A Window on Kids’ Cyber-Peril

A pioneering effort to measure sexual harassment of children in online chat rooms and other electronic communications has turned up incidents that range from lewd comments to solicitation. The encounters are frequent and may have damaging emotional and psychological effects, according to a recent nationwide survey funded through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and conducted by the University of New Hampshire’s Crime Against Children Research Center.

These findings should be not a call for more ham-handed congressional efforts to legislate morality on the Internet, a valuable tool for learning, but rather a signal flare to the adults in these children’s lives.

Few of the children who were sexually harassed told anyone, least of all their parents. Behavior covered by the survey ranged from unseemly chat-room questions and comments to aggressive attempts to maintain contact via telephone or regular mail and efforts to meet the youngsters in person.

Most of the kids said they were too embarrassed or ashamed to report the incidents, blamed themselves or feared that they would be blamed and lose their computer privileges.

Those surveyed were from 10 to 17 years old and were described as regular users of the Internet, most logging on two to seven times per week. One in five of the more than 1,500 was subjected to some form of online sexual harassment in the past year, the survey said, and many described themselves as having been extremely upset or afraid. In nearly half of the cases, the perpetrators claimed they were juveniles; a quarter said they were adults.

The report is one more wake-up for parents, who need to be as interested in their children’s online activities as in their friendships and schoolwork. The survey, available online at www.ncmec.org, offers useful addresses for reporting harassment as well as a guide to a problem that is clearly troubling to children.