Internet Sexual Predators – the Facts, the Fears and the Future

All of us have watched Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator series on Dateline. We sit in front of our TV with baited breath, wondering if that overweight creep will actually walk through the door and if the is stupid enough to sit down with Chris and shoot the breeze about why he showed up to have sex with a 13-year-old.

And, luckily for Dateline’s ratings, they are stupid. Stupid to communicate with someone they think is a 13-year-old willing to have sex. Stupid to show up. Stupid to chat with Chris. Some are even stupid enough to show up – twice! And one was stupid enough to strip nude before walking into the house, because the “13-year-old” asked him to. And when they get caught, some are even stupid enough to call me to represent them! (After the first show aired, three of them called me looking for defense counsel. I suggested they look elsewhere.)

Suddenly, we were all worried that our children would be stalked at school or at home by Internet sexual predators who learned online where they live or go to school. After years of only worrying about the pornography their kids were exposed to online, suddenly everyone was seeing the cyber-boogeyman at every site and network online.

It made sense. It fits our “kids being grabbed and shoved into the back of a van” fears.  Stranger danger. We tell our kids what we heard from our parents who heard it from their parents. It falls into the razorblades in apples for Halloween category of fears. It is one of the things parents need to worry about in this brave new cyberworld.

But this might have survived Dateline’s specials without causing a feeding frenzy  if it hadn’t coincided with the launch and rise of MySpace. (Chris has a great book called To Catch A Predator that features many of my safety programs and advice and even devoted half a chapter to what got me started in cybersafety years ago. You may enjoy reading about common sense and how you can keep your children safer online. [link to amazon for his book.])

MySpace was the first place where parents were finally able to view the secret world of their teens online. They acted out, looking for their 15 megabytes of fame, posing in bras before they were old enough to wear them. I knew they were doing these things. But parents had turned a blind eye.

When Dateline was showing them how much they should worry about middle aged, pot-bellied creeps online looking for their sons and daughters, MySpace showed them how at risk their own teens were. Or how at risk their friends were. It was a feeding frenzy for the media, policymakers and panicked parents.

It started in 2005. Cybersafety advocates knew what teens and preteens were doing and how often. Only parents were in the dark. So parents did what frightened parents do. They blamed MySpace. They blamed the Internet. They blamed law enforcement. And they became even more frightened.

With their fear came more panic and the teens started hiding what they were doing online to avoid having their profiles shutdown by irate parents. Unsupervised teens, digital video cameras and cell phones that can post to MySpace with the click of a key can only mean trouble when boredom sets in. It’s not much different from our getting into trouble when we were growing up. It’s just the scale of it and immediacy that makes the difference. And the scope of the fear and what seems to be common sense.  More kids and teens online – more predators trying to molest them offline.

The tension between what we know and what we think we know was behind the creation of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force run by Harvard and its recent report about fears of sexual predators online being overblown. It was also the driving force behind the survey conducted by McAfee asking moms what they feared the most. Their teens’ safety online worried them more than drunk driving, unprotected sex or offline predators! ( I repeat this finding often because it is so telling. Moms (and dads) are scared out of their minds.

What’s the right level of concern? Should we, as parents, be scared? Is MySpace the risk parents think it is? And if so, why is it allowed to operate?

In this first of a series about Internet sexual predators, and risk they pose to our kids and teens, I’ll try to bring sanity to the issue. And together we’ll find the right balance of concern, supervision, reality and healthy perspective. Check back for the Facts next.

Tags: Cybercrime, Family Safety