The National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction

Selected Quotes from Appendix C of the Study:“The purpose of this literature review is to move beyond fears or myths and paint anaccurate and data-centric portrait of what risks youth are truly facing. Although fears ofpotential dangers are pervasive, the research presented here documents the knownprevalence and frequency of Internet harm. Threats involving the Internet have notovertaken other harmful issues that youth encounter. For instance, although pervasive andfrequently reported in the media (Potter and Potter 2001), Internet sex crimes againstminors have not overtaken the number of unmediated sex crimes against minors (Wolaket al. 2003b), nor have they contributed to a rise in such crimes. This situation may seemat odds with the large number of reports made of Internet crimes against youth—in 2006,CyberTipline (a congressionally mandated system for reporting child crimes) received62,480 reports of child pornography, 1,098 of child prostitution, 566 of child sex tourism,2,156 of child sexual molestation, and 6,384 reports of online enticement of children forsexual acts (National Center for Missing & Exploited Children 2006). Yet the increasedpopularity of the Internet in the United States has not been correlated with an overallincrease in reported sexual offenses; overall sexual offenses against children have gonesteadily down in the last 18 years. State reported statistics show a –53% change in reportsof sexual offenses against children from 1992 to 2006 (Calpin 2006; Finkelhor and Jones2008), which Finkelhor (2008) argues is both significant and real. Furthermore, sexcrimes against youth not involving the Internet outweigh those that do; Internet-initiatedstatutory relationships are greatly outnumbered by ones initiated offline (Snyder andSickmund 2006; Wolak et al. 2003b) and the majority of sexual molestations areperpetrated primarily by those the victim knows offline, mainly by family members oracquaintances (Snyder and Sickmund 2006). This appears to be partly true of Internetinitiatedsexual offenses as well, as a considerable percentage (44%) of Internet sexualoffenders known to youth victims were family members (Mitchell et al. 2005b).” p. 10.* * *“More importantly, 95% of sexual assault cases reported to authorities are committed byfamily members or known acquaintances (Snyder and Sickmund 2006). In a study ofInternet-initiated sex crimes reported to law enforcement, 44% of crimes were committedby family members and 56% were committed by people known to the victim offline,including neighbors, friends’ parents, leaders of youth organizations, and teachers;known cases involving strangers are extremely rare (Mitchell et al. 2005b). In otherwords, the threat of Internet-initiated sex crimes committed by strangers appears to beextremely exaggerated (Finkelhor and Ormrod 2000).” p. 15.* * *“Online sexual solicitations by adults are of great concern, because some of this type ofcontact is considered to “groom” youth (Berson 2003) and coerce them to participate ineither offline or online sexual encounters. Although conceptually similar to the processthat pedophiles use to recruit child victims (Lang and Frenzel 1988), neither onlinesolicitations nor Internet-initiated relationships particularly involve prepubescentchildren. It is generally assumed that adults use some degree of deception in theC-3