Study: 30% of girls meet web friends in person

HealthDayNearly a third of American teenage girls say that at some point they've met with people with whom their only prior contact was online, a study reveals.

Online and offline activity was tracked for more than a year among more than 250 girls aged 14 to 17 years. The study found that 30 percent followed an online acquaintanceship with in-person contact, raising concerns about high-risk behavior that might ensue in the leap from social networking into real-world encounters with strangers.

Girls with a history of neglect or physical or sexual abuse were particularly prone to presenting themselves online (both in images and verbally) in ways that can be construed as sexually explicit and provocative. Doing so, researchers warned, increases their risk of succumbing to the online advances of strangers whose goal is to prey upon such girls in person.

"Statistics show that in and of itself, the Internet is not as dangerous a place as, for example, walking through a really bad neighborhood," said study lead author Jennie Noll, director of research in behavioral medicine and clinical psychology at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.

"The vast majority of online meetings are benign. On the other hand, 90 percent of our adolescents have daily access to the Internet, and there is a risk surrounding offline meetings with strangers, and that risk exists for everyone," Noll said. "So even if just 1 percent of them end up having a dangerous encounter with a stranger offline, it's still a very big problem.

The study, which was supported by a grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, appeared online Monday and in the February print issue of the journal Pediatrics.