The CSPH



Every Saturday, The CSPH highlights news or recent research in the field of human sexuality. This week we’re looking at a study that found that nearly a third of American teenage girls have met up with someone they met online.

Demographics/Methodology

Lead researcher Jennie Noll, Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati and Director of Research in Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, focused on 130 teenage girls aged 14 to 17 who had been identified by their local Child Protective Services agency as having a history of mistreatment—in the form of abuse or neglect—in the year leading up to the study. Additionally, Noll and the research team evaluated another 121 girls without such a background. While the girls’ parents were asked to outline their teen’s routine habits, as well as the nature of any practiced at-home Internet monitoring, investigators coded the girls’ profiles for content. The teens were asked to report all cases of having met someone in person who they previously had only met online in the 12 to 16 month period following the study’s launch.

What did it find?

Of the participants, 30% of the girls in the study proceeded from strictly online acquaintances to in-person contact. Teens with a history of behavioral issues, mental health issues, neglect, or physical or sexual abuse were shown to be particularly prone to presenting themselves online—both in images and verbally—in ways that could be construed as sexually explicit and provocative. Those who posted provocative material were found to be more likely to receive sexual solicitations online and to arrange offline meetings with strangers. Although parental control and filtering software did nothing to decrease the likelihood of such high-risk Internet behavior, the study did find that direct parental involvement and monitoring of their child’s behavior did mitigate against such risks.

Strengths and Weaknesses

This study highlights the tendency for adolescent girls, especially those with some kind of severe personal or family issues, to connect and sometimes meet up with people they have only ever chatted with online. It indicates the need for additional open conversations about Internet use between adolescent girls and their parents for the obvious reason of safety. However, this study also assumes that all of the participating teens were meeting up with strangers in dangerous situations and without taking steps to maintain safety like talking with their parents, meeting in a public place, not giving out their address or other personal information immediately, etc. It also excludes the teenage boy population, gives no information regarding the people they met up with, and provides no specific detail for how they quantified or defined “behavioral issues, mental health issues, neglect, or physical or sexual abuse.”

Even Noll, the lead researcher states, “Statistics show that in and of itself, the Internet is not as dangerous a place as, for example, walking through a really bad neighborhood,” and “the vast majority of online meetings are benign.” Noll and her research team claim, however, that regardless of the likelihood of risky behavior, if there is any risk at all where a teenage girl could end up getting hurt, it is an issue worth addressing. They come to the conclusion that communication between parents and teens is the most important preventive measure, stating that concerned parents need to balance the desire to investigate their children’s online activities—and perhaps violate a measure of their privacy—with the more important goal of wanting to “open up the avenues of communication.”

Conclusions

In terms of the takeaway message from this study, Dr. Jonathan Pletcher, Clinical Director of Adolescent Medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, states it well in that, “It’s really about building a foundation of knowing your kid and knowing their warning signs and building trust and open-minded communication. You have to set up that communication at an early age and establish rules, a framework, for Internet usage, because they are all going to get online.”

Essentially, the Internet is a huge part of a teenager’s life and that is not going to change due to a parent placing severe restrictions on its use at home. Also, dating websites and chatting and messaging functions on websites like Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter, to name a few, are an extremely popular way for both teens and adults to communicate. By embracing and accepting that your teen is going to use these sites and others, you can introduce a more effective conversation about how to be safe and protect one’s online identity.

To read more about this study, please click here.