I have been giving this issue a lot of thought recently as I prepare to go out to various institutions under the Experience based Learning project. Reservations abound about the Web 2.0 tools I would like to champion amongst other things and I have a gut feeling that this is over-reaction. Two posts in the last week make enormous sense to me and will furnish me with a few counter-arguments if the anticipated objections are voiced.
The first post is from Pete Reilly who has dug up a wealth of statistics to show how insignificant the threat of online predation is in the US. Less than 1% of sex abuse is due to online strangers predation. Is there any reason to suppose that the trends are significantly different here in Europe?
The second is from David Warlick's blog looking at Social Networking according to the results of a recent Pew Internet Report which found that 55% of young people use social networking tools and of those 66% do not allow their information to be made public outside of their known friend's network.
I don't think that this information means that the problem is not a real one but I do think that it puts the level of risk into perspective. I would advise education about the potential for problems rather than banning.
Thanks to Scott Macleod's Dangerously Irrelevant blog for alerting me to these two.
Keywords: online predation, social networking
Comments
Hi Anne. I've been doing a lot work around these issues recently and I agree with your conclusions. We can't pretend that there aren't risks associated with using the internet - the internet doesn't exist some place outside of ideology and society, and is as subject to risk as offline life. The problems are in some cases specific or exasperated by digital contexts, but are in no way unique. Unfortunately it is easier to lay the blame for deep rooted social problems and inequalities at the door of technology than to seriously address the complex nature of exploitation.
The paper I wrote in response to the DOPA proposal addresses these issues head on and you may find some of the arguments useful in the context of your current work:
http://fraser.typepad.com/blogfolio/2006/08/3_august_2006_d.html