Rachel Dretzin, Director, "Growing Up Online"
Opening Remarks at FOSI Roundtable, April 2008, Washington, DC
It may surprise you to hear that we had a difficult experience finding kids to interview on this film. Work on a film like this one usually begins much like an academic research study, by canvassing a wide group of potential subjects: data gathering, in essence. We figured the most direct way to find kids who spent a time online was to approach them online, and to request that we have a conversation about the worlds they inhabit there.
But to our surprise, that task turned out to be very challenging. The kids we approached online were suspicious of us, and loathe to respond to our requests for an interview-- even one conducted over the phone. We tried everything to prove our legitimacy: links to our Web site, offers to send copies of other films we had made for PBS-- but nothing seemed to work. Dozens of kids we met, without exception and cutting across all socioeconomic lines, told us the same thing: they were uncomfortable talking to or meeting someone in person who had approached them online. Given that this is a generation raised on the internet, this was surprising and oddly reassuring-- a testament both to the success of the safety education efforts out there, and to most kids' innate sense of self-protection.
Over time, we began to delve deeper into the issue of online predation, and learned more about the circumstances in which kids are vulnerable to being approached online by strangers. The best research, as some of you may know, was conducted by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and funded by the Dept of Justice. It found that virtually all cases of sexual exploitation online involved kids as active participants, rather than as passive victims. Most kids knew they were meeting someone older -- most thought they were in love-- and had made a decision to meet that person, however misguided that decision turned out to be. The picture most of us had of innocent kids being stalked online by predators lying in wait, their homes and schools staked out surreptitiously, is a virtually nonexistent scenario.
That was the first assumption that I had that was dismantled in the course of making this film. With regard to my other "big fear:" inappropriate content on the web, I was also suprised. Yes, the kids we met reported having been exposed to inappropriate content online from pretty early ages, whether or not they sought it out. One story in particular pointed to how inevitable this exposure is: Greg, one of our characters, told us about an experience he had in fifth grade. He was sitting in the school library, a librarian on each side, and they were showing him how to find the answer to a social studies question online. They told him to type in a website address. Accidentally, he got one letter wrong, and ended up at a porn site-- right there in the school library! One of the librarians, mortified, quickly hit the exit key.
But the truth is, despite this widespread exposure, we found few kids who reported being shaken or traumatized by this kind of experience. For kids like Greg, it was just another story to laugh about. Many kids we met-- the ones who were pretty grounded from the start-- had moved on, finding that the violence and sexual content wore old the more exposure they had. There is, after all, a certain illicit quality that makes the stuff appealing. If you can get it whenever you want it, many kids lose interest.
So where do you look for evidence of the impact of this adult content, when at least in our experience, kids themselves are unlikely to report having been affected by it? In my mind, the dangers of widespread exposure to this content is evidenced in the more ephemeral cultural shifts that happen, for example when an entire generation of kids is exposed to pornography at an early age. The sexual behavior of some teens, something I've studied a bit over the years, seems to be shifting to one that vaguely mimics the structure of the pornography they see: hookups rather than relationships, girls feeling they have to look and act like porn stars to attract boys. This isn't coming from the internet alone. It's on the billboards they see walking down the street and most significantly the television they watch. But the internet no doubt plays a big role.
Here's where I landed after a year of talking to kids. The internet does not have the power to transform a perfectly healthy child. But for vulnerable kids, kids who are already at risk offline, the online world can become a rabbit hole. The reality, I have come to believe, is that the dangers our kids do face online often come out of a stance of complicity: a sort of dance between what's going on inside them and what's available to them on the outside, online. It's so often the things that kids use the internet to do to themselves and each other: the conversion of their particular risk factors and the internet's willingness to go anywhere- that can lead them into harm. These things are hard to measure and track and even harder to regulate. More significantly, the message we parents and others give our kids not to talk to strangers and to avoid inappropriate content on the web, though valuable messages, aren't going to address these deeper, more subtle issues. In fact, they can at times be a sort of smokescreen, giving us a false sense of complacency that prevents us from recognizing other risks.
Let me explain what I mean by giving you some examples of some of the more disturbing things kids told us over the course of the many months we spent researching this film.. These are the stories we heard over and over again--- NOT the stories of being traumatized by explicit content or being tricked by predators. This is the daily bread of growing up online.
— Kids talk about "flaming" each other, which means leaving bad comments rapidly on someone's myspace page or IM account. One kid told us that within an hour there were 1210 negative comments about her on her social networking page.
— Kids told us about selling each others passwords in the school cafeteria and then using those passwords to create fake accounts in other kids names. For example, they might use someone else's password to send a message saying "I DON'T WANT YOU TO SIT WITH ME ANYMORE AT LUNCH", and then suddenly that friend will not have any friends anymore
— The story of Ryan Halligan, which we told in the film. Ryan's father was a manager at IBM who considered himself savvy about the dangers of the internet. He had laid down the rules for Ryan: no talking to strangers, no visiting porn sites or violent websites. No giving out his real name or address online. And Ryan didn't break a single one of those rules. But he did get bullied both at school and online and was called gay by some of his friends. Over the summer between seventh and eighth grade, in an effort to fend off the rumours of being gay, Ryan began to flirt on instant messaging with a popular girl who pretended to like him online all summer, only to publicly humiliate him when school started in September, telling him it had all been a big joke. Depressed and insecure, Ryan then formed an online friendship with a boy who used to go to his school, who happened to be fascinated by death. Together, they visited suicide and death-themed websites. With his friend's encouragement, Ryan ended up committing suicide at the age of 13.
Or the story of 15 year old Sara, who wrote us this letter shortly after we met her in a school focus group:
"I am one of the teenage girls who suffers from eating disorders and self mutilation. As i am unable to tell my parents, friends, or family about my situation, i use the interent to find other people like me and to talk freely to people who have simillar problems. The interent also provides me with razor blades, tips on cutting, better ways to harm myself, pills to suppress my appetite and to burn fat faster, and other ways to keep my weight down without anyone else knowing about it.. Being on the internet I am allowed to be who i am with out anyone finding out that it is really me or even knowing me. My favorite thing about using the internet is that while i am under my parents roof, I can be who I really am… with out anyone knowing that it is me and if i want to find out about an eaiser way to harm myself i can and no one can stop me. The internet is extremely dangerous for me becuase i know that i could end up hurt, or even extremely ill and no one might know."
When I asked Sara if her parents were concerned about her internet activity, she said no, because they knew she would never give out her name and address to a potential predator, which was their main concern. And of course, she wouldn't have.
The takeaway here for me is that kids who are at risk off line are very much at risk online, and while we should certainly not cease our efforts to restrict inappropriate content and teach our kids not to talk to strangers online, the kind of work we really have to do, in my mind, is much more delicate. It involves a widespread education effort. We have to teach our kids judgment and civics online as well as offline. We have to create forums in their schools, and in their online communities-- places for kids and parents to share their online experiences and for adults to identify and reach out to kids who are in trouble. We have to get in on the ground floor with our kids and find ways to dialogue with them, both in the offline and in the online world. As parents and educators, its tempting to say "we've given them all the warnings they need." But those warnings aren't enough. This is a journey we are going to have to find a way to take together: us and our kids-- and for better or worse, there are no shortcuts.
