Introduction

This chapter investigates children's practices related to meeting face-to- face (offline), contacts previously met on the internet. ‘Stranger danger’ has been part of the collective imaginaries of citizens, the media, concerned parents and caregivers, teachers and youth workers, non-governmental organisations and regulators. It has frequently been exaggerated by the media based on a relatively few cautionary tales that have sparked disproportionate concerns and reactions. Without minimising the risks of these practices, this chapter, through an in-depth, contextual, exploratory approach, tries to put into perspective the phenomenon of meeting face-to-face with contacts made online. The generic categories of online ‘stranger’ and, especially, ‘meeting strangers’, can encompass a variety of situations, from a child who wants to exchange a video game with a ‘new online friend’ who may be an immediate physical neighbour, to a random person offering a Blackberry for sale in a local advertisement, to the cute 10th-grader from another high school, located through Facebook, to the extremely rare cases of online predators attempting to groom children for sexual purposes.

The EU Kids Online survey posed descriptive questions about children's communication with people newly met online (3 out of 10 of all children), and children's face-to-face meeting with those people originally met online. Among these face-to-face (that is, offline) meetings (9 per cent of all children), 57 per cent met someone with a connection to a friend or a family member (5 per cent of all children), while 48 per cent (4 per cent of all children) met someone with no connections to themselves beyond mutual use of computers – the typical case of the new online contact. Of those 9 per cent who met an online contact offline, almost 12 per cent declared that they had been ‘bothered’ by the encounter (which translates into fewer than 1 per cent of all the children interviewed).

The main objective of this chapter is to investigate, in depth, children's behaviour related to contacting new people online, to follow those contacts that led to offline meetings – especially meetings with ‘complete strangers’ – and to examine those cases where the experience had been harmful. Investigation of children's coping strategies and parental mediation is the subject of Chapters 16 and 18 in this volume.