Strategies to thwart abuse should involve prevention across all Internet media.
Rapidly growing use of social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook and MySpace has raised concerns about online sexual victimization of youth. To explore the ways in which SNSs are implicated in sex crimes against minors, researchers conducted surveys of >2500 law enforcement agencies, followed by detailed interviews about >1000 individual cases in 2006 that resulted in arrests related to Internet sex crimes against minors.
About one third of all arrests for Internet-related sex crimes against minors involved SNSs. Most offenders began relationships with their victims at other websites, primarily chat rooms. SNSs facilitated these crimes in various ways, including initiating relationships, communicating with victims, accessing or dissemi…