Kids who use Internet sites like Myspace.com often want a place of their own, where they can exercise self-expression and a bit of independence. What they don’t seem to realize is that they’re as vulnerable in such places as sheep to wolves — and often just as oblivious to the danger. They may think they’ve having a great time communicating on blogs and meeting new friends, but prowling among them are men who mean to use them for self-gratification, and perhaps even to harm or kill them. Even seemingly safe places can attract evil, and not just from adults.

Abdullah Jimzawi

In the June 17, 2006, issue of Science News, Bruce Bower examined “Growing up Online.” He opened by describing a conversation between kids who like to mutilate themselves with cutting instruments, who compared the pros and cons of cutting devices that went deep but did not hurt. “It rapidly becomes evident,” he says, “that this is not idle electronic chatter.” In fact, there are more than four hundred sites online for “cutters,” and it’s obvious that Internet meeting places can offer kids more than just a social outlet. They can support each other but they can also push each other into negative behaviors.

Lester and her father going to court

The Internet has become a viable place for adolescents to seek support among their peers, especially when they have a difficult time making friends where they live and go to school. Sometimes they can assist one another, as on peer counseling sites, but other times they merely point out ways to maintain and even deepen self-destructive behavior. Children have “aggressively colonized” certain spaces on the ‘Net, Bower, points out, and unless parents are monitoring closely, kids can make connections that may not be in their best interests. But they usually don’t realize that.

In June 2006, Katherine Lester, from Michigan, ran off to the Middle East to meet a man who had contacted her in the Myspace.com site. Only 16 at the time, she was on her way to Tel Aviv, Israel, to join 20-year-old Abdullah Jimzawi when authorities intercepted her in Jordan. They sent her back home, where she faced a hearing in court. Judge Wallace Kent Jr. ordered her to surrender her passport and go to counseling. She agreed.

Long’s mother holds a photo of her daughter

The two had interacted on the Web site, falling in love and making plans for Lester to convert to Islam and leave the U.S. But Jimzawi clearly wasn’t thinking clearly; he still lived with his parents, was a high-school dropout, and had no way to support them. Lester, too, was too young to understand what she faced. But hers is a story with a relatively happy ending for her family. Other young people have fallen prey to predators who have no intent to marry them or otherwise assist them in life.

Christina Long, 13, was an honor student and cheerleader in Connecticut, writes Edward Baig for USA Today. She liked to meet strangers from the Internet and eventually one of these encounters ended with her death. Other girls have been raped and otherwise damaged by men who seek to conquer one young victim after another.

Crisis Connections indicates that sexual predators are generally male, between 13 and 65. Many are married, although most are single, and they can be classified into four types:

• Collectors — predators who start on “static” sites collecting photos and pornography but who generally graduate to “dynamic” sites, i.e. real-time chat rooms, where they can meet potential victims and seek ways to realize their fantasies.
• Travelers — the most dangerous type, these men will go great distances to meet their prey (even other countries) to get what they want, generally sending gifts and using enticements to draw the child away from the safety of the home. They look for vulnerable lonely children who crave attention and they’re quite persistent, as well as skilled. They can get a relationship going within two to four chats.
• Manufacturers — they distribute pornography to others and sometimes partake themselves, but are mostly in it for the money
• Chatters — they like to engage children in chat rooms and talk about sex but don’t often graduate to meeting offline

Patricia Greenfield

These online contacts can influence a young person’s sense of identity. Psychologist Patricia Greenfield, of the University of California, LA, indicates in Science News that the Internet offers a wide variety of opportunities of meeting places for social networking. This same article reports that nine in ten adolescents utilized Internet resources in 2004, and at least 50% went online every day. A lot of them are contacted by predators seeking a viable contact whom they can draw into their net. Most predators have a number of fetishes and paraphilias, so for some, almost any kid who responds will do.

For kids, the appeal of these online meeting places is the anonymity and the opportunity to represent a façade that might not have any basis in reality. The ‘Net also provides a forum for kids to admit to things they don’t want to say to people with whom they interact face-to-face. For example, a child who believes she’s a lesbian may not want her friends to know but can find someone online to discuss her feelings with (using a screen name, of course, which allows her to “hide”). This helps kids to figure out who they are and what they want to do about it. It also helps predators bait their hooks.

Since online chat rooms don’t have specific topics, kids range around looking for someone to talk with about the topic of their choice. While this can be a healthy way to work through pressure and relieve frustration, as well as exercise ideas they aren’t brave enough to express with parents or in class, kids quite often freely give out personal information, including names, age, and phone numbers, which is just what a predator seeks. Sometimes, the kids talk among one another about sex, which is an even greater magnet. “Sexual themes,” says Bower, “constitute about five percent of all messages, corresponding to about one sexual comment per minute.” Unmonitored sites attract more males than monitored sites.

Parents trying to protect kids may forbid them from talking with strangers in chat rooms, but the kids are no match for wily con artists. They often don’t even realize that they’ve become targets. One study indicates that children below the age of 12 don’t grasp that strangers circulate in this arena and may contact them. Their awareness of the potential peril is vague at best, and with the typical adolescent sense of invulnerability, they believe they can tell who’s dangerous from who’s not — but they can’t.

Chat rooms are the typical place for predators and victims to cross paths, as predators start the enticement process with “real time” conversations. Participants often post “profiles” that list things about themselves, such as age, gender, hobbies, and preferences, giving the predator a foothold — a way to introduce himself. Kids may also include their photos or use Web cams to show themselves in action. P2P networks allows for the sharing of large files, such as video, and predators not only look for these but send a few themselves, usually as bait or a way to solidify a “relationship.”

Sexual predators know precisely what they’re looking for because their fantasies are fixated on a specific type of prey, e.g., prepubescent boys or 16-year-old girls. When they find what they seek, they hone in on those targets. If such a child expresses conflicts with adults, depression, loneliness, or the need for love, that’s all a predator needs to start manipulating. They offer emotional support and gradually work their way into inviting the child to meet them offline. They make certain the child keeps “the secret” and they use specific tactics to isolate the child from friends and family. Often they will send gifts, particularly web cams or paid phone cards, and they will seem trustworthy to the child. It’s like the old “candy” ploy.

Detective Richard Peffall, of the Montgomery County Major Crimes Unit in Pennsylvania, has been involved in a long-term sting operation that utilizes officers who look for these predators in teen chat rooms. What they find is nothing different from what vice cops have always found.

“The Internet predators of today,” Peffall says, “are the same guys that we would catch standing outside of school yards 30 years ago when I started in police work. These criminals are the same sick deviate individuals that preyed on children in the past; the Internet has just created an entirely new avenue for them to find victims. With more than 40 arrests of ‘travelers,’ the most common initial excuse we hear is, ‘I was just coming to warn them about how dangerous it is to meet strangers from the internet.’ When asked to explain why they came with a pocketful of condoms, and confronted with evidence of their chats, they quickly give in.”

Peffall insists that parents must be the first line of defense. “Know who your kids are chatting with,” he suggests. “Keep the computer out of their bedrooms and in a common area. And talk to your kids about this danger.”

Book cover: Investigating Child
Exploitation and Pornography

Attorney Monique Ferraro and Forensic Examiner Eogahn Casey, in Investigating Child Exploitation and Pornography, discuss how the Internet has “irreversibly impacted every major human endeavor,” including how predators operate. They specifically focus on the online exploitation of children. The Internet, they state, has created a trade in child pornography that stays several steps ahead of law enforcement and legislative efforts at regulation. It’s even encouraged communication among child molesters who might otherwise have remained solitary wolves. They pass around ideas and describe new opportunities, as well as support each other in criminal activity.

Cyber offenders, says forensic psychiatrist Michael McGrath, generally target multiple victims, and they’re looking for low self-esteem, family troubles, kids uncertain of their sexuality, and other issues common to adolescents. These predators will go where they are likely to encounter a large pool of kids. Sometimes they will pose as adults who offer kids a “mentoring” relationship; other times they act as kids the same age as their contactee. With the Internet, they can achieve a faster sense of intimacy than they can face to face, because they can use clever phrases to convince a kid they actually care. Officers who understand the various Internet tools these offenders use to “groom” potential victims (gain their trust and gradually seduce them) are better prepared for finding and stopping them.

Investigators and psychologists who specialize in Internet predation offer a series of red flags for parents to be aware of, such as

• gifts sent to a child from someone the parents do not know
• phone calls from unknown adults for the child;
• a child who spends a lot of time online but doesn’t say much about it
• a child who tried to hide what he or she is doing online
• a child who begins to behave different, especially more aggressively.

To ensure their child’s safety, parents must set up clear rules about Internet use and remain firm, engage in regular periods of monitoring, keep open communication with children, and discuss Internet dangers. There will still be enticements for children determined to defy their parents or try something “dangerous,” but other kids, when educated, may be deterred.

The fact is, sexual aggression is a persistent crime, and predators have found a viable avenue with the Internet for finding vulnerable children. Travelers are determined to satisfy their needs, but they will avoid children who clearly are protected and look for easier targets.

Young person at computer, involved in a blog

Kids can inadvertently encourage Internet predators, and the February 10, 2007 issue of Science News reported the results of a study that defined just how it happens. One in five adolescents with a regular online presence report an encounter with a person they don’t know who sexually solicits or harasses them. Of those, certain behaviors act like fishing bait. It turns out that it’s not the personal information kids post at specific Websites that make them vulnerable, but certain things they initiate.

Michele Ybarra, from Internet Solutions for Kids, led a team of researchers for two months in 2005 to phone kids nationwide who were between the ages of ten and 17. Most subjects were white and the pool was evenly split between male and female. The team had nearly 1,500 kids in their sample population when they posted the results in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

They found that there were five specific behaviors that stood out among those who had reported an encounter with a sexual predator:

1. Making contact with people in a variety of online venues
2. Talking specifically about sex with strangers
3. Allowing strangers to be part of their personal buddy list
4. Making rude comments online
5. Intentionally visiting X-rated sites

The above are considered risky behaviors, red flags to sex offenders trolling for child victims. Often, the child participates in these behaviors while in the company of peers, and a high percentage of those experiencing unwanted sexual attention online reported having serious problems with parents, incidents of sexual abuse, and difficulty with bullies at school.

In other words, kids looking for someone to talk to because they’re lonely, scared, or unable to talk with their parents are just as vulnerable online as they are hanging out in a mall. What they say and do alerts predators to how easy it might be to lure them into a meeting, which could result in sexual abuse, or worse. The study did not specify which of these behaviors was the riskiest, but common sense indicates that kids looking at sexual content or talking about sex with people they don’t know are possibly open to an encounter who offers them something they’re looking for.

A senior at the University of Colorado was falsely labeled a sex offender by MySpace in May 2007, and her profile was removed. She wrote to correct the mistake, says Kevin Poulsen for Wired.com, concerned that this erroneous information could become public. The mistake was acknowledged by Sentinel Tech Holding Corporation, the leading online background verification company, which had entered into an agreement with MySpace in December 2006, to identify registered sex offenders (RSO) on the social-networking site.

According to a December press release, “MySpace will employ a 24-hour-a-day, dedicated staff to proactively monitor for convicted sex offenders identified by Sentinel Safe and remove any matching profiles from the community. MySpace will continue to work with The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and law enforcement to identify any suspect individuals and assist in investigations.”

In the case of the misidentified student, a Sentinel official clarified what happened: they’d found a sex offender with the same name as hers and a birthday only two days and two years apart, so the computer had made the match. However, the offender lived in a different state, and the two women’s photos showed two very different people. Apparently, the verification went only so far.

Mistakes will be made, unfortunately, especially when computers are left to do the matching, but this problem does not detract from the potential benefit of identifying sex offenders by cross-matching the MySpace database with RSO databases. Sexual predators have quickly figured out that many kids online— especially lonely, vulnerable kids — will talk with anyone, and that the best approach to this highly popular site was to build a MySpace profile and become “buddies.” RSOs could easily pass as just another kid, drawing the naïve into their webs. MySpace personnel are aware of the problem and have joined with Sentinel to try to address it; they have also hired a new security chief.

When law enforcement officials learned about Sentinel’s early estimate of several thousand RSOs with MySpace profiles, the attorneys general from eight states jointly sent a letter to MySpace. Caroline McCarthy reported on Cnetnews.com, that in this letter the attorneys general insisted that allowing sex offenders onto MySpace placed them in proximity to children, a violation of the terms of probation or parole for many of the offenders. By May 29, they expected MySpace to provide the exact number of RSO profiles that Sentinel had collected and their procedures for dealing with these criminals. They also contacted authorities from all 50 states, urging them to join them in applying pressure on MySpace to do more to protect children. Jen Shreve, from Wired, indicated that in 2006 there were more than 100 criminal incidents involving adults with MySpace profiles preying on underage participants.

MySpace, it turns out, wasn’t keen about the way these demands were issued.

At first, News Corp, which owns MySpace, refused to cooperate, reported Dan Goodin for The Register, because the attorneys had not pursued the proper legal channels for obtaining information via the federal Electronics Communications Act. So, the attorneys acquired the necessary subpoenas.

Connecticut Attorney General
Richard Blumenthal

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal was quoted as saying, “Our subpoena compels this information right away… Many of these sex offenders have violated their parole or probation by contacting or soliciting children on MySpace.” Whether he had evidence of that charge is unknown, but the probability of such violations is high. It’s not automatically illegal for RSOs to be on the site; it depends on the terms of their sentencing.

This time, MySpace complied. It turned out that Sentinel had removed the names and profiles of over 7,000 MySpace participants from the site after identifying them as RSOs or other types of violators. (One case, documented by Wired, was a predator who had sexually violated an unconscious person, but had sanitized himself in his online identity into a Christian with a girlfriend.) The list was turned over to the authorities to decide if violations have occurred. Some sex offenders are prohibited from using the Internet for any purpose, while others may not contact children.

While all of this sounds like a step in the right direction, a potential problem is that the corporation does not maintain the removed profiles, only the bare-bones data. Profiles could conceivably serve as evidence in a court case, should an incident occur that inspired criminal charges. A violation would send the offender back to prison, but if MySpace no longer has the record of his or her presence on the site, that could damage the case.

And there’s another issue: Shreve points out on Wired.com that this arrangement with Sentinel only affects sex offenders who have registered with their actual information; it counts on criminals to be honest. Those who are quite determined to pursue their criminal goals will find ways around it.

Ideally, authorities would like to see mandatory registration of sex offenders’ email address registrations to expedite the identification process and thwart sex offenders in at least some of their online movements.