Who Are the Online Predators?

I'd like to thank Corey for his warm welcome and his gracious offer to guest blog here at Sex Crimes.  I often read Corey's fine work as I follow the ongoing social, legal, and political developments that have become our modern policy towards sex crimes.  While crime and the law frequently engender intense rhetoric, nowhere does the rhetoric seem so stark than when it comes to sex offenders.  Perhaps this is entirely justified; after all, sex crimes represent behaviors that many folks loath most.  But such rhetoric tends to blur rather than define the problem.

Today, former Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, had an editorial in USA Today advocating for additional federal legislation to deal with online predators and child pornography.  AG Gonzales has been instrumental in making online sex crimes a priority for the Justice department. Today's editorial contains this often heard assessment:

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, approximately one in seven youth (10- to 17-years-old) receives a sexual solicitation over the Internet. One in five girls, and one in 10 boys, will be sexually victimized before adulthood. 

The implicating, of course, is that children and adolescents are being solicited for sex by adults online.  Yet, a recent study published in the American Psychologist conclude that such assumptions are false:

The publicity about online "predators" who prey on naive children using trickery and violence is largely inaccurate. Internet sex crimes involving adults and juveniles more often fit a model of statutory rape--adult offenders who meet, develop relationships with, and openly seduce underage teenagers--than a model of forcible sexual assault or pedophilic child molesting...

Much of the fog that has become our modern sex offender policy is bogged down by the fact that we don't have much reliable data, and what we do have, is often misunderstood by even those who who have the best intentions.  When it comes to sex crimes, however, we need to ensure that we're getting the research right. 

 

Comments

[Niki Delson]

David Finkelhor director of the Crimes against Children Research Center and the codirector of the Family Research
Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire did an extensive study on internet crimes. They found
1. The predominant online sex crime victims are not young children. They are teenagers
2. Only 5% of these cases actually involved violence. Only 3% involved an abduction. Deception does not seem to be a major factor. Only 5% of the offenders concealed the fact that they wereadults from their victims. 80% were quite explicit about their sexual intentions with the youth that they were communicating with.
3. The offenders lure teens after weeks of conversations with them, they play on teens’ desires for romance, adventure, sexual information, understanding, and they lure them to encounters that the teens know are sexual in nature with people who are considerably older than themselves.

You can read the entire report at CCOSO.org - click the link to the library and then go to internet crime link