fixing draft 1
A young boy, still not mature enough to be fully self-aware, sits behind his computer screen flirting with the idea that he’ll be able to find himself by talking with strangers in an online world, a world so different than the one he’s been forced to live in by his parents. In his real life, he was never allowed to talk about his sexual feelings because they were not accepted as normal in his community, his church, and household. But with this new freedom, he was able to show his true colors and explore the possibilities and experiences that he had been missing out on. As he stretches his fingertips to the keyboard and signs into a chatroom, a message pops up. “Hi, my name’s Dave. What’s yours?” Strangely excited by this interaction with this stranger, he types back. The boy and Dave start to have a conversation, but the conversation soon gets serious and quickly turns onto adult issues. The boy, struggling with his sexuality finds comfort in talking to this man about his sexuality, like he is the only one who would understand what he is going through. The time passes in what seems like minutes, but it has really been four hours. The boy signs off, but as soon as he gets a chance the next day he logs on. Dave is there waiting for him, like he knew the boy was going to be there. Dave and the boy talked for 3 days straight about sexual things the boy would not be able to talk about with his friends and family. The two decide to meet. But the sad part of the story is that Dave just didn’t find an interest in just this one boy, he was a serial online predator, waiting for his next victim to come along.
Stories like this happen everyday. But what makes teens and adolescents, who know about the dangers of online sexual predators, decide to talk to and confide in strangers online and how are teens using the Internet to talk to these people?
There seem to be many different reasons why teens would talk to strangers online and not in their everyday lives. For instance a teen might be too shy to talk to someone in person, but they are comfortable enough to talk to him or her behind the safety of their computer screen. It seems that the top two motivations teens have for talking to strangers are to meet people with common interests and find someone who is willing to accept them for who they are.
Throughout history, it has been made clear that the human race likes to be around other people with the same common interests. In the same manner, kids in today’s society are no different now than they have been in the past, but now they have easier ways of meeting people who share the same interests. Even more so in modern society, it appears that adolescents feel like they need to be different than everyone else around them. The Internet gives them an outlet to express their individuality and meet people who share the same views and interests as them. And because of this way of meeting new people, masses of people are able to connect with one another and talk about things they have in common. In addition to kids wanting to find other people with common interests, they also want find people who can relate to them on a different level.
It is true that society has become more accepting of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals over the years, but a lot of homosexual people are logging on to chatrooms to find and meet people of the same sexual orientation. Over the past 10 years, more and more homosexual teens are finding it easier to come out. They have found a space to come together over the Internet, one in particular called the “Queer Global Village” (Silberman). This specific site, other sites, and chatrooms of the same type are becoming a safe haven for teens in the gay community and more popular everyday. Here, homosexual teens and those coming to terms with their sexuality can come together in one place and talk about issues that they cannot seem to talk about with their friends and family members. It wasn’t until recently, in the past decade or so, that teens would not have to wait until they were old enough to go out to gay clubs to meet other homosexual and bisexual people (Silberman). Now they can converge and converse with people with the same orientation without even leaving their bedrooms. As one can see there are different motivations for teens to talk to strangers, but how are they going about it?
It is apparent that almost every teen today is connected to the online world. The most common places to find them now are sites where “collecting friends” seems to be a big deal like MySpace and a social network called Facebook (which is more commonly used by college students). Kids are also meeting people online through chatrooms and blog pages, AOL Instant Messenger and other instant messaging programs, and virtual online worlds in which players use avatars and create their own virtual lives, such as Second Life. More and more kids are meeting new people online and now since collecting friends appears to be the cool thing to do, meeting people online is more prevalent now than ever before. Teens and kids are meeting people of all age groups, social classes, and races through these online social networks.
These sites and activities have become so addicting to some people that they compulsively sign on and login to their personal pages to see if they have received any new comments, messages, friend requests, and picture comments. CBSNews.com has recently posted an online poll asking kids how much time they spend online a day; they found that “On average, teens say they spend almost three hours a day on the Internet on a typical day.” Kids are even linked to their favorite bands through these pages where fans can meet each other and share their love for these artists, which is just another medium for meeting new people with common interests. Furthermore, social networks and online journals have become so popular over the past three years that the number of users has grown at an enormously fast pace. According to USATODAY.com MySpace has grown from 4.9 million users in November of 2004 to 26.7 million users in just one year. The information for the number of Facebook users was not available for November of 2004, but by November of 2005 it had grown to 11.1 million. In November 2004, Xanga had 5.8 million users and by November 2005 its numbers had reached 7.9 million. As of October 2007, Myspace has over an astonishing 100 million users and is growing at a rate of 500,000 every week, and now Facebook has 49 million users (Facebook). Though its true many of the users of these social utilities are adults, the vast majority of them are kids and teens. Also, although many parents may be aware that their children are using online social sites, some are clueless of what really goes on behind their child’s computer screen and who may be trying to contact their child.
Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online, posts helpful blogs on her website, Totallywired.ypulse.com, for parents and guardians that give insight into what teens and adolescents are really doing online. One article has information taken from a poll of 3,000 teens and tweens who use the virtual world Habbo Hotel. These are the following statistics:
“86.4% of teens say their parents have discussed online safety with them. 51.7% say they visit chat rooms at least once every day. 18.5% say they have experienced chatting online with someone they found out was an adult pretending to be much younger. 57.2% say they have chatted, IM’d or emailed with someone online that they have never met face to face. 26.6% say they have been asked questions about their sexuality or sexual experiences while chatting online that made them feel uncomfortable. 31.7% say they have posted personal information online before. 72.5% are aware that anyone can view personal information they post online, not just their friends.”
These statistics might scare some, but kids aren’t stupid. Most teens know to stay away from people who make them feel uncomfortable, uneasy, and anxious. Parents are telling children to stay away from strangers from a young age, but who isn’t a stranger on the Internet? Anytime you sign into a chatroom and start talking to someone, are they not a stranger at first? Even if you meet someone face to face, are people not strangers the first time they meet? The problem is how to distinguish between a person who can be trusted and who cannot be trusted.
There are a growing number of cases where tweens and teens are talking to people about personal issues who they don’t know if they can trust. Most of the things we hear in the news about online sexual predators are concerning middle age men. It doesn’t matter what race, age, or kind of background these people come from, and apparently neither does gender. “Although almost all of the research shows that the majority of sexual perpetrators are males, there is growing evidence that female-perpetrated sexual abuse is not rare and that the consequences of female-perpetrated sexual abuse can be just as traumatic as male-perpetrated sexual abuse” (Oliver). But what happens when situations between minors and adults online go beyond just talking or chatting?
In September of 2005, The New York Times carried an interview with Justin Berry (then 18), from California, who was selling his body on a porn website and talking to men online who would watch him through his webcam. According to the article, Justin bought a webcam at age 13 with the idea of meeting other teens online and hopefully some girls. But, for the most part, the only people Justin got messages from were adult men, some even going so far as to pretend to be teenage girls but later revealing themselves as men. So Justin started talking to these men, thinking they were no threat and could possibly be potential friends.
One day Justin received an instant message from a man who offered Justin fifty dollars to sit in front of his computer without a shirt for three minutes. Justin thought it was no big deal, but after this first experience with being paid to sell his body online, he was addicted to the attention (because he longed for affection from his family) and was lured by the money to continue selling himself. These men even started a “wish list” on Amazon.com where Justin could pick anything he wanted and they would buy it for him. According to the article, “Justin was watched by more than 1,500 people who paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars to undress, shower, masturbate, and have sex in front of his webcam.” The article goes on to note that, “in its investigation, The Times obtained the names and credit card information for the 1,500 people who paid Justin to perform on camera, and analyzed the backgrounds of 300 of them nationwide. A majority of the sample consisted of doctors and lawyers, businessmen and teachers, many of whom work with children on a daily basis.” Today Justin has stopped performing for these men and has since helped the police and other law enforcement agencies catch online sexual predators.
There are many cases of children performing for adults and meeting them in person, but for the most part, kids are smart about who they talk to online. In many cases, kids say they only talk to friends online that they have met in person already or have met online through a mutual friend in their shared network; they claim that if they start to feel uncomfortable they sign off or just simply stop talking to whomever they are chatting with. Most teens say they talk online to keep in touch with their friends, comment on pictures their friends have posted, and play games with other people who they feel comfortable with. For a worrying parent, the best way to help stop kids from chatting with predators online is to talk with them about the potential dangers of talking to people they don’t already know and ways to spot predators.