A Child's Playground or a Predator's Hunting Ground? How to Protect Children on Internet Social Networking Sites
Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: Playing on swing sets has become an archaic childhood past-time, replaced by the virtual world of chat rooms, blogs, and instant messenger.'Children today are growing up "watching, listening to and interacting with technology and media for any purpose, including TV, radio, iPods, video games, computers and the Internet." 2 This new generation of Internet-savvy children is prevalent in cyberspace 3 where entertainment, friendships, and refuge become accessible at the click of a finger.'Unfortunately, despite the educational, recreational, interpersonal, and even therapeutic value the Internet offers the t J.D. Candidate, May 2008, The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law.See Cable in the Classroom, Fact Sheet: PTA Back-to-School Media Briefing (Aug.10, 2006), http://www.ciconline.org/parenting(follow "Fact Sheet: Research on Children and the Internet" hyperlink).As of 2005, approximately nine out of ten teenagers were Internet users (amounting to twenty-one million youth) and fifty-one percent of them reported going online daily.AMANDA LENHART ET AL., PEW INTERNET & AM.LIFE PROJECT, TEENS AND TECHNOLOGY, at i (2005), http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIPTeens TechJuly2005web.pdf.Teenagers are even more likely to use the Internet than the average adult.See Pew Internet & Am.Life Project, February to March 2007 Demographics of Internet Users, http://www.pewinternet.org/trends/UserDemo_6.15.07.htm (last visited Nov. 8, 2007) (stating that seventy-one percent of all American adults reported using the Internet "at least occasionally" or had "sen[t] or receive[d] email, at least occasionally.").2 Cable in the Classroom, supra note 1. 3 Cyberspace is a unique medium of newsgroups, chat rooms, electronic mail, and the World Wide Web "located in no particular geographical location but available to anyone, anywhere in the world, with access to the Internet."Reno v. ACLU (Reno I1), 521 U.S. 844, 851 (1997).
Author: Jessica S. Groppe
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W798768090