House Misfires On Internet Safety

CBSNews.com's Larry Magid Says Bill Passed Last Week Is A Mistake

(CBS) 
I don't know of a federal law that prohibits kids from playing football, soccer or basketball on school grounds even though there are cases of kids being hurt and killed in these activities. Instead, schools teach kids how to play these games as safely as possible and if a child is hurt, teachers and coaches reach out to help the child recover from the injury and prevent it from happening again.

Also, social networking sites can serve as a potential safety valve. As part of the research on "MySpace Unraveled: What it is and how to use it safely", a book I co-authored with Anne Collier - I spoke with John Draper of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, who said that at-risk kids are increasingly using their online profiles "to in some ways convey they had suicidal intent."

Draper said that these sites have "the very real potential for saving lives because the first people to hear about kids at risk are other kids." His organization is setting up profiles on MySpace, Xanga and Facebook as a resource for teens.

The bill does exempt the use of social-networking sites or chat rooms for "an educational purpose with adult supervision," but it doesn't define what that means. Does that mean that an adult has to be with the child at all times? Do they have to be looking over a shoulder or just in the room?

And even if schools were to block such sites, it wouldn't stop kids who were determined to get access. To begin with, there are hundreds – potentially thousands – of social-networking sites in addition to the ones that school authorities (and companies that make filtering software) know about, and it's pretty easy to set up new ones from anywhere in the world.

I could even envision someone setting up "a non-commercial site" that would be exempt from this law in a foreign land with absolutely no accountability or safety procedures. Today's popular social-networking sites all make some effort to protect users. Many of them, including MySpace, Xanga, Bebo and Tagged, have dedicated security officers with a strong background in Internet safety and/or law enforcement.

There is also the question of whether the bill is dealing with a widespread problem. There clearly are a lot of potential predators out on the Internet in general, but we don't know whether there are a lot of victims.

Sting operations performed by law enforcement have lead to the arrest of numerous people who – if given the chance – would have sexual contact with children they meet online. But these operations involve an adult undercover officer who is posing as a child. The potential predator may think he's dealing with a kid, but he's really dealing with an adult cop.

So while we do know that adult predators are using the Internet to try to lure children, we don't know how many children are being lured, and we have no idea yet how many are on being approached on the social networks. This might be a good to know before legislation is passed.

Even if the number of cases of children being sexually molested by people they meet online is underreported, we are still talking about an extremely small percentage of the millions of kids and teens who are online.

What's more, when those few tragic situations do occur, in every case that we know about, the child went willingly to meet with the predator, and in most cases - according to a 2004 report from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center (www.unh.edu/ccrc) - the children knew what they were getting into. Only 5% of the offenders tried to deceive their victims about being older adults and only 21% misrepresented their sexual motives, according to the report.

And then there is the issue of the real risk. What I'm about to say is facetious but based on real data. If the federal government wants to protect children from sexual predators, it would be better off banning kids from school, church, sports activities and being around their own families.

The fact is, again according to the Crimes Against Children Research Center, 70% to 90% of sexual abuse is committed by persons "known to the child." For girl victims, a third to one-half of the crimes are committed by family members. For boys it's between 10% and 20%.

If rules are necessary to regulate what kids can access from schools and libraries the decisions should made be at a local level by school boards, administrators or, preferably, classroom teachers and librarians.

I'm glad Congress is concerned with Internet safety but rather than pass DOPA, it ought to be funding campaigns to educate children, parents, and teachers on how to use the Internet safely - while giving the cops and prosecutors the resources they need to truly delete online predators.