Main threats for young people in Internet
The rise of Internet usage and social media has been unequal. Children, teenagers and young people have adopted new technologies faster than adults or elderly. A 2015 survey in the USA shows that 71% of children ages 3 to 18 use Internet frequently, with higher frequencies for teenagers and for children of high-income families. This also created a new list of risks for the youngsters that usually adults do not see, do not know or do not understand. We can divide the main threats for young people online in three big categories.
Firstly, Sexual Solicitation and Internet-Initiated Offline Encounters, sometimes called cyber-predators. Sexual predators have always existed, but recently they have become a known problem in Internet. The most common victims are girls over 14 years old. Teen boys who are questioning their sexuality are the second-most targeted group because they typically feel talking about it online is safer than sharing in real life. The age and motivation of the perpetrators varies. Some are as young as the victim, while others are much older. Young sexual perpetrators are often involved in online harassment activities towards their victim (Beran & Li, 2007; Kowalski & Limber, 2007; Ybarra & Mitchell, 2004a). Adults who seek children and teenagers online for sexual purposes are child molesters, but not necessarily paedophiles. Sexual attraction to children isn’t the only reason behind this behaviour. Some of these adults are post-pubescent adolescents or barely twenty years old, while others are much older. Most sexual solicitations to children actually come from teenagers and men under thirty, moreover only a few of them actually lead to offline encounters (Wolak, Mitchell, & Finkelhor, 2006; Wolak et al., 2008c). Connections online that lead to in-person meetings are usually between youth of similar age and are not sexual in nature. Internet initiated sex crimes committed by strangers are much less common than sexual assaults committed by family members or known acquaintances.
The second category is online harassment and cyberbullying. It lacks clear a definition, but typically we use these terms to mean acts designed to threaten, embarrass, or humiliate youth. Online bullying often mirrors the traditional face to face bullying. Perpetrators are normally in the same age group that their victim. They are frequently anonymous to the victim, although not necessarily unknown.
Recent statistics show steady growth in cyberbullying. A 2007 Pew Research study found 32 percent of teens have been victims of some type of cyberbullying. Nearly a decade later, a 2016 study by the Cyberbullying Research Center found those numbers were almost unchanged. By 2016, just under 34 percent of teens reported they were victims of cyberbullying. Meanwhile, the American National Crime Prevention Council puts that number much higher, at 43 percent.
According to the results of a study among Americans aged 12 to 17 the most commonly reported behaviours included spreading rumours online (60 percent), posting mean comments online (58 percent), or threatening to hurt someone online (54 percent). Girls were more likely to have been bullied online, except for those with recent experiences (30 days); while boys were more likely to have bullied others online. The study also found that nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of the students who experienced cyberbullying stated that it really affected their ability to learn and feel safe at school. As professors Patchin and Hinduja describe it, “the negative effects inherent in cyberbullying… are not slight or trivial and have the potential to inflict serious psychological, emotional, or social harm” (Patchin & Hinduja, 2006, p. 149).
The third and final category is exposure to problematic content. This contains a broad spectrum such of content that concerns parents and can be further classified in pornography, dangerous trends, explicit violence, self-harm propaganda and fake news.
The average age of first exposure to pornography is around 11 years old. Elizabeth Schroeder, executive director of Answer, a sex-education organization based at Rutgers University, said: “Your child is going to look at porn at some point. It’s inevitable.”. Although youth often encounters unwanted pornography online they often seek for it as well. According to GuardChild.com statistics, teenagers actually consume more porn than adults. Regular porn consumption is lower among teen girls than teen boys, but they are more likely to publish photos and videos of themselves naked online (22%). 71% of these girls claim they sent these photos and videos to their boyfriends, but they can’t guarantee how many people actually have seen them.
The rise of social media has also led to the popularity of online challenges. Some, as the recently famous “dancing along moving cars”, has led to several hospitalisations and deadly accidents. When these challenges become a popular a trend, many children and teenagers across the world copy them.
Overall, we can say Internet is full of risks for everyone. Although children are more vulnerable, their risks are not too different than the ones adults experiment.
Picture from the Australian Institute of Family Studies