The not-so-long arm of the law
BY JULIAN SHER
USA TODAY
MAY 1, 2007
No Quick Fix to Making the Web ‘My Safe Space’
By Julian Sher
Emily Vacher has seen more of the dark side of the Internet than most people. As one of the FBI’s star undercover agents who go online posing as a teenager to nab child predators lurking on the Web, she has arrested dozens of men.
But these days, Vacher spends a lot of time in high schools and community forums warning teenage girls – and their parents -- about a new threat: young people tricked into producing their own porn.
Older men disguise their true identity and age on popular social networking sites like MySpace; they pretend to be a lonely girl’s online “boyfriend” and seduce her into sending sexually graphic pictures they can use for their own pleasure, for profit or for blackmail.
“It’s a trend and it’s scary,” says Vacher.
Indeed, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) is now finding that as many as 10 percent of children it has identified in child pornography images are now older teenagers who take compromising pictures of themselves.
This new twist to Web crime should give pause to anyone who takes too much comfort from a flurry of new laws -- from Republican Senator John McCain to the Democratic Connecticut state legislature – that promise to crack down on online predators. Worthy as some of these efforts may be, there is simply no quick legal or technological fix to the social problem that Internet predators have become.
If you’re a parent who doesn’t know the difference between YouTube and Yahoo, here’s a reality check: two thirds of teens have a personal profile on social networking sites such as MySpace, Friendster, or Xanga. A survey by the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center showed that one third of children between ages 10 to 17 who use the Internet regularly had posted their real name, telephone numbers or home address.
If you don’t know what your child is doing online, the predators do. In the past three years, the department of Justice has seen nearly ten-fold increase in what they call “cyber enticement”—resulting in close to 2,000 arrests. MySpace -- and the politicians -- are scrambling to play catch-up.
MySpace says its staff hunts through the 7 million images and videos that are posted every day for indecent images and it shuts down about 30,000 profiles of underage users each week. When the company discovered late last year that hundreds of registered sex offenders were brazen – and stupid – enough to post profiles using their real names, it compiled a database of known violators to weed them out.
But that won’t stop predators from using fake names and emails. So Senator McCain is pushing for legislation that would oblige convicted offenders to disclose all their e-mail addresses to law enforcement and make the use of a false e-mail address a violation of probation or parole.
That makes so much sense it’s surprising it’s not on the books already. But let’s face it: it is akin to telling convicted bank robbers out on parole they cannot use unregistered guns if they plan any more hold ups.
Meanwhile, if Connecticut legislators get their way, MySpace might turn into something more like MyParentsSpace.
A law proposed last month by the state’s attorney general Richard Blumenthal would force MySpace and similar social networking portals to verify users' ages and get parental permission before anyone under 18 could post a personal profile. At least a dozen other states are looking at similar legislation.
Again, a fine idea in practice. But in theory, even if MySpace could manage to contact all the parents and they vetted their child’s profiles, curious or adventurous young people – and high-tech predators – will always find a loophole around the rules.
Neither of these laws can do much about predators without any criminal records or negligent parents. In Ohio recently, a 40-year old school bus driver was charged with having sex with a local 16-year-old student: only then was it discovered that he also had a MySpace web page where he pretended to be a teenage boy.
In Illinois, another MySpace prowler named John Wentworth pled guilty earlier this month to sexually abusing an underage Naperville girl. Forget about getting parents to vet their child’s web page profile; this girl managed to meet her assailant in her family home!
Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal – himself a father of four -- is wise enough to know that, as he puts it, “parents… are first line of defense.” That’s why on his website he provides an easy guide showing parents how to create their own profiles on MySpace and check out what their children are doing on the Internet’s playground.
And late last month NCMEC, as part of the Department of Justice’s ambitious Project Safe Childhood, launched a major campaign to educate teenage girls with the blunt message: “Think Before You Post.”
“No one piece of technology or trick or tool is going to do it,” says FBI agent Emily Vacher. “It has to be about communication between parents and the kids.”
Communication that is sorely lacking. In a survey by the non-profit foundation I-SAFE, 29 percent of children admitted that their parents would not approve of their Internet activities—if they knew.
t’s 11 pm. Do you know where your child is on the Web tonight?
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Julian Sher is the author of Caught in the Web: Inside the Police Hunt to Rescue Children from Online Predators, published by Carroll & Graf. He can be reached at www.juliansher.com