Despite the rise of social networki...

Despite the rise of social networking sites like MySpace, a smaller percentage of youths are being sexually solicited online than five years ago.

if it be not that children ages 10 to 17 also are being increasingly bombarded with online porn and are being harassed more -- ofttimes by their peers.

That's the mixed message in a landmark studious mood to be released today through the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of modern Hampshire.

It measure and estimateed 1,500 children ages 10-17 last year and compared findings with those five years earlier.

About 13 percent said in 2005 that they had received an unwanted beseech to engage in sexual activities or conversations in the previous year from either adults or other children.

Five years earlier, 19 percent were solicited.

While that's an improvement, it's "still way too high," says Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Allen and researcher David Finkelhor attribute improvements to education campaigns stressing "stranger danger," and les time exhausted in chat rooms "where creepy race hang out," Finkelhor says.

Internet researcher Larry Rosen a professor of psychology at California State University, says the novel research reinforces what he has seen: "There simply is not the whirl of predators on MySpace that commonalty imagine."

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