Greatest Internet threat to teens may be teens themselves

More than perhaps any backyard conversations, "Dateline NBC's" widely seen series "To Catch a Predator" has done much to stoke parents' concerns. In it, a female decoy, by all appearances a young teen, responds to advances from adult men in a chat room. With astonishing brazenness, these men send lewd photographs of themselves, propose sex and, when encouraged by the decoy, show up at her door ready for an encounter with a girl they believe to be a minor.

During the confrontation the alleged predators have with "Dateline's" reporter and then with police squads standing by to arrest them, it remains unclear how many men who made chat-room advances never showed up, or might have simply melted away if the decoy had told them to get lost. While "Dateline" has won broad accolades for the popular show, it has also come in for criticism from civil rights advocates and journalistic watchdogs.

The new attorneys general task force report, "Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies," found that most reports of online sexual predation predate the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Friendster. And it found that most sexual fishing expeditions take place outside of these networking sites, in chat rooms and online forums intended for adults.

Moreover, the task force report suggested that parents' worries may be largely misplaced: In most of the off-line encounters that began on the Internet, it found, "the minor knows the adult is older [usually in his or her twenties], knows that sex is desired, and believes that she or he can consent to a sexual encounter." And though parents appear to believe that most sexual advances are made by older adults, the task force found that almost half of sexual solicitations to kids over the Internet are made by other minors, and most of the rest come from young adults 18 to 25 years old.

Such facts confront many parents with a litany of uncomfortable but age-old conflicts: The kids who are trolling for sex may be our own; the peers with whom these kids are exploring their emerging sexuality have edged out parents as an influence; and these young people are taking risks that parents cannot easily control.

In short, Wolf says, the kids are growing up. Only now their teenage angst is being played out in a medium that "does make certain kinds of naughtiness" -- including the posting of suggestive photos -- "more possible." It's a medium, as well, in which parents feel outrun, outmaneuvered and just plain shut out by the digital pioneers they spawned.