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Social Networks and Teens: Sexual Threat Overhyped?
With recent findings that more than 29,000 sex offenders have registered on MySpace, parents and politicians are in a scramble to put measures in place that protect social networking teens. But, according to recent research from the Journal of Adolescence, the situation might not be as dire as many MySpace critics suggest.
Sameer Hinduja, criminologist assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University, and Justin Patchin, political science researcher at the University of Wisconsin, studied a random sample of 9,282 MySpace profiles and found that over one-third of users 18 and under had wisely set their profiles to "private," allowing only prescreened "friends" access to their profile information. Of the remaining public profiles of underage users, only 8% revealed their full name, 4% included an instant messaging name, 1% listed an email address, and 0.3% revealed their phone number. Ideally, with education, age verification, and increased parental monitoring, those figures will all drop to zero.
MySpace and Facebook are both making sweeping efforts to scrub their respective sites of would-be threats. MySpace deleted the 29,000 identified sex offenders from its registry and is using background verification company Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. and its database of convicted sex offenders to identify and remove unwelcome users. Facebook's platform, by design, limits contact between people of different age groups by preventing adults from contacting young users if they are not affiliated with the same school network.
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