US Teens For Real Meetings Often Became Gets Acquainted Through The Internet

US Teens For Real Meetings Often Became Gets Acquainted Through The Internet.
Nearly a third of American teenage girls sway that at some property they've met up with tribe with whom their only prior contact was online, new research reveals. For more than a year, the go into tracked online and offline activity among more than 250 girls aged 14 to 17 years and found that 30 percent followed online understanding with in-person contact, raising concerns about high-risk behavior that might ensue when teens place the leap from social networking into real-world encounters with strangers. Girls with a narrative of neglect or physical or sexual abuse were particularly prone to presenting themselves online (both in images and verbally) in ways that can be construed as sexually precise and provocative.

Doing so, researchers warned, increases their danger of succumbing to the online advances of strangers whose goal is to victim upon such girls in person. "Statistics show that in and of itself, the Internet is not as dangerous a place as, for example, walking through a genuinely bad neighborhood," said study lead author Jennie Noll, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati and chief honcho of research in behavioral medicine and clinical psychology at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. The huge majority of online meetings are benign.

On the other hand, 90 percent of our adolescents have diurnal access to the Internet, and there is a risk surrounding offline meetings with strangers, and that hazard exists for everyone. So even if just 1 percent of them end up having a chancy encounter with a stranger offline, it's still a very big problem.

So "On top of that, we found that kids who are in particular sexual and provocative online do receive more sexual advances from others online, and are more likely to upon these strangers, who, after sometimes many months of online interaction, they might not even view as a 'stranger' by the time they meet," Noll continued. "So the implications are dangerous". The study, which was supported by a award from the US National Institutes of Health, appeared online Jan 14, 2013 and in the February type number of the journal Pediatrics.