ComputerForensicsDigest.com

David Finkelhor, the head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, has published the results of a study of Internet predators and has reached a provocative conclusion: that the Internet is not any more dangerous for children than the brick-and-mortar world.

In an article for The Daily Beast, Lenore Skenazy summarizes Finkelhor's research and notes that over a 7 year period, from 2000 to 2006, just 614 individuals were arrested for soliciting actual children online. Admittedly, another 3,100 people were arrested for soliciting people they thought were children, but in fact, were undercover police officers trolling sexually-oriented chat rooms.

Skenazy tries to put the numbers in perspective by noting that during the same seven-year stretch, tens of millions of children joined social networking sites and other online hang-outs, but the number of arrests for even attempted solicitation (let alone actual soliciation) remained relatively low.

The point of Finkelhor's research, Skenazy said, is not to dismiss the crime of solicitation and the fact that some children do in fact get lured and assaulted through online communication. His intent, she said, is to make sure that we do not lose sight of the far larger problem of real-world child abuse -- which kills as many as 1,000 children each year -- while we're hyperventilating over the threat of a new technology.