Wide Area News
Get it together
by Russell Brown
When confronted with the latest teen-sex outrage, parents need to bear in mind the results of silly reactions from the past.
TEEN WEB TRAP. That, in capital letters coming out of lurid pink, was the straphead for the lead story in the Christchurch Press of July 11. The story, “Dad’s plea for police to check Net sites”, centred on an interview with “a horrified Christchurch dad whose teenage daughter invited a stranger home for sex”.
The “web” part was fair enough: the two teens had met online, on the social networking site Bebo.com, before planning their sexual liaison. But where was the “trap”? Nowhere in the Press story, that’s for sure. The newspaper conjured up the popular impression of internet predation for a story that was about something else altogether.
The father who contacted the Press was entirely within his rights to be concerned – arranging to have casual sex with strangers you meet on the internet is risky and, to most of us, strange behaviour (although adults doing just that have helped to make nzdating.co.nz one of the most popular New Zealand websites).
What happened was probably localised copycat behaviour of a niche culture on the most prominent social networking site, MySpace. The US, a nation where some teens vow sexual abstinence with great ceremony, is also the country where some teens (and twentysomethings) arrange casual sex via the internet.
Whether the internet is the heart of the problem is another matter altogether. The father was understandably upset at viewing his daughter’s Bebo profile and finding pictures of her acting like “something off Manchester Street”, but the culture of sexual display runs much deeper than MySpace or Bebo. It can be found in Saturday morning TV music videos and in colourful magazines. It is perpetuated by companies for whom it would be commercially disadvantageous to do otherwise. Sometimes, they’re the same companies that run scary stories about the internet.
We’ve been here before. Indeed, we’ve been here bigtime. The so-called Mazengarb report, officially known as the “Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents”, convulsed the nation in 1954. Small wonder, when it was distributed to every house in the country.
The report, conducted as a consequence of the Parker-Hulme murders, grimly noted “Organisation of Immorality”, and related the story of a “Milk Bar Gang” whose young members met, according to one girl, “mostly for sex purposes”. Among other things, the report blamed films, comics, parents, “new concepts” such as contraception and divorce, and state housing for the recent collapse in morals. TV got off the hook, as it was not yet available, but the report “firmly” recommended “practical measures to control what is offensive to many” when it did arrive.
Some fairly silly things were done in the wake of the report, and we ought to bear that in mind in confronting the latest outrage. The father wanted police to crack down on such sites, but, excepting breaches of consent law, it is no business of the police that teenage girls are dressing up like Shakira and having themselves photographed. It is not even any business of the police that over-16-year-olds are having consensual sex.
The obvious risk is that the would-be teenage partner turns out to be an adult predator – but a succession of studies in the US have shown the actual incidence of predation to be very, very low. A study based on more than 1500 interviews with teenage MySpace users, published this month, found that only seven percent had fielded a sexual approach of any kind “and nearly all of them simply ignored the person and blocked him from their page”.
And however much parental instinct might lean towards it, constant surveillance of teenagers leads down a perilous path. American researcher Danah Boyd said during her recent visit here that she had interviewed parents who watched their teenagers every hour that they were not actually at school. The perverse effect was that this simply encouraged the kids to act more covertly as they sought refuge from the “controlled space” of family life.
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This is what's so great about the Internet: The full text of the Mazengarb report is freely available from Project Gutenberg, and Wikipedia has an article that provides a good guide to this nugget of New Zealand social history. The new Cal State study of MySpace risks is also available online.
Email: russb@ihug.co.nz
