BodiMojo Blog

By Adrianne Loggins

The Internet has become a potentially dangerous place for teens to socialize. Although the Web is full of informative and helpful sites, unsupervised teens can run into trouble – including connecting with sexual offenders, who are liable to use chats, forums and instant messaging software to gain a teen’s trust and arrange a face-to-face meeting for sexual exploitation purposes.

One recent study, conducted by development psychologist Dr. Jennie Noll, associate professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center at the University of Cincinnati, found that a history of childhood abuse and the use of a provocative avatar, or digital image, increases the risk of Internet victimization of adolescent girls. The research, published in the June issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics asked 104 non-abused adolescent girls and 69 abused girls between the ages of 14 and 17 to create their own avatars – or virtual personas online. The girls could choose what their avatars looked like, including hair, clothes, bust and hip size.  “In the context of this study, I thought, “If these girls are at high risk of victimization in other ways, why wouldn’t that generalize to their Internet lives?” Noll says. Noll and her team found that those girls who chose a more provocative avatar, or “smutty” persona, as Noll calls it, were the ones who told her that they were experiencing more sexual advances online and making dangerous encounters in the real world. Noll found that the abused girls were more likely to exhibit this kind of provoking behavior.

Noll calls this the Proteus effect, which says the ways you represent yourself can change your behavior. “The ways in which you present yourself can change the way the perceiver perceives you. The Proteus effect generalizes the fact that the ways you interact socially can change depending on the ways you present yourself,” Noll says.

With abused girls, Noll theorizes,  “Certainly the sense of self is not optimal. Another is the violation of sexual boundaries – seeing themselves as damaged goods. And then not understanding the role of sex in normal development or even in love and intimacy can change the way a girl sees herself as a sexual being. Early sex boundaries violation can distort their view. On average, abused teenage girls tend to gravitate to sexual preoccupation.”

In order to prevent the dangers of exploitation of these teens, parents need to be on the lookout and be aware, Noll says.  A word to parents: Know how your kids are presenting themselves online – honest communication is the best way to find this out. Talk to your teens; open up dialogue by asking questions like “Hey, let’s figure out what the implications are of presenting yourself in certain ways – could it be you’re inviting sexual advances?” and “What do you do when you get sexual advances – how do you ward off those advances?”

And, teens, never give your personal information to someone you don’t know online. “It’s always dangerous to meet someone whose ID you don’t know for certain offline,” says Noll. “It’s never certain you are going to meet someone whose profile is who they say they are.” Finally, have some confidence and respect for the way you present yourself online, too.

“We don’t understand the implications how big these networks are,” says Noll. “You have to be smart about the world so you can understand how to be safe.”

Adrianne Loggins is a journalism graduate student at Northeastern University.