Additional information from the report:
In 2006 close to one-third of the solicitations were aggressive, meaning the solicitors made, or attempted, offline contact with youth. Some of the aggressive episodes, about one quarter, involved solicitors youth knew offline.. In aggressive solicitation incidents
Seventy-five (75) percent of solicitors asked to meet youth in person
Thirty-four (34) percent called youth on the telephone
Eighteen (18) percent came to youths’ homes
Twelve (12) percent gave youth money, gifts, or other items
Nine (9) percent sent offline mail to youth
Three (3) percent bought travel tickets for youth
How did youth respond to the episodes?
In 2006 most youth (66%) handled unwanted solicitations by removing
themselves from the situation, by blocking the solicitor, or leaving the web site or
computer. Other youth told the person to stop, confronted or warned the solicitor
(16%), while others ignored them (11%). Very few incidents were reported to
law enforcement or other authorities (5%) or handled by parents or guardians
(12%) or teachers or other school personnel (2%). In more than half of cases
(56%), youth did not tell anyone about solicitations.
28% of solicited youth said an incident left them feeling very or extremely upset and 20% felt very or extremely afraid. Thirty-four (34) percent of aggressive incidents left youth feeling very or extremely upset, and 28% left youth feeling very or extremely afraid. Also youth were very or extremely embarrassed in 19% of aggressive solicitations and 49% of distressing incidents. Further in one-quarter of all solicitation incidents, youth had one or more symptoms of stress, including staying away from the Internet
or a particular part of it, being unable to stop thinking about the incident, feeling jumpy or irritable, and/or losing interest in things.
We asked youth open-ended questions about why they thought specific instances of unwanted exposure happened. Many of the youth seemed to view the Internet as strewn with sexual material that could only be avoided with constant vigilance. These youth seemed to attribute their exposures to letting
their guard down. They said:
Boy, 12: “I spelled a word wrong.”
Boy, 13: “I was not clear enough doing the search.”
Boy, 15: “I didn’t read the information underneath the link.”
Girl, 17: “I was typing too fast, not paying attention.”
Girl, 17: “There’s a lot of that out there. Unless you’re careful, it’s bound
to happen.”
Some youth had more sophisticated views of how sexual material was being
marketed on the Internet.
A girl, 14, said of a misspelling, “[I made] a simple
mistake. I’m sure there are people out there who want those types of things to
come up if you do make a mistake like a spelling error.”
Several 17-year-old boys commented:
-“I think people falsely label web sites on the Internet.”
- “People who run porn sites purposely buy old domain web sites, and they
change the web sites to what [they’re] not supposed to be.”
-“I go to web sites about racing dirt bikes, and when I’m on there pop-up ads
come up with naked pictures of girls and guys.… Some of the sites have
swimsuit calendars on them and it kind of opens the door for other
pornographic images to appear.”
-“Whoever put it on there wanted someone to get interested. Someone who
wanted to see those kinds of pictures would click on it, and it would spark
an interest.”
- “The porn market is really big…. I think they just want young people to
go there.”
Youth told someone about two-thirds (67%) of the harassment incidents. This was in contrast to the solicitation and exposure episodes, more than half of which were undisclosed. Many youth (45%) told friends or siblings about harassment, but they told parents or guardians about 31% of all incidents and
42% of distressing incidents. One-third of harassment incidents (33%) were undisclosed. Of the youth who
did not disclose, 63% viewed the incidents as not serious enough, but 19% said they did not tell anyone because they were afraid and 14% because they thought they might get in trouble.
How did harassment incidents affect youth in 2006?
More than half of the incidents (62%) were not at all or only a little upsetting to youth. Youth rated 30% of harassment incidents as very or extremely upsetting and 24% as very or extremely frightening. Twenty-two (22) percent were very or extremely embarrassing. Slightly more than one-third of youth (34%) had one or more symptoms of stress including staying away from the Internet or a particular part of it, being
unable to stop thinking about the incident, feeling jumpy or irritable, and/or losing interest in things. In distressing incidents, close to two-thirds of youth (64%) said they had at least one symptom of stress.
Moreover, solicitations from acquaintances were not less distressing or aggressive than those from people youth did not know in person. This means prevention messages need to be generalized enough to include dangers from this source too, rather than just using a stereotype of the unknown person as the Internet threat.