Thirty percent of teen girls report meeting offline with someone they met online according to research reported by Jennie Noll, Ph.D., a psychologist at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, and colleagues in the Jan. 14, 2012, issue of the journal Pediatrics.
The study was based on interviews with 251 adolescent girls between the ages of 14 and 17. About 50 percent of the participants had been victims of abuse or neglect in the home.
Abused or neglected teenage girls were more likely to present themselves online in a sexually provocative way than other teenage girls. Research shows that high-risk online profiles are more likely to lead to offline meetings.
“If families installed Internet filtering software at home, it made no difference in the association between maltreatment and high-risk Internet behaviors, says Dr. Noll. These behaviors included intentionally seeking adult content, provocative self-presentations on social networking sites and receiving sexual advances online. On the other hand, "high quality parenting" and parental monitoring helped reduce the association between adolescent risk factors and these online behaviors.”
This research is particularly pertinent to Birmingham Alabama. Birmingham has recently been shown to be a hot spot for sex trafficking in teen aged girls in local motels and hotels.
The research was reviewed at the Eureka Alert website on the date of publication.
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