 Thank you all for having me, my name is Michelle Ibarra and Internet Solutions for Kids also is a non-profit organization, we focus on research, adolescent health research, understanding how the internet and newer technologies are affecting the health and well-being of young people and then from the other side thinking about how we can use it as a prevention and intervention tool. So I'm going to give you a roadmap for what it is that I want to discuss today. We'll be talking about unwanted sexual solicitation and internet harassment. First we'll cover some definitions, what exactly is it that we're talking about, we'll talk about prevalence rates over time, how often does this happen, how many young people is it actually affecting, what is the influence the social networking sites seem to be having on harassment and sexual solicitation. Then we'll get into how rates compare online versus offline and then we'll also touch on whether or not there are other factors beyond the technology itself that we need to be aware of. The data that I'll be talking about today come from three data sets and I have to say it's such a treat to be on this panel where we all have nationally representative data, it's very rare and it's great, it's definitely the gold standard. So three data sets that I'll be using are nationally representative, one is the growing up with media survey, it's a longitudinal survey that is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at Baseline which was 2006, we recruited 1,588 households, young people had to be between the ages of 10 and 15 years of age, had to use the internet at least once every month for the last six months so that would give us kind of a wide range of internet use and then English speaking. This sample is actually recruited from the Harris panel online which is over four million members and then what we do is we weight it back to the general population and we also do something called propensity scoring so that we take into account the fact that this panel is online and in so doing it becomes nationally representative. The other two surveys that we'll be using today are the youth internet safety surveys one and two. These surveys were headed up by Dr. David Finkelhor and his colleagues at the University of New Hampshire. The first survey was conducted in 2000 and then they did a replication survey so it's not longitudinal in that we're talking to the same kids but they took the same survey and refilled it in 2005 to kind of understand how things had changed and how they had stayed the same. For both surveys 1,500 households were recruited, they used a telephone random digit dial methodology, young people were between the ages of 10 and 17 so slightly larger range of young people but he or two they had to have used the internet for about once at least once a month for the last six months so you have kind of a variety of internet usage. English speaking and adults needed to be equally or most knowledgeable about youth's internet use. All right so as Amanda said we are finding that social networking site usage is growing. What we asked there's lots of different ways as Amanda said there's lots of different ways to ask questions to slice the data the way that we asked it was so among all of the activities all the things that you do online what are the top two things that you spend the most of your time doing so in 2006 16 percent of our kids said social networking sites were in their top two and that doubled in 2007 so it's a huge increase over one year. We're finding the increase is true for boys and for girls so at 2006 12 percent of boys and 22 percent of girls this again is the sex difference that Amanda was talking about girls significantly more likely to be on social networking sites but for both boys and girls you're seeing a huge jump to make it that now about one in three young people by sex rate social networking sites is one of the top two activities that they're spending time online doing. Same is true across ages and as Amanda suggested you see a huge spike so for 10 and 11 12 year olds not a whole lot going on then you start looking at 14 15 16 year olds and there's quite a bit of activity going on and the way to read this slide obviously our kids aged by one year so what you can do is you can not only see how it's trending over time but you can compare 11 year olds in 2006 with 11 year olds in 2007 not a whole lot going on you look at 14 year olds from 2006 and 14 year olds in 2007 you're seeing a huge jump. So let's talk about internet harassment and cyberbullying these quotes are from the second youth internet safety survey that so the data were collected in 2005 a fortune year old boy said I have my own website and I have my own page on it and somebody posted something bad about me on it a 15 year old boy said I was playing a first person shooter game and unintentionally offended this person became very serious and began to threaten me by saying if this were real life he would physically harm me it happened because he was unable to accept that this was just a game. So when we talk about definitions it depends on the survey the youth internet safety surveys defined it one way growing up with media we defined it another way and Pew defined it a third way. This is pretty common when we're kind of coming in social science when we're identifying kind of a new experience and we're trying to figure out the best way to measure it but what it does mean is that you'll end up seeing differential rates differing rates based upon what specific activities we're asking about. So in the youth internet safety surveys young people are asked whether or not they'd ever received rudermeen comments on the internet felt worried or threatened because somebody was bothering or harassing them online or whether somebody had used the internet to threaten or embarrass them by posting or sending information. So one is getting at kind of direct contact that's harassing and bothering and then the other is getting at somebody posting or sending information for others to see. In the growing up with media survey we asked about rudermeen comments threatening or aggressive comments and whether or not anybody spread rumors about the young person whether or not they were true. So you see some similarities across the three surveys and also some differences. So there's some good news. Youth internet safety survey the first one was conducted in 2000 and the second was conducted in 2005 so this is not quite the good news. Using the same questions in both surveys they saw a 50% increase from 6% in the first survey to 9% in the second survey said yes this has happened to me at least once in the last year. In the growing up with media survey we're actually seeing a stabling of rates. At baseline in 2006 34% said yes one of these things has happened to me at least once in the last year and when we asked them again in 2007 the same percentage 34% said yes one of these things has happened to me in the last year. In the growing up with media survey we also asked how often does this happen has it happened once or twice does it happen monthly does it happen every day you know give us a sense of kind of how frequent this is happening. When we look at young people who are frequently harassed because the idea is that those who are frequently harassed is a much more serious experience than those for whom it happens only once or twice. Again we're seeing stabling of stabilizing of rates so 8% at baseline said that they were harassed monthly or more often same percentage in 2007. So we don't seem to be seeing a significant increase. When you look at continuity of harassment over time one in five young people report being harassed both at baseline and at follow-up and those are the kids that I'm really concerned about. You're seeing 13% who were harassed at baseline only and 14% who were harassed at follow-up only. Sorry so wave one wave two I should probably be a lot more consistent with but at follow-up at one year follow-up in 2007. Exactly yeah 8% of the whole. So who is doing the harassing? Well based upon data from the Youth Internet Safety Survey 2 which was done in 2005 again young people who said yes I've been harassed in the last year they were asked who is the harasser. Well 8% said it was somebody between the ages of 10 and 12. 51% said it was somebody between the ages of 13 and 17. 21% said somebody between 18 and 25. 2% said it was somebody who was 26 years of age or older. And then 18% said I don't know. So what that means is that 59% of the harassment comes from other minors. And then an additional 21% is coming from 25 year olds and younger. So only 2% is what we're seeing of harassers who are 26 years of age and older. So how does social networking sites fit into all of this? Well again so the 16 and 34% of the same percentages that you saw earlier right? 16% in 2006 said social networking sites are one of the two things that I spend the majority of my time doing. In 2007 that jumped up to 34. Okay so then within that context that we're seeing a doubling of usage in social networking sites what does that mean for harassment? Well in 2006 9% of young people said that they had been harassed in a social networking site and that increased to 16% in 2007. So we're seeing an increase in harassment in social networking sites as we're seeing an increase in the number of young people who report using social networking sites frequently. It's about what we would expect. I do want to point out however that a twofold increase would be 18%. So we're slightly under that. Now what's the likelihood of social networking site users will be harassed? So to give the context among those who said social networking sites are one of the two top activities that I do online, 61% of social networking site users in 2006 said that they had been harassed anywhere on the internet. And that decreased down to 50% in 2007. So social networking site users, the percentage of young people who said they'd been harassed decreased. The percentage of social networking site users who said they'd been harassed in social networking sites stabilized. 35% in 2006, 37% in 2007. So even though we saw the doubling of young people using social networking sites among social networking site users, we're not seeing an increase in harassment. So how do rates compare online or offline? We define bullying based upon Oveas who's kind of the guru of adolescent bullying research. The definition is different from what we typically will talk about in internet harassment. Internet harassment can be obnoxious, annoying sorts of things. They can happen once, they can happen 100 times. It's still diffuse at this point, but bullying based upon Oveas is pretty clear. There has to be a differential power dynamic and it has to be repetitive. We're not talking about something that happens once. So in Wave 2 in 2007, we wanted to better understand how does everything compare online and offline? What's really going on with these kids? And we said, look, this is how we define bullying. We say a young person is being bullied or harassed when somebody else or a group of people repeatedly kicks, threatens, or says nastier and pleasant things to them. Another example is when no one ever talks to them. Okay, so we're getting at both physical bullying and relational bullying. Relational bullying has to do with social exclusion, rumors spread, that type of thing. We say these things can happen at school online or other places. Young people hang out. It is not bullying when two young people of about the same strength fight or tease each other. This is not something we created ourselves. It's actually a measure of bullying that has been used for years. And what we found, we gave them five different places. We said school, internet, cell phones, community, and anywhere else. How often has bullying happened to you based upon this definition? Well, the good news is that overwhelmingly across all environments, the vast majority say this has never happened to me in the last year. But when you compare school versus internet, school versus any other environment, 31% say it's happened to me at least once. Wow, bullying within our definition of repetition. It's happened to me at school compared to 13% on the internet. We also asked about cell phones. We have 6% of young people saying, yes, that's happened to me on cell phones. 11% say it's happened to me in the community. And then an interesting 13% are saying it's happening somewhere else online. That's kind of an interesting group to figure out where that's happening. No, sorry, I did. That's what I said, but that's not what I meant. Yes, thank you. It's just somewhere else in their life. And then it seems to hold true, not just kind of in general, but when you look at the young people who say this has happened to me, frequently it's happening to me monthly or more often. 5% of young people at school, that's 1 in 20 young people at school, say that this bullying, as you've defined it, is happening to me at least once a month or more often. And then 2% is the next highest on the internet and in the community. So does it matter? What's the impact that internet harassment seems to be having on these young people? Well, in the Youth Internet Safety Surveys and in the Growing Up with Media Survey, young people who said they'd been harassed were asked, how did you feel about this experience? Or how upset were you by this experience? They had 5 options, one being not upset at all, to extremely upset. And so when we kind of identify those young people who have been very or extremely upset or afraid because of the incident, we see a range of 25 to 38% depending on the survey. So between 1 in 4, 1 in 3 young people say, you know, it made me very or extremely upset. So there's an important minority who are affected. Yeah, harassment. Yes, thank you for the clarification. So we're talking about 1 in 4 young people who have been harassed, okay? So not among all young people, but among those who are harassed, what is their reaction? So the opposite of that is true as well, right? So 3 in 4 young people say, I wasn't really all that affected, right? We, I haven't looked at it in the Growing Up with Media Survey. When we look at the Youth Internet Safety Survey 2 stuff, we did see that young people who reported multiple harassments were significantly more likely to be distressed. What else is going on with these kids? Well, a lot. So in all 3 surveys, we also asked about other things that were going on in these young people's lives. None of this, none of these data that I'm showing you are longitudinal. They're all cross-sectional, so I don't mean to imply that harassment is causing these problems or that these problems are causing harassment, but rather just to say, these kids who are being harassed are significantly more likely to have a lot of other stuff going on, okay? So across all 3 surveys, we're seeing interpersonal victimization and offline bullying. So kids who are being targeted for harassment and bullying online are significantly more likely to be targeted by the same sort of peer victimization offline. We also see some indication that they're significantly more likely to have social problems, problems interacting socially with other people. For boys specifically, we saw indications of increased likelihood of depression, alcohol and substance use, and then responding to stimuli with anger. We don't get into it today because it's not central, but across all surveys, what we're seeing is young people who have been harassed are significantly more likely to harass others. So there's kind of this interaction effect that not all these young people are kind of naive, vulnerable people that are not reacting, or instead it's very similar to the bullying experience that we're seeing offline. We have some people who are just bullies, some people who are just victims, but you also see bully victims, and we're seeing the same thing on the internet. And I think that's what's going on with the last measure. Okay, so we've talked a lot, we've just looked at a lot of data, so let's do a quick synopsis. The prevalence rate of internet harassment appears to be stable. Social networking site users are not significantly more likely to be harassed now than they were in 2006, even though the number of social networking site, frequent social networking site people, users have increased. School is by far the most commonplace young people report being bullied. The majority of internet harassment appears to be coming from peers, those under the age of 18, and youth who report being harassed online report a myriad of concurrent psychosocial problems offline too. So the question is about kind of mobile phones and kind of how the ability to now connect to the internet on mobile phones, what does that mean for all of these statistics because it now kind of blurs the lines. And we do have just like harassment, we had very specific questions about has this happened to you, has this happened to you. We have the same questions in terms of text messaging, so we make it very specific about text messaging. And I don't have those dated today. For the comparison across environments for bullying, we just said cell phones. So whatever that meant to the young person is how they responded. Just social networking sites. So the question is, did we ask specifically about specific sites, or was it a much more general sort of social networking sites? It was much more general. I mean, the question said, right, so here's a list of activities that young people engage in online. Of the things that you do online, what are the top two? And one option was social networking sites, and then in brackets we had, for example, MySpace Facebook. But we didn't say specifically which ones are. No, so the question is, what about things like somebody stealing your password? Again, kind of this idea of somebody hacking into your profile or creating your profile, kind of really focusing on social networking sites. We didn't, and the reason we didn't do that is because we wanted to have a very, in order to be able to compare rates across, you need to have a parallel measure. And that's not to say that there are things online that don't translate to offline, and similarly there are things offline that don't translate to online. But what we wanted to do was kind of say, this is generally what it would look like and how, where has it happened to you? So, sure, that's right. Okay, so if there are no other points for clarification, okay. We'll move on to unwanted sexual solicitation. So here are some quotes again from the Second Youth Internet Safety Survey from young people who reported unwanted sexual solicitation. A 14-year-old girl said, I was chatting on the internet and this guy just popped up in an instant message and started talking really dirty to me and saying things that I'd never heard before. He told me he was 30 years old and then he said, LOL, otherwise known to laugh out loud. A 12-year-old girl said, I went into a chat room and they asked me if I wanted to have cyber sex. I was asking them what kind of music they liked and stuff. And then an 11-year-old boy said, who was, 11-year-old boy, he was playing an online game with a man who was 20, said he asked me something personal, something about a man's private. So there's a lot going on in these quotes, but a couple of things that I want to point out. One of the things that we're asked about a lot is this issue of deception, right? The concern that you have adults who are pretending to be of the same age, who are pretending to wanting to be friends as opposed to having a sexual interest. And I think the first quote really very clearly does a good job of dispelling a little bit of that, right? She knew that he was 30. He didn't pretend that he was 14. He was very clear that he was 30. And he didn't pretend that he wanted to be her friend. He was pretty clear that there was sexual intention. So this concern about deception may not really be grounded in the data. And I also, you know, the first thing happened and it's the messaging, the second happened in chat rooms, the third happened in games. That's just to make the point that, as you all know, just to reinforce what you already know, which is that unwanted sexual solicitation and any sort of contact with positive and negative can happen anywhere where young people are communicating online. It's my view that it's not reflected in the data. However, as a researcher, I tend to say suggestive of... Yes, no, yes. Pin me down. I will go on record saying, based upon the data we have to date, it is not supported by the data. Deception is not supported by the data. All right. So how do we define unwanted sexual solicitation? We use the same questions across all three surveys, which is fantastic because then the numbers are directly comparable. We ask young people whether or not somebody tried to get them to talk about sex when they did not want to. Whether or not somebody had asked them for sexual information when they did not want to tell the person. We're talking about really personal information, like what your body looks like, what your bra size is. Whether or not somebody asked you to do something sexual when you didn't want to. Of course, that could be, you know, with a webcam being asked to take off your shirt or that kind of thing. A couple of points here. These can... These tap into a wide range of experiences, some that can be relatively benign, some that can be relatively serious. Okay. Not all of these reflect a young person being solicited for sex. So when we talk about unwanted sexual solicitation, we're talking more about solicitation for information rather than sexual activity. So from Youth Internet Safety Survey 1 to Youth Internet Safety Survey 2, so 2000 to 2005, the prevalence rate of unwanted sexual solicitation decreased from 19% to 13%. These are the data that you know, right? The one in five, that's now one in seven who have been solicited. Again, make the point. We're not talking about solicited for sex. All right. So significant decrease. Good news. In the Growing Up with the Media Survey, in 2006, 15% said that they had been solicited. We followed up with them again. In 2007, the rates looked relatively stable. 13% said this has happened to me. So good news that it seems relatively stable. Good news that we're seeing similar percentages across surveys too. It gives us, as researchers, a little bit confidence that we're tapping into the same stuff across samples. So in the Growing Up with Media Survey, again, we're asking people how often has this happened? Did it happen once? Did it happen monthly? Did it happen every day? So young people, 3.4% in 2006 said this has happened to me at least monthly or more often. It's really not all that common, right? 3.5% of all young people say this is happening to me monthly. We asked them again in 2007, similar percentage. In fact, exactly similar percentage, 3.4%. So it's quite stable among our sample. Continuity of solicitation over time. 6% reported at least one solicitation at both time points, both at 2006 and again at 2007. 8% reported solicitation only in 2006 and then said, no, this didn't happen to me in the last year in 2007. And then 7% reported, no, it hasn't happened to me in 2006 and newly reported in 2007. And again, it's that 6% that as an adolescent health researcher I'm really concerned about. So when we look at solicitation across ages, and the cool thing now is that we've got four data sets basically that we can look at. And you're seeing a pretty clear picture, a pretty obvious trend. 10 and 11, 12-year-olds, not a whole lot going on. 15, 16, 17-year-olds, whole lot going on. This is an issue that is most common for older teens, 15 to 17 years of age, who, by the way, are normatively becoming developmentally curious about sex. Who's doing the soliciting? So in the Second Youth Internet Safety Survey, similar to the internet harassment data, young people who said, yes, this has happened to me, they were asked to follow up question, who was it? Well, 43% said it was somebody who was 17 years of age and younger. 30% said it was 18 to 25 years of age and younger. Excuse me, 30% said it was somebody between the ages of 18 and 25. 19% said it was somebody 26 years of age and older. And then 18% said I don't know who it is. Absolutely. So the question is kind of what would it look like if we actually changed the definition of the category to make it a more sort of typical college age, 18 to 22. What does that do to our 30%? The quick answer is I don't know. I haven't been close to these data for a while, but I would also say that 25 is still within, frankly, now kind of the typical age of a college attending person, I think, has increased such that you would easily find 25-year-olds in college still. Nature of large universities, people often take years to get the classes they need to finish, et cetera. I mean, six years is now a standard amount of time to spend getting a degree. So I think 18 to 24, 25 is actually quite a reasonable way of thinking about university age. Yeah. So it's a good point. And so the point is here that for us, we kind of see 18 to 25 as the college age group. Yeah. Okay. So the question is, I think kind of where are these data coming from? Is it being verified in any way? Is that what you're asking? Yeah. Right. Well, those could be two, one and the same thing, right? So somebody could say, I'm 30, and then you see on a webcam that this guy looks around 30. I mean, so it is based upon youth, self-reported knowledge of the person's age, however it was obtained. Yes. Well, the kid was, what the child was told. So if the young person is under the impression that the solicitor is 30, then in this graph, in this page, they would fall into the 30 category. And they didn't know face-to-face how sure they were of the age. And most of the kids said not at all, sure. That figure shows what kids thought the age was, but most kids also said they weren't at all, sure. All right. So let's talk about social networking sites and how that kind of impacts the picture of unwanted sexual solicitation. So again, the 16 and 34 percent, this is a percentage that you're well familiar with at this point, 16 percent said social networking sites, one of the top two things I do in 2006, that increases to 34 percent. Okay. So the question is, do we see a similar increase in the percentage of young people who report being solicited in social networking sites? And the answer is mostly. 4 percent in 2006 said that they were solicited in a social networking site and just under half, or just under double, rather. So a doubling of 4 percent would be 8 percent to mirror the doubling and usage. We see 7 percent. 7 percent of all young people in our survey in 2007 said that they were solicited in a social networking site. What's the likelihood that social networking site users will be solicited? So among those that say social networking sites and there are top two things that they do, 27 percent in 2006 and 22 percent in 2007 said that they were solicited just somewhere online. Right. So one point to make is that social networking site users can be solicited at other places, can be harassed at other places. Again, it kind of gets at there's a multitude of activities that young people are engaging in online. These things are happening a lot of different places online. So 27 percent and 22 percent of frequent social networking site users said that they were solicited somewhere online. When we look at social networking site, frequent social networking site users being solicited in social networking sites, it's pretty stable. 15 percent said yes. I was solicited in a social networking site in 2006 and the same percentage said yes in 2007. How do the rates compare online and offline? We used a parallel question to tap into school-based sexual solicitation. So we said the following question is about your experiences at school. In the past 12 months, have any of the three, these three things happened to you, right? So did anybody ask you to try and ask you to talk about sex when you didn't want to, to provide sexual information when you didn't want to and to do something sexual that you didn't want to? Yeah, not exactly what we would have expected, right? But we see good news. 83 percent and 87 percent in both environments say no, this never happened to me. But 16 percent of young people say, yeah, that's happened to me at least once in the past year at school, compared to 13 percent that said, yeah, that's happened to me once at least on the internet. So I think it's fair to say that at least from this slide, we can conclude that the internet doesn't seem to be representing or causing an explosion of sexual harassment and solicitation that is much, in fact, we're seeing similar percentages of other environments that young people spend a lot of time in, for example, school. So the question is kind of what overlap are we talking about? Are we talking about the same kids? Are we talking about different kids? I don't, I could get the answer for you, but I don't know off the top of my head. But yeah, I'll just all leave it there. Right, so the point is that we, unlike the bullying question, we only asked about school. We didn't ask about other places offline. And hopefully, ostensibly, at school, really the only thing that we are measuring is peer-to-peer solicitation, and it's possible that in other environments, non-school, face-to-face environments that young people could be solicited by adults. I think that's a good point. And I think if that's the case, then we're undercounting the amount of solicitation that's happening offline, which then just furthers the hypothesis that the internet is not the only place that we need to be concerned about what's going on in our kids' lives. The impact of unwanted sexual solicitation, similar to internet harassment, young people who were solicited were asked, how upset or afraid did this make you? Among young people who were solicited between one and four and one and three said, I was pretty upset, very or extremely upset by what happened. We did look at youth who reported being solicited in a social networking site versus being solicited somewhere else, and people are not significantly more likely to be upset by the solicitation that occurs in social networking sites compared to other places online. What else is going on in these kids' lives? A lot, a lot. We're looking at youth internet city survey one and the Wave 2 data from growing up with media, again cross-sectional, so I'm not implying causality at all, but kids who report unwanted sexual solicitation are also reporting victimization offline from their peers into the form of bullying and other sorts of physical type of interpersonal victimization, and that's consistent across data sets. We're also seeing substance use and alcohol use. What also is concerning in the growing up with media survey is weapon caring at school. Kids who are solicited online are 10 times more likely to report carrying a weapon to school in the last 30 days. I'm not saying it's causing it, but I'm saying it's definitely a marker for concern. All right, so quick synopsis. Rate of unwanted sexual solicitation overall seems to be stable. Social networking users are no more likely to be solicited in social networking site now than they were in 2006. We're seeing at least similar percentages of youth being reported, youth report being solicited online as being solicited at school. Almost half of sexual solicitations are estimated to come from minors, and the overwhelming majority of targeted youth are 14 years of age and older. And again, similar to the internet harassment youth, youth who report being targeted by unwanted sexual solicitation have a lot of other stuff going on in their lives. They're reporting a lot of other concurrent psychosocial problems. So quick implications, yes. So you're asking about the psychosocial profile of kids who are solicited online versus solicited offline? Yes, so kids who, that's right, that's exactly right. So kids who report being targeted by unwanted sexual solicitation on the internet versus kids who do not report being targeted online by unwanted sexual solicitation are significantly more likely to also report problems in their relationship with their caregiver, significantly more likely to report problems with their peers, significantly more likely to report a multitude of behavior problems. And so that's the point, that these young people who are being solicited online are also reporting a multitude of psychosocial problems offline. So in terms of inferences, again with the Youth Internet Safety Survey data that Janice and I worked on with Kim and David at the University of New Hampshire, we did look with the Youth Internet Safety Survey too kind of across nine different types of behaviors that are typically deemed as risky, right? And this includes sending information, posting information, harassing others online, talking to people you know only online, talking about sex with people you know only online. And what we found to be the strongest predictor or the most influential in helping us understand the odds of being harassed and sexually solicited is the total number of things that young people report doing online. So it's kind of these young people that are really kind of out there and engaging in lots of different things that seems to be the greatest predictor. So I think I'll leave it there. Thanks.