Julie Posey Blog

by Julie Posey

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The average Internet sex offender will victimize between 30 and 150 victims before his first arrest. This victimization ranges from exploiting children through child pornography to child abduction and rape.

Many people criticize law enforcement for not being able to permanently stop these crimes against children but the real dilemma is that there are too many child sexual predators to handle effectively. I don’t know of any official statistics but my best estimate would be that sexual predators out number law enforcement by about 2000 to one.

So how does the victimization process work? Here are some important factors:

• Internet predators are seeking to find the kids tat have regular and unsupervised access to the Internet. One of the very first questions a kid is asked is “Where are your parents?” If the parent is either gone or in another room, the predator gives this child some points on the possible victim scale.
• The predator often seeks victims whose daily routine is similar to their own. Early in the conversation the predators will seek information about what the child’s interests are. That may come in the form of a question similar to, “What kinds of things do you do when you are not online?” The primary reason to ask this question is to see how frequently the kid is available to him. The predator is seeking kids that are consistently online about the same time each day and don’t have many activities outside school that would interfere with the time he can spend with the child. If the kid’s answer is, “I just hang out,” more points are given to this potential victim.
• A few of the predators communicate via e-mail but not very many. Most sexual predators prefer to use instant messaging to keep in contact with the potential victim. He may originally meet the kid in a chat room, through a post in a forum, or any other area of the Internet but the communication quickly moves to instant messaging.
• Online predators seek young people who are vulnerable, lonely and naive. They often use a variety of tactics to draw the young person into a conversation. They may pose as teens themselves or grossly lie about their age.
• More potential victim points are given to the child who comes from a single parent family, has trouble in school, has had a few encounters with the law, has some substance abuse problems, or is already sexually active and not afraid to talk about it.
• The Internet sex offender is searching for the kids who pack their profiles with lots and lots of information. The kid who posts his name, age, phone number, lots of pictures and documents his daily activities in a blog makes a perfect victim.
• The online predator prefers his victims to have Web cams, digital cameras, or camera phones. He will apply lots of pressure to the teen to get these items if they don’t already have them and most predators will purchase a camera for the kid and send it to them. The sexual predator will coerce or intimidate the kid into performing sex acts on Web cam, send him sexually explicit photos or create provocative videos for him to view.
• The victim who is most at risk is the one that doesn’t terminate the conversation when the topic of having sexual activity is raised. The kid often gives more weight to the fact that he/she is getting attention and pays less attention to the uneasy feeling he/she has about talking very openly about sex. The kid will tolerate hearing about the predator’s most violent and disturbing fantasy just to avoid losing his/new online friend.
• Any child online is at risk for sexual abuse or sexual exploitation but both boys and girls between 12-15 are the most likely ones to be coerced into a face-to-face meeting without telling a single person.

Tags: behaviors