Worries that the internet and social networking services like MySpace pose a threat to child safety are overblown, a report by industry, academics and technology experts has suggested.

The report, released today, found that the biggest threats to children's safety online may come from other children, and that their own behavior could contribute to the trouble they encounter.

"Minors are not equally at risk online," the report said. "Those who are most at risk often engage in risky behaviours and have difficulties in other parts of their lives."

The report was produced by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, created last February by 49 state attorneys general to address what many of them said was the growing problem of sexual predators soliciting children online.

"The risks minors face online are complex and multifaceted and are in most cases not significantly different than those they face offline, and ... as they get older, minors themselves contribute to some of the problems," the study said.

The Harvard-led panel of experts and academics dismissed prospects for age-verification technologies, the approach favored by many law-enforcement officials.Technology can be a component in the strategy to protect minors online, but Internet companies "should not overly rely upon any single technology or group of technologies as the primary solution," the task force said. "Parents, teachers, mentors, social services, law enforcement and minors themselves all have crucial roles to play in ensuring online safety for all minors," the report said.

The findings could play an important role in determining if law enforcement officials in the US step up pressure on social networking sites to police members more closely, potentially requiring identity and age verification. Such sites have large numbers of younger members, and parents have expressed concern over strangers approaching their children. MySpace was the subject of a 2006 lawsuit by a 14-year-old girl who said she was sexually assaulted by a 19-year-old man she met on the site.

The Task Force included executives from Facebook and MySpace, as well as other technology and media companies including Yahoo!, Verizon and Time Warner's AOL.

Released by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, the report suggests that the biggest threat to children's safety online comes from other children. "Youth report sexual solicitation of minors by minors more frequently, but these incidents, too, are understudied, underreported to law enforcement, and not part of most conversations about online safety," the task force said. It added that bullying and harassment, especially by peers, are the most frequent problem minors face both online and elsewhere.

MySpace, which helped to fund the study, said in a statement it fully supports the key conclusions of the report, noting that "there is no single technological solution to the problem of youth online safety and no single technology that fully addresses any specific risk minors face".

"This shows that social networks are not these horribly bad neighbourhoods on the Internet," said John Cardillo, chief executive of Sentinel Tech Holding, which maintains a sex offender database and was part of the task force. "Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons."

Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, who helped create the task force, criticised the report for "downplaying the predator threat". He told the New York Times the task force had relied on outdated research and failed to provide a specific plan for improving the safety of social networking.

"Children are solicited every day online," Mr Blumenthal said. "Some fall prey, and the results are tragic. That harsh reality defies the statistical academic research underlying the report."