Being in Contact With Strangers Teenagers’ Exploration of Alternative Identities Online

The present article intends to analyze the European children’s online and offline interactions, as they appear in the results of EUKIDS II ONLINE European enquiry from 2010. At this moment, there is an increasing concern in the academic background and among the decision factors involved in the public policies field regarding the interactions that children could have with strangers (Livingston & Helsper, 2007). The main research topic to which we’re trying to find some answers is: Are young people more exposed to risks because they talk to strangers or the young people who are more exposed to risks are those talking to strangers? Our results partly validate Mitchell, Finkelhor and Wolak’s hypothesis (2007) according to which the increasing number of children’s online potentially risky behavior determines an occurrence growth of online sexual harassment or unwanted sexual requests. Regarding the relationship between the unwanted exposure to sexual requests and the existence of some negative feelings, our analysis is consistent with the previous results (Mitchell, Finkelhor, & Wolak, 2003b; Mitchell et al., 2001), although they can’t establish a direct causality relationship between the variables included in the analysis.

Keywords: meeting strangers, teenagers, EU Kids Online, risk comportament