws between and even with states, where in one state someone who is 19 can have sex with a 17 year-old legally, in another this would result in him or her be listed as a sex offender. There have been incidents where individuals have been arrested for admitting to having sex with their spouse who they are lawfully married to. For military members this is even more convoluted. The Federal law indicates that a 16 year-old can give consent, but many installations are located in states or countries with a higher age. Federal property can either be joint State/Federal jurisdiction, or strictly Federal jurisdiction, depending on the agreement worked out when the land was transferred to Federal hands. On large bases it is not on common for both different arrangements to be present on different areas of the bases, so where you assigned housing is can be the difference between being a sex offender and a law-biding citizen.
So a more reasonable number might be 10-20,000 sharks swimming in a sea of 220,000,000 American internet users.
Thanks Cory, I agree it's heartbreaking, to hear parents mourning the freedom they had as kids when things were 'different', because they 'can't' give their own kids the same freedoms 'the way things are these days' - when all that's really changed is fear.
I don't find this story to be surprising.
The way the media prey on adults fears concerning their children is over the top. Keep in mind that they mostly do it for ratings/money. Every sweeps period your local news trods out the tried and true.
Soon the implanted chips will be administered by your local school district.
It is hearbreaking, that paranoia has replaced communication between parents and children.
I seem to remember reading, a few years ago, and maybe someone has a source, that child abduction figures have remained basically constant since the 50s, at least. Interest and publicity have created the impression of a rise that simply isn't there, was the point being made in what I read.
Anyone have any actual numbers?
Rationality is the cruelest casualty of suspicion.
It's too bad the registry isn't available and indexable so as to figure out who the REAL predators are. You know, the ones who activley go after kids, or things like that versus those caught with a hooker. I'm aware those are two vast groups, but...they're all on the list (depending on location).
I wonder if those who are on the list because of visiting a prostitute, where the crime isn't sex, but MONEY, can argue cruel and unusual punishment for being put on the list (in those areas where this happens).
Relatedly, the Supreme Court recently refused to hear arguments on that cockamamie 'Child Online Protection Act,' which effectively keeps it dead in the water.
Maybe that research project had a positive effect in keeping ridiculous legislation from being law.
Bravo!
#17 - I remember reading more or less the same thing. Got to love the media. It's job these days is to blow everything entirely out of proportion.
The question we are not asking is "Who wants us to be scared, and why?"
@Mellon:
The orderly and scheduled transfer of power which took place recently has been occurring on a regular basis, and occurred for almost 200 years before the internet even existed. It would have taken place this time, as well, even if there were no internet. If you start with the faulty assumption that the Internet resulted in the transition, you're going to lead yourself to many faulty conclusions. Conclusions like "They want to crack down on online pedos as a proxy for controlling the internet..."
Clearly this is political exploitation of people fears of things they don't understand, and not some "big brother" conspiracy. If you want to combat it, though, you should make sure you understand why it's happening, or you'll just be lumped in with the rest of the paranoid crackpots.
@Acx99:
If you start off by looking for the conspiracy, you'll convince yourself you found one. Nobody wants us to be scared in this particular situation. They are merely exploiting the already existing fear for political gain.
I was underage on the internet, back before the hysteria started. Man, the shit we got away with, just because no one had thought to protect us from it yet.
I did try cybering a couple times, but it was lame. Probably because I had no idea what I was doing, and I imagine that my "partners" were also people my age pretending to be older, because they didn't know either.
After assuaging my initial curiosity, I avoided porn. I just wasn't old enough for it, and thus it was uninteresting and made me uncomfortable. I did read a couple adult stories, but nothing worse than I could have found in a novel in the young adult section at the library. Again, anything more explicit than I was ready to see would make me uncomfortable and I'd wander off to do something else.
I'm happy to say that I think I turned out pretty well. I learned a little about myself and a little about the world. I never became a sex fiend or was abused. In fact, and I'm sure my mother would be relieved, I never had sex at all as a teenager because I'd seen the porn and it didn't really look like something I wanted to do yet.
I feel bad for the current batch of teenagers.
only 3% of sexual abuse takes place within the immediate family.
Do those statistics include 'Mom's new boyfriend'? Because that would make a very big difference.
About ten years ago I read a great book that debunked the myths of "Stranger Danger." I wish I could remember the title, i've been googling to no avail. I remember it was quite controversial at the time.
It was quite good.
"wellll now... it seems to me.. it seems to me that the type of person who would criticize the government on the internet is the kind of person that would look at child pornography"
JENNYBEAN42,
Wasn't "Stranger Danger" a child safety video starring an alien who didn't know any better, and was taught by his fellow school chums how to play it safe? Sorry, I know this is loosely connected to the topic.
ww t's rlly grt hw ths prvkd lk fftn prgrph-pls rnts bt hw t scks tht chld prn s llgl "bcs t's wy t vnt". fntstc
mn ths r sm ntrstng sttstcs bt ths cmmnt sctn prvds ncdtl vdnc t th cntrry
I'm really surprised that no one mentioned the Wisconsin high school student who made the news last week.
"New Berlin - A former New Berlin Eisenhower student was accused Wednesday of a pattern of manipulation and deception using the social networking site Facebook to coerce male schoolmates into sexual encounters.
Anthony R. Stancl, 18, posing as a female on Facebook, persuaded at least 31 boys to send him naked pictures of themselves and then blackmailed some of the boys into performing sex acts under the threat that the pictures would be released to the rest of the high school, according a criminal complaint.
All 31 boys attend New Berlin Eisenhower Middle/High School, said Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel.
The sexual assaults occurred in a bathroom at the high school, the school parking lot, a New Berlin Public Library restroom, Valley View Park, Malone Park, Minooka Park and at some of the victims' homes, according to the complaint. ..."
http://www.jsonline.com/news/waukesha/39124037.html
gulo gulo,
You're going to have to provide some citations for statements like that.
campfire
I'm not surprised that the Attorneys General are pounding the table over this. Prosecuting online sex offenders is a high-profile, low-effort gig where most of the legwork is done by volunteer civilians and the accused can usually be coaxed into accepting a guilty plea. And it looks great come election time.
"Why are we so obsessed with the Internet side of the puzzle when so many more kids are abused in their own homes?" I, too, would love to know the answer to this. I've gotten into so many arguments with people about how abuse is more likely to be doled out by relatives and other people you know and trust, not random creeps on streetcorners and lurking in chatrooms. Not that that doesn't happen, but it doesn't happen nearly as often as the rest. I think people just don't want to admit that the real evil could be your uncle, your teacher, your Little League coach, rather than the scary internet predator.
Just because the issue has been blown out of proportion, doesn't mean that there isn't a kermel of truth though.
First off, I wholeheartedly agree that the media is guilty of massively overhyping the whole range of child-danger issues, because fear sells papers. The Brass Eye 'Paedophile Special' was, imho, the final word on that side of the debate.
However, I work in a police computer forensics/investigation unit - not as an imp of The Man or as a shadowy manipulator of people's souls (as the Doctorows of the world seem to think that anyone working for the police is), but as a grunt predominantly doing jobs based around indecent images of children and online grooming.
Naturally, I'm getting the 'spotlight effect' - I see a lot of online nastiness because it's my job to. I can confirm though, that it does exist. I can also confirm that the scale is large enough to scare me as a parent - and this is coming purely from my own experience, not from any of the crap in the papers or TV. Any online venue that kids or teens use also has an active population of paedos. If you don't believe that, spend a few days signing up to a few as a kid and participating for a while. I'm not scaremongering to bring about the NWO, or trying to keep myself in employment, or any of the other rather lame accusations that fly around blog comments, I'm just reporting what I see every day, 8 hours a day.
indecent images of children and online grooming
But who's producing the images and doing the grooming? It's not like pedophiles are slipping in windows and secretly borrowing children for the afternoon for a film shoot. It has to be a family member or a trusted friend pimping out their own children.
It has to be a family member or a trusted friend pimping out their own children.
It's not that simple. The images fall broadly into the categories of: pro-looking studio shoots, home, sex tourist, garage or vehicle, webcam.
How do the kids get there? I don't know, is the honest answer - victim tracing isn't part of our remit. The pro shoots often have a former-Soviet Bloc look to them and those countries are big producers of child abuse images (CAI). The sex tourist stuff speaks for itself and these two are obviously ones with a commercial impetus that may be driven by the family of the victim. Similarly, the home ones often look as if the paedophile is known to the child. A lot of the garage/vehicle sort look like hurried high-risk affairs, so they could be strangers - roaming paedos picking kids up off the street are hugely rare though.
The webcam stuff...that's nearly always strangers, in my experience. Following the chat logs, you often see young girls or boys being groomed in a very patient, drawn-out way. Once they've given a little away, enough for the groomer to have some hold over them, it gets tinged with blackmail to open the floodgates wider. We get a good few jobs of this nature coming in, and the volume is increasing. From what I've seen they're always strangers. Yes, the victims do often seem to be willing participants in the grooming (until it gets too real) - but isn't the point of having laws protecting children precisely that children don't know what's best for themselves?
But it's not just about the groomers and the hands-on abusers, is it? There are a *lot* of people seeking and trading CAI online. The images I've described above, of all categories, are soon out in general circulation and we see a lot of the same ones over and over again. These are strangers trading images of strangers online, through chatrooms, P2P etc. The trade thrives on new images, which is how some of the offenders come to cross the line between watching and participating, particularly when they've got a little social network that eggs each other on, and particularly when it's so damn easy to engage a teenager in a bit of sexy chat. Again, this is coming from what I've learnt from reading their chat logs.
So yes, a lot of paedophilia does come from people known to the victim. But there are also a lot of people trying to abuse strangers, or swapping images of strangers, online - and these are by definition online sex offenders. This shouldn't distract from the fact (that I don't dispute) that hands-on abuse by strangers is rare, but nor should it be hidden in the backlash against the distasteful media obsession with online abuse.
I can't emphasise strongly enough that none of this is coming from a desire to scaremonger or vilify the Internet - I'm a liberal, lefty, anti-censorship geek. I love the internet, and shout in frustration at each new misguided government advisory trying to lock it down.
We have a massive backlog, and a dedicated team doing the arrests that has a very long list to work through. We're not one of the major cities, either, and all the UK forces are in the same boat. When I started about 6 years ago I was amazed at how much of it there was - I had no idea, and had previously thought that a city might get a dozen cases a year. It's more like 2 a week coming in for us.