August 24, 2008

Lurking online

The digital world gives predators access to their victims with a simple click

By KELLI FONTENOT
of The Chronicle

We need to talk
     Last month, a predatory sex offender in The Dalles e-mailed images of child sex pornography to an Internet user he thought was a 14-year-old boy. The boy turned out to be an undercover police officer who contacted The Dalles police department.      Undercover crime solving is nothing new, but something was different about this offender.
     When Detective Lori Rosebraugh of The Dalles police major crimes section listened to the offender’s telephone conversations and read his chat logs, she thought he seemed aggressive and authoritative. The man had been convicted of a sex crime years ago, but family and friends did not suspect that he was still an abuser at all. Later, Rosebraugh interviewed him in person and was astonished by how much his voice had changed. It was soft and polite, like he was a completely different person.
     The anonymous nature of the Internet allowed another side to take over, Rosebraugh said.
     “All of a sudden, when he can say anything he wants and be anything he wants to be, it changes everything,” she said.
     Cases that do not involve the Internet are rarely “Jekyll and Hyde situations,” Rosebraugh noted. Statistics prove that most sex offenses are committed by relatives or friends of the victims. Rosebraugh only sees a few cyberpredator cases each year in The Dalles, but in recent years, the use of the Internet in sex crimes has grown exponentially.
     When it comes to online predators, especially those who target children, anonymity weaves a complicated web.

Technology’s role
     With a single click, a search engine can provide you with the phone number, address and Web site of most anyone you’re seeking information about. If someone posts personal information on a social networking Web site like Myspace or Facebook, sex abuse investigations get even more complicated, Rosebraugh said.
     One study published in 2007 by the American Psychologist journal yielded contrasting results. After conducting 400 police interviews about Internet-related sex crimes, psychologists found that there were few cases of sex offenders stalking and abducting minors based on information posted on social networking Web sites.      Predators look for teens with histories of sexual abuse, family problems and tendencies to take risks. Pedophilic sexual predators continue to hunt vulnerable children, and offenders who target teens spin the situation to make the victim think the relationship is a forbidden romance.
     Social networking sites were not found to increase the risk of being sexually victimized in those cases, but under constant speculation, these sites are still making the effort to protect their users.
     Myspace took steps to make it more difficult for sexual predators to gain access to people’s profiles in January of last year as reported by The New York Times. They removed the profiles of registered sex offenders — those who listed their names and locations, that is — from the site.
     In addition to making all under-18 user profiles private, this year Myspace accepted independent monitoring and vowed to strengthen responses to inappropriate content. Internet users must be 14 years old to create a Myspace profile.
     But as Bill Carroll, the commander of Oregon’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force (ICAC), points out, anyone can click that button that says they’re 14 — or even 18, if they’re viewing content on adult Web sites.
     “People lie,” Carroll said. “Did you put your true weight on your driver’s license? Your true height and weight? This is nothing new.”
     Carroll, who has been a police officer for 34 years, suggested that if parents are uneasy about letting their children have Myspace pages but think a ban would be too harsh, the parents should sit down with their children and have them create pages right in front of them. If the child wants to lock the site so that their parents can’t see the profile, parents can just say no, Carroll said.
     ICAC, one of the five different units Carroll oversees as the special agent in charge of the Oregon Criminal Justice Division, stresses the importance of communication between parents and children.
     “One in seven children are sexually solicited online,” said Carroll, citing information from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “If you take the number of kids who are using the Internet, that is a staggering number of children.”
     They can go online at the library, at their friends’ homes and on their wireless laptops, so parents must set clear guidelines for Internet use, Carroll said. With portable technology like the iPhone, children even have unlimited access to the Web when they’re outside. This illustrates the unsettling reality that there is no real way of knowing who is on the Web or what they’re doing.
     Legislators in Oregon are catching up with evolving technology by creating specific consequences for online sex crimes against children.
     According to statute ORS 163.433, first-degree online sexual corruption of a child — meeting a child with the intention of having sex or “intentionally taking a substantial step” toward doing so — is a Class B Felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Second-degree online sexual corruption of a child — offering or agreeing to meet with a child for sex — is a Class C Felony punishable by a maximum of five years.
     The legislature pushed the second degree statute through last year, Carroll said, and is continuing to design laws that deal with online enticement and electronic media use that endangers children.

A new breed of sexual predator
     When classifying a sex offender as predatory, Oregon police look at whether a sex offender’s record lists a history of sex crimes, a history of sex offense convictions, multiple victims, use of threat or weapon during an offense, still requiring a high level of supervision at the end of supervision, community notification on supervision, a stranger-to-stranger relationship with victims, prior non-sexual criminal history convictions or adjudications, predatory designation on supervision. If an offender meets three of the criteria, state police classify an offender as a sexual predator.
     If someone uses a weapon during the commission of offense, commits sex crimes against multiple juvenile males or commits forcible rape, that person is automatically considered a predator.
     In her 11 years as a police officer, Detective Rosebraugh has interviewed hundreds of children, parents and suspects in child sex abuse investigations for Wasco County.
There is no specific profile for a sexual predator, Rosebraugh said.
     Most people think of sexual predators as people who commit crimes that “shock the conscience,” Rosebraugh said. Rosebraugh remembers one case in which a woman used the Internet to find a man willing to teach her 8-year-old and 9-year-old how to have sex.
     “There’s a lot of them that commit crimes that you would never imagine,” she said.
Changes in technology have affected not only the crimes predators commit, but the way they hunt. Predators no longer have to lurk at public parks or swimming pools.      They use the endless opportunities provided by the Internet to find their victims.
Some predators instant message their victims pretending to be teenagers themselves. Others enter chatrooms and look for screen names that supply personal information, Carroll said. A predator might enter a chatroom and send a message to a user with a telling screen name, asking questions about music or hobbies. Within minutes, the predator sends a message asking for “ASL” - Age, Sex and Location.      After five minutes, Carroll said predators usually ask for phone numbers because they want to verify that they are talking to a child, not an undercover cop.
     This trend might have been influenced by the NBC Dateline show “To Catch a Predator,” Carroll said.
     On the show, police and television producers conduct sting operations and arrest cyberpredators. The sister of one of the show’s predators sued NBC for $100 million when her brother shot and killed himself after policemen and television producers showed up at his home to arrest him. The show has not aired again since, and though the show’s premise is unconventional, sexual predators do exist, luring children and teenagers.
     Organizations like the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force (ICAC), which has about 63 units in the United States, fight to catch predators without a camera crew. Oregon has one ICAC unit, with two investigators covering the state, Carroll said.
     “Because we’re so small, what we decided to do was to engage partnerships with other law enforcement agencies,” Carroll said. “We have a total of 162 law enforcement affiliates, and that’s local, state, federal and tribal members.”
     Last year, ICAC and its affiliates made a total of 54 arrests in Oregon. As of July of this year, they had made 21 arrests. ICAC also gives presentations to parents and children to educate them about online predators. They usually speak to children between 12 and 17 years of age.
     “Those are the kids that are normally targeted. Those are the kids that are being sexually solicited online. Some of them are putting themselves in that position by going to adult chatrooms,” Carroll said.

After the fact
     Abuse has an especially profound effect on young children because their brains are still developing, according to Penny Rivers, a clinical supervisor of children’s intensive services at Mid Columbia Center for Living. Studies have shown that trauma associated with abuse may have a negative effect on the neural regions of the brain associated with memory. Children may develop post-traumatic stress disorder or forget about the abuse entirely.
     Rivers has worked with children as young as 3 years old who have been victims of sex abuse. When they are hurt at such a young age, they cannot process what has happened, and the repressed memories resurface during puberty, Rivers said.
     “People carry those feelings of anger and shame their whole lives if they don’t have a chance to work it out,” Rivers said. “I’ve talked to people in their 60s who talked about being sexually abused when they were younger and they had never told anyone before.”
     It may be uncomfortable, but victims need to talk about what happened to them, Rivers said. Once victims can identify abuse, they can express the feelings brought on by trauma. Communication is one of the first crucial steps toward recovery in sex abuse cases.
     Therapy is important, but parents have a key role in the healing process as well, Rivers said.
     A family in The Dalles experienced a cyberpredator’s strike about 10 years ago. A young girl about to enter middle school started chatting with someone in Texas who claimed he was a teenager of the same age. After a few months, the girl’s family found out he was actually an adult with a record.
     One parent said the family worked closely with the City of The Dalles Police, the Wasco County Sheriff’s Department and Oregon State Police during the investigation.
The parent encouraged his daughter to remain involved in sports and activities that allowed opportunities to keep in touch with other parents. The girl’s softball team and the team members’ parents supported the family during the incident, he said. The parent said he took took turns with his wife taking time off of work for a couple of months to supervise her after school. They shut off the girl’s access to the computer and confiscated some of her CDs with violent lyrics.
     “Sometimes you have to be the bad cop. As a parent, you can’t just always be saying yes, and your kids will hate you for it at the time. They’ll come to respect and love you for it, maybe in a couple of months. In the end, they’ll come around,” he said.
His daughter went on to graduate from high school with an academic scholarship to a university.

We need to talk
     Tricks like the keyboard combination of “alt + tab” can switch a screen from one document to another, so if you enter the computer room, hear a quick click and your child is staring at the weather page, Carroll said, it’s time for a discussion. An empty browser history might also be a clue that a child visited inappropriate Web sites or chatrooms.
     If a child agrees to meet with a predator, the situation worsens, and in some cases, the child is aware that the predator is not a teenager.
     “They know that they’re meeting an adult with the purpose of having sex. But this adult has become their friend. This adult ’trusts’ them,” Carroll said.
     Some children are lured into a relationship with an online predator by bribery or compliments. Many of them, Carroll explained, are exploring their sexuality, and online predators know exactly what to say to make children trust them. Some predators threaten to blackmail or hurt the child if he or she tells an adult, but most predators go through a process police call “grooming.”
     They develop long-term relationships with the children, making the children feel trusted and cared for. Some predators send explicit images of other children engaging in sex acts to expose the child to sexuality and raise curiosity about the subject while strengthening the notion that such behavior is normal.
     Carroll said Internet predators know what parents are telling their kids — “No, you can’t stay out all night. No, you are not old enough to go there. No, you can’t leave the house dressed like that.” The predators respond with what they know the kids want to hear — “You should be able to stay out all night. I know other kids who do. You’re not a baby anymore. You’re 13. They don’t trust you.”
     This does not mean parents should give in to their children - but it does mean they should define boundaries and open the lines of communication with their children, Carroll said. They should be aware that no matter what the circumstances are, when an adult targets a child, it is wrong.
     During one investigation, Carroll met a sex offender with four child victims. The offender had tattoos of babies on his arms, including one of a tattoo gun drawing an image of a baby on a man’s arm. When investigators questioned him, he said they were there to remind him to stay away from children.
     There was another tattoo of a baby in a birdcage.
     When they asked why it was there, he said it was because every time you harm a child, you mark that child for life.
     “He knew exactly what he was doing,” Carroll said.
     If a child is in danger, Carroll advises contacting the local police department by calling 9-1-1. In addition, ICAC suggests visiting the Web site CyberTipLine.com, which is run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited children.