Child predators on the Internet

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A common child predator. Don't let his innocent face and dashingly good looks fool you.

An online child predator is a person who uses the internet with the intention of contacting minors below the age of consent, soliciting sexual relations.

There are, of course, mass hysterias or moral panics about them, and children are more likely to be abused by people they know and trust in real life like family friends or relatives, but online child predators are one threat to consider.

Real dangers

Of course, despite being rare — by far the largest threats to children, statistically, are family members or acquaintances — there is a small, but real threat to children. This threat can be pretty much eliminated very easily and parents can go back to needlessly worrying about uncles and close friends looking at their children in any way.

Try the following if you have very young children:

• Check to make sure you know where they're going and where they are.
• Or, you could actually, you know, teach your child(ren) to recognize the warning signs of a child predator and how to avoid a dangerous situation. This is probably better than refusing to give a child the ability to keep some thoughts and secrets to themselves.
• As a last resort if you are actually worried about them not because "I heard somewhere that they are going to get kidnapped": don't give them unlimited, unsupervised Internet access — install net-nanny or only let them use it somewhere you're around.
• Basically, do your job as a parent and look after your kids!

Try the following if you have a child above 10-11 years of age in your house:

• Do not watch their every move online, and do give them privacy
• Teach them about the levels of danger on the Internet, how to report creepy people, have them ask for permission before meeting online friends in-person, tell them not to send sexually explicit photos, tell them to be careful with personal information, etc.
• Be open and honest when discussing stuff, and foster their own honesty and openness towards you.
• But don't be patronizing.
• Seriously, do your job as a parent and look after your kids!

Media scare tactics

In recent years, a handful of individual and/or isolated cases of internet child predation have been met with a lot of vivid and greatly excessive media coverage (hype). The over-reporting, coupled with flawed logic (the Spotlight fallacy), has fostered the impression that such predations are a frequent occurrence and that the odds of it happening are very high, which has induced scares and even hysteria on a global basis.

Governments and law enforcement entities have responded to these scares and imposed serious measures to curtail these predations. Sexual predators of all kinds are now being tracked and monitored using satellites, and are not allowed to live in certain areas (leaving room for more wholesome felons such as paroled murderers and Wall Street executives). This registration process is so draconian in some jurisdictions (such as Oregon) that homeless people can be arrested and detained for peeing outdoors. Florida and Texas even have plans for creating separate hurricane shelters for sexual predators. "When a child is missing, chances are good it was a convicted sex offender" claims NBC correspondent Jim Acosta. He forgot about children running away (you know, like, running away from being abused at home, which is incredibly more common), being abducted by family members, being lost, etc. Oh well.

The scare tactics and panics resulting from media hype around child predators, and specifically those operating on the Internet, were parodied in Chris Morris' Brass Eye paedophile special (entitled Paedogeddon). This included paedophiles wearing black t-shirts with child bodies drawn on so that a child watching via a webcam would think it was another child and the claim that predators could cause your computer's keyboard to emit chemicals that make children suggestible.

Another problem with people's perception of the situation is that sexual predators aren't talked about as such very often; the most often heard term is "sex offender", which (while it includes sexual predators) includes many other people: anyone who has been convicted of any sex-related crime, including some teenagers who had sex with other teenagers, people who bought sex from a prostitute, pissed in public, hugged other children as a child, or sold pornography where they weren't supposed to. This has led to "sex offender" being equated with "sexual predator" in the public consciousness, which muddies the waters considerably.

To Catch a Predator

NBC's Dateline ran a program in 2006–2007 where they had several "children" (FBI agents) lure internet predators to their house, where they then captured them. The point was ostensibly to show how easy it is to find them online, and totally not to bring in big ratings by taking advantage of people's exaggerated fears of Internet predators. These fellows are subsequently arrested or brought in for questioning and imprisoned pending trial for trying to victimize children somewhere you are incredibly unlikely to find children, suggesting they are either stupid or drunk. What NBC did not admit was that they had lured these predators from chat rooms that are often used by people looking for quick sex, hardly places where unsuspecting children spend their time.

Under the title "To Catch a Predator" and with the cooperation of the controversial anti-sex predator website Perverted-Justice.com, this feature continues to be a much-(ab)used ratings grabber on Dateline NBC. It does, however, occasionally provide great comedy — such as when a 50ish guy turned up to meet what he thought was a hot 15-year-old. Confronted by the NBC cameras, he explained that he had only come to counsel her, and the six-pack of Budweiser he was carrying was just in case all that counseling made him thirsty. Aficionados of real beer might conclude that his greatest crime was in his choice of beverage.

In 2008, the show "ended in disgrace due to its sensationalized approach, lack of legal consequences for the predators caught, and financial motives of the group involved." In the ensuing years, the host Chris Hansen "learned from his prior mistakes" and helped oversee over four-hundred arrests.

See also

• Child abuse
• Child sexual abuse
• Moral panic
• Online pedophile activism