MySpace

I just watched this report on the CBS Evening News about the so-called dangers of MySpace. Don't get me wrong, online predators are clearly dangerous and something to warn your children of, but, I have been wondering just how pervasive the problem is. Nearly every night, it seems, the local nightly news shows some despicable guy being caught in a police sting trying to meet a young girl. Dateline NBC even had a story about it the other night. So, being deluged with these stories, I've been curious about how many incidents of actual old dude perverts are enticing kids over the internet, meeting them and raping them. Never in these reports is a nationwide number, not that one isn't disturbing, I just want a point of reference.

The CBS news story finally reported a number.

The Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported more than 2,600 incidents last year of adults using the Internet to entice children. With numbers like that, you'd think all parents would be hovering over their kids, wanting to know what they're doing online. But authorities say many parents are clueless about their kids' MySpace profiles.

So does the 2600 incidents include the number arrested by police stings. If the Kansas City area is getting 1 or 2 arrests a week in these stings, I imagine there are at least 40 other metropolitan areas this large getting the same amount. Consider if there's 1 arrest for this sort of thing in the 40 largest metro areas in the U.S. every week (a rather conservative estimate) that would equal 2000 incidents. So I don't know if the police stings are included in that number. Checking the source included in the report, The Center for Missing and Exploited Children I found this statistic:

According to NISMART-2 research, which studied the year 1999, an estimated 797,500 children were reported missing; 58,200 children were abducted by nonfamily members; 115 children were the victims of the most serious, long-term nonfamily abductions called "stereotypical kidnappings"; and 203,900 children were the victims of family abductions.
...
According to Highlights of the Youth Internet Safety Survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice “one in five children (10 to 17 years old) receive unwanted sexual solicitations online.”

In 1999, 115 children were the victims of long-term nonfamily abductions and one in five children receive unwanted sexual solicitations online. Granted these numbers don't really mesh with one another because in 1999, not a whole lot of kids had websites but chat rooms were pretty popular then. 115 children abducted is a horrible number and I'll bet that number is even larger now.

But, just how dangerous is MySpace vs how dangerous CBS News makes it out to be? They throw out the 2600 statistic but don't put that number into perspective by saying how many MySpace sites there are. If there's 100,000 MySpace sites, again a conservative estimate, that means there's less than a 3% chance that anyone would try to entice a child sexually. And that's using the 2600 number which, I think, includes police stings which are middle aged guys pretending to be 15 year old girls trying to get another middle aged guy to meet them for sex. This whole "epidemic" seems to be much ado about nothing and lulling people into a false sense of security. It's the online people I should fear, not the dudes walking through the mall or ol' Uncle Joe.