'As many as one in five children
who use internet chat rooms are approached by
paedophiles.' (1)
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So claims UK Liberal Democrat MP
Paul Burstow. He presented the statistic during
prime minister's Question Time in February 2001,
and the statistic has been cited in his subsequent
press releases.
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Burstow is campaigning for changes
to the existing laws regarding paedophilia and the
internet. Tony Blair has confirmed that he will
consider such changes (2), and home secretary Jack
Straw has agreed to meet with Burstow at the Home
Office later in March 2001 'to help develop an
action plan to make the UK the safest place in the
world for children to use the internet' (3).
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This 'one in five' statistic is
enough to terrify any parent. But can internet
chat rooms really pose a danger to children on
such a scale? Given that an estimated 4.8million
children in the UK now use the internet, this
would mean that potentially hundreds of thousands
of them are at risk from paedophiles in chat
rooms.
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In investigating the evidence
behind this statistic, I ran into considerable
difficulty. Burstow's press office did not know
the origins of the statistic, and claimed that the
figure had been passed to them by the internet
safety agency Childnet International (4).
Childnet's administrator Ellen Rogers told me that
I would have to wait for the appropriate person to
call me back with the necessary information.
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Given that this frightening 'one
in five' statistic has been so widely used,
wouldn't you expect those who base their press
releases on it to have more of an idea about what
research it is based on?
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In fact, as Childnet's development
manager Stephen Carrick-Davies later clarified,
'That statistic has been blown out of all
proportion'. He was supportive of new government
initiatives to make internet chat rooms safer, but
he balked at the uses to which the 'one in five'
statistic was being put. 'There are real dangers
out there', he said, 'but any message about the
internet must emphasise the positive as well as
the negative'.
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Carrick-Davies explained that the
'one in five' figure originally came from a June
2000 report on American children conducted for
congress by the National Centre for Missing and
Exploited Children (NCMEC) (5). Looking at the
original NCMEC report (6), it is striking how much
the meaning of the statistic has been twisted by
the recent campaigns.
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The NCMEC's national survey of
1501 American 10- to 17-year-olds found that
'approximately one in five received a sexual
solicitation or approach over the internet in the
last year' (7). There is a huge leap from 'sexual
solicitation or approach' to Paul Burstow's
phrase, 'approached by a paedophile'.
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The report found that almost half
of the solicitations reported did not come from an
adult, but from other children: 'juveniles made 48
percent of the overall and 48 percent of the
aggressive solicitations.' (9) The report also
points out that only 'one quarter of young people
who reported these incidents were distressed by
them' (8). 'Sexual solicitations' between children
in an internet chat room are the online equivalent
of adolescent fumbling, a world away from the
threat of paedophilia.
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Despite this less threatening
reality, Burstow's inaccurate and emotive use of
the 'one in five' statistic has provoked the UK
prime minister and the home secretary to consider
new legislation around this issue.
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Concern around paedophiles' use of
chat rooms soared in mid-March with two government
publications on the subject: a set of Department
for Education and Employment (DfEE) guidelines
(10) written by Childnet, and a Home Office report
(11) written by the Internet Crime Forum (12). The
Home Office report, Chat Wise,
Street Wise: Children and Internet Chat
Services, recommends supervising children
while they surf, anonymising children's email
addresses, using software to filter internet
content accessed by children, advising children
not to open suspect email attachments, and
countless other safety measures.
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Children are, and should be,
supervised to some extent when they are online.
But how necessary are the measures proposed
here?
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I hoped that Chat Wise,
Street Wise would have more a factual basis to
its recommendations than the ill-used 'one in
five' statistic. Unfortunately not. The report
devotes only 22 of its 183 paragraphs to
quantifying the risk to children in internet chat
rooms - the remainder consists of descriptions of
the danger and of measures to counter it.
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The authors confess that 'it is
extremely difficult to make any accurate
assessment of the level of sexual approaches to
children in chat rooms in the UK'. They list eight
instances where a UK adult with suspect intentions
contacted a minor in an internet chat room and
engineered a meeting offline. Of these eight
cases, four resulted in the adult being convicted
of a crime.
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The report argues that even those
cases that did not result in a criminal conviction
are significant: 'Whilst no criminal
investigations resulted from these
incidents...they did heighten awareness of chat
room issues.' It seems that, faced with only four
criminal cases to give evidence of the dangers
posed to UK children in chat rooms, the report
tries to make out that there is a sinister unknown
quantity hidden behind the figures. It complains,
for example, that 'reports of incidents which do
not lead to criminal charges are not recorded'.
But anybody can be suspected of enticing children
online - finding them guilty is quite another
matter.
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An unknown quantity is not
sinister; it is simply unknown, and therefore
statistically meaningless. Parents and teachers do
not deserve to be scared out of their wits by
erroneous claims that 'one in five children who
use internet chat rooms are approached by
paedophiles'; and new laws do not need to be
drafted on the back of half-baked statistics with
no basis in fact.
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Sandy
Starr has consulted and written on internet
regulation for the Organisation
for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and
for the European Commission research project RightsWatch.
He is a contributor to Spreading the
Word on the Internet: Sixteen Answers to Four
Questions, Organisation for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, 2003 (download this
book (.pdf 576 KB)); From Quill to
Cursor: Freedom of the Media in the Digital
Era, Organisation for Security and Cooperation
in Europe, 2003 (download this
book (.pdf 399 KB)); and The Internet:
Brave New World?, Hodder Murray, 2002 (buy
this book from Amazon
(UK) or Amazon
(USA)).
Read
on:
Back to the
asylum, by Jennie Bristow
TV as judge
and executioner, by James Heartfield
(1) House of
Commons debates, Paul Burstow, Hansard,
28 February 2001, col 904
(2) Guardian,
28 February 2001
(3) Jack
Straw, letter to Paul Burstow, 19 March 2001
(4) See
the Childnet
International website
(5) See
the National
Centre For Missing and Exploited Children
website
(6) Online
Victimisation: A Report on the Nation's Youth,
June 2000. Click here to
download a copy of the report in .pdf format
(7) Online
Victimisation: A Report on the Nation's Youth,
p9
(8) Online
Victimisation: A Report on the Nation's Youth,
p9
(9) Online
Victimisation: A Report on the Nation's Youth,
p16
(10) See
the Guardian,
22 March 2001
(11) Chat Wise,
Street Wise: Children and Internet Chat
Services can be found here
(12) See
the Internet Crime
Forum website
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