Debbie Nathan
Feds, Kids & DOPA (Delete Online Pedagogues Act?)
It’s not like the government can’t get good information about sex, minors, and the internet — but it just won’t listen. The feds’ position tracks U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ campaign to protect teen girls from their MySpace urges. Check out these dire warnings about the horny fellow students and creepy old guys who will forever ogle, gossip about and stalk you if they spot your bio or cleavage in a posting. Presumably, the ads air on venues such as Fox TV, sending nationwide shivers through parents. The chill extends to Congress, where the Senate is considering passing the Delete Online Predators Act (DOPA). It would block students from accessing their MySpace accounts at school or libraries.
Off on the sidelines, there’s real data like this excellent panel discussion sponsored recently by the non-partisan, DC-based Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee. Four researchers who study children and the internet sat down for the committee to present their findings. They note that the DOJ’s drumbeat, about how kids typically get tricked online into sex, is wrong.
Earlier this month, Dan Radosh’s blog mentioned one centerpiece of the panel discussion: a big law enforcement study about teens who had sex with adults they met online. The study found that grownups in these relationships rarely pretended to be kids or “just friends.” Instead, they usually made their advanced age and libidinous intentions quite clear, pretty quickly. And the kids – a quarter of them gay boys — got involved in the first place by deliberately visiting adult places like sex chat rooms. Girls and boys later hooked up with adults in person, sometimes after lying that they were over 18. Many of the teens got angry with the police when they were caught. Half said they were in love with the adult they’d met on the net.
Radosh.net didn’t link to the study, but it’s available at www.unh.edu/ccrc/pdf/CV71.pdf
The Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee confab discusses a second study, downloadable here as abstract or full article. It examined the results of several online behaviors, including posting personal data on social networking spaces. Contradicting the spooky Gonzales PSAs, preeminent child protection sociologist David Finkelhor notes that “It’s not giving personal information that puts kids at risk.” Instead, it’s “being willing to talk about sex with a stranger,” “going to sex sites and chat rooms,” and behaving “like an internet daredevil” – often in the company of one’s friends. Another panelist says of earlier warnings not to post bio material and pix on MySpace: “We were wrong…we just spoke before we had the data.”
To keep kids out of trouble online, Finkelhor says, society has to “start with an acceptance of the fact that some teens are curious about sex and are looking for romance and adventure and take risks when they do that.”
“Some” teens?? How about all? And rather than “acceptance” we need “celebration.” Changing those words would advance adult efforts to help kids own their safety and their sexuality.
The sharpest panelist has a flair for presenting her own personal data. Ethnographer danah boyd – no uppercase – of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication, does field research into teens’ online social networking. She appreciates how it helps them do much more than ape Gossip Girl scenarios – they use MySpace to organize political activity, for instance. Alberto Gonzales apparently communicates only with adults, about pink-slipping U.S. prosecutors and waterboarding prisoners in warm climes, but boyd converses with kids. And she doesn’t just hoo-hah about their behavior online. She tries to figure out what it means to them. Click here to see lots of boyd’s work, and here’s her blog.
For example, a common belief about adolescents who get sexually involved with adults online is that the minors come from broken homes (the 2005 New York Times article about Justin Berry, who got took up porn webcamming at age 13, pointedly described him as a child of divorce). The law enforcement study, however, found that most teens who dallied with adults online lived with both parents.
At the panel, ethnographer boyd points out that often the kids’ problem is too much parental attention – though of the bad quality kind — rather than too little. Unlike in previous generations, they’re under constant surveillance by adults. And upper-middle-class teens are frequently under pressure: pushed to get into Ivy League schools, constantly “told they’re not doing things right.” In the suburbs teen boredom is rampant and has intensifid in the last decade. boyd points out that kids don’t even have malls anymore, “especially if you live in towns that are all big boxes now. So there’s no place to hang out.” The internet, she adds, “is a substitute” for teens stuck at home. Increasingly, home is populated by parents susceptible to government calls for paranoid, one-dimensional vigilance of children. Kids thus reach out on the net to older people “who have more freedom online,” says boyd. “They have his dream of freedom because their home…is not free.”
Kids’ idea of what constitutes online sexual intrusion differs from adults’. Teens couldn’t care less about the dark warnings on To Catch a Predator, says boyd. They don’t see men’s online questions about whether they’re virgins as threatening: “They’re so used to being marketed to that they just relate these sexual contacts as marketing and their approach is, ‘You just delete that.’” According to boyd, what really bothers kids is online Viagra solicitations.
Which is not to say teens don’t appreciate the state’s gloom and doom about danger; it’s just that they’ve got different notions of risk. They’ve heard for years not to post personal data in order to avoid people preying sexually on them. But they “repurpose” the message, according to boyd. Their reason for not posting is so college admissions officers and future bosses – the real predators? — won’t find dirt on them and ruin their lives.