It's Complicated

4. danger - are sexual predators lurking everywhere?

Fred and Aaron, white fifteen-year-old friends living in suburban Texas, are avid gamers. When we first met in 2007, their mothers were present. I asked about their participation on social network sites, and they explained that they didn't use those sites but loved sites like Runescape, a fantasy game with customizable avatars. Their mothers nodded, acknowledging their familiarity with Runescape before interrupting their children's narrative to express how unsafe social network sites were. Something about Fred and Aaron's gritted nod in response left me wondering how these teens really felt about MySpace and Facebook — sites that were all the rage with their peer group at the time. Later, almost immediately after I sat with the boys alone to talk with them in-depth, they offered a different story.

Aaron explained that he was active on MySpace but that his mother didn't know. Since many of his friends were using Facebook, he would have liked to create an account there, too, but his mother had an account on Facebook for work and he feared she would accidentally stumble onto his profile. Out of deference to his mother, Fred had yet to create an account on either site, but he was struggling to decide whether to keep abiding by his mother's restrictions going forward. Fred told me that his parents forbade him from Facebook and MySpace after seeing "all the stuff on the news." He said that his parents were afraid that "if I get on it, I'll be assaulted." Aaron chimed in to sarcastically remark, "He'll meet in real life with a lonely forty-year-old man." They both laughed at this idea.

Neither Fred nor Aaron believed that joining MySpace would make them vulnerable to sexual predators, but they were still concerned about upsetting their mothers. Both felt that their mothers' fears were ill founded, but they also acknowledged that this fear was coming from a genuine place of concern. Although their demeanor was lighthearted, their discussion of their mothers' fears was solemn: they worried that their mothers worried.

Although Aaron had violated his mother's restriction by joining MySpace, he was conscientious about his profile there. His profile was private and filled with fake information and a non-identifiable photo, in part to minimize his mother's concerns if she were to find out about the account and in part to minimize the likelihood of her finding out at all. In explaining his actions, Aaron spoke of protecting his mom just as she had told me about her desire to protect him. He wanted to save his mother from fretting about him. This dynamic — children worrying about mothers and mothers worrying about children — was something I saw often.

Like their parents, Aaron and Fred's understanding of MySpace was shaped by the concern that unfolded over sexual predators in the mid-2000s. They understood where their mothers' anxieties came from, even if they found the explanation illogical. Starting in 2005, news media across the United States began to suggest that MySpace was an unsafe place for youth, a place where sexual predators — understood to be older men with malicious intentions — sought out vulnerable children.[1] Although this was not the first time that the issue of online sexual predators emerged in the media, previous dis- cussions had taken place before the internet had become mainstream among teens and before social media had become a media phenomenon.[2] Parents were warned to keep their kids away from MySpace completely, lest they become someone's prey.

This message of danger was heard loud and clear. The teens I interviewed had all heard terrible stories of teenagers being harmed by older male sexual predators they met on MySpace. In particular, girls believed these stories and feared the possibility of being raped, stalked, kidnapped, or assaulted by strangers as a result of their participation online. Their fears were rooted not in personal experience but in media cover- age magnified by parental concerns. Teens often referred to the Dateline NBC TV show To Catch a Predator as proof that evil men are lurking behind every keyboard, ready to pounce on them. From news stories to school assemblies, teens were surrounded by messages about the dangers of predation. Although some teens rejected such messages as unfounded, others internalized them. Yet all were aware of the issue and were grappling with their feelings regarding the risks of social media.