Young people are being increasingly exposed to unwanted sexually explicit material and online harassment despite the fact that there has been a rise in the use of filtering and monitoring systems in Irish households, a conference in Cork has heard.
Senior lecturer at the Department of Applied Psychology at University College Cork, Dr Ethel Quayle, said that while, overall, the proportion of youth internet users receiving sexual solicitations online had decreased, there had been no reduction in the level of aggressive solicitation, ie attempts to meet young people offline.
Dr Quayle told the seventh annual research conference of the Catherine McAuley School of Nursing and Midwifery at UCC that it was impossible to say how many young people might be at risk through their use of the internet.
"We need to think about children and young people using the net as consumers and increasingly as generators of material.
"With the advance of the new wave of web technologies, young people will have the capacity to create material in a way never seen before," she explained.
Being female, using chat rooms, talking about sex with people online and meeting them offline are all risk factors for young people using the net, according to Dr Quayle.
Young people who send out personal information about themselves, who are depressed or lack traditional supports within the family can be at risk of aggressive solicitation or "grooming" online.
Dr Quayle said a request for pictures should be a major warning sign to a young internet user. She said that once images or photos appear on the net, they will never go away even if removed from a particular site.
"There was a case last year in Cork where four images that a girl had taken of herself were accessed by about 40,000 teenagers until somebody told his father about it.
"A child was actually wrongly identified through her school uniform and the media was warning that people who had the pictures might be guilty of child pornography. You can imagine the panic of those 40,000 teenagers," she said.
Surprisingly, Dr Quayle explained that nearly half of children who are groomed are groomed by other children which challenged many of the stereotypes about who is offending against children.
She said that as a teenager, her own ability to gain access to sexual material had been extremely limited and the only place she ever saw naked bodies was in the National Geographic. However, by entering the words "sexual pictures" and "teens" into the Google search engine, she got well over a million hits in the space of 0.17 seconds.
"Images of sodomy, group sex, bestiality and sadomasochistic practices are all available to young people on the net today. Even as an adult, you would not have had access to this kind of material in the pre-internet days, but it's all there now," she warned.
Dr Quayle highlighted a recent US study which found that, just like adults, young people who use pornographic material online are more likely to suffer from depression or anxiety.
