PEG 2.0

The belief that sexual deviants by the tens of thousands are prowling the Internet in search of children to entice and corrupt, and that their ranks are increasing rapidly, has won broad popular acceptance. The most widely cited statistic is “one in five,” as in the number of children who have supposedly been approached by a sexual predator on the Internet. The origin of this figure is the Department of Justice’s National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which first reported it in 2001. Five years later the center amended the result to one in seven, but by either measure the figure suggests nothing less than an epidemic.

Until you look closer. The actual question posed in the department’s “Youth Internet Safety” survey asked teenagers under 17 if they had received an “unwanted sexual solicitation,” which was defined as follows: “a request to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that was unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult.” Since “adult” in this case was defined as anyone 17 or older, the definition included many would-be high-school Romeos, predators of a highly conventional and not particularly dangerous sort, and also took in a strain of intimate gossip familiar to all teenage girls. As the study’s authors themselves noted, half the solicitations came from other teenagers. Not a single solicitation led to actual sexual contact.