Tag Archives: predation

What if the sexual predator image you have in your mind is wrong?

(I wrote the following piece for Psychology Today under the title “Sexual Predators: The Imagined and the Real.”)

If you’re a parent, you’ve probably seen the creepy portraits of online sexual predators constructed by media: The twisted older man, lurking online, ready to abduct a naive and innocent child and do horrible things. If you’re like most parents, the mere mention of online sexual predators sends shivers down your spine. Perhaps it prompts you to hover over your child’s shoulder or rally your school to host online safety assemblies.

But what if the sexual predator image you have in your mind is wrong? And what if that inaccurate portrait is actually destructive?

When it comes to child safety, the real statistics don’t stop parental worry. Exceptions dominate the mind. The facts highlight how we fail to protect those teenagers who are most at-risk for sexual exploitation online.

If you poke around, you may learn that 1 in 7 children are sexually exploited online. This data comes from the very reputable Crimes Against Children Research Center, however, very few take the time to read the report carefully. Most children are sexually solicited by their classmates, peers, or young adults just a few years older than they are. And most of these sexual solicitations don’t upset teens. Alarm bells should go off over the tiny percentage of youth who are upsettingly solicited by people who are much older than them. No victimization is acceptable, but we need to drill into understanding who is at risk and why if we want to intervene.

The same phenomenal research group, led by David Finkelhor, went on to analyze the recorded cases of sexual victimization linked to the internet and identified a disturbing pattern. These encounters weren’t random. Rather, those who were victimized were significantly more likely to be from abusive homes, grappling with addiction or mental health issues, and/or struggling with sexual identity. Furthermore, the recorded incidents showed a more upsetting dynamic. By and large, these youth portrayed themselves as older online, sought out interactions with older men, talked about sex online with these men, met up knowing that sex was in the cards, and did so repeatedly because they believed that they were in love. These teenagers are being victimized, but the go-to solutions of empowering parents, educating youth about strangers, or verifying the age of adults won’t put a dent into the issue. These youth need professional help. We need to think about how to identify and support those at-risk, not build another an ad campaign.

What makes our national obsession with sexual predation destructive is that it is used to justify systematically excluding young people from public life, both online and off. Stopping children from connecting to strangers is seen as critical for their own protection, even though learning to navigate strangers is a key part of growing up. Youth are discouraged from lingering in public parks or navigating malls without parental supervision. They don’t learn how to respectfully and conscientiously navigate new people because they are taught to fear all who are unknown.

The other problem with our obsession with sexual predators is that it distracts parents and educators. Everyone rallies to teach children to look out for and fear rare dangers without giving them the tools for managing more common forms of harm that they might encounter. Far too many young people are raped and sexually victimized in this country. Only a minuscule number of them are harmed at the hands of strangers, online or off. Most who will be abused will suffer at the hands of their classmates and peers.

In a culture of abstinence-only education, schools don’t want to address any aspect of sexual and reproductive health for fear of upsetting parents. As a result, we fail to give young people the tools to handle sexual victimization. When the message is “just say no,” we shame young people who were sexually abused or violated.

It’s high time that we walk away from our nightmare scenarios and focus on addressing the serious injustices that exist. The world we live in isn’t fair and many youth who are most at-risk do not have concerned parents looking out for them. Because we have stopped raising children as a community, adults are often too afraid to step on other parents’ toes. Yet, we need adults who are looking out for more than just their children. Furthermore, our children need us to talk candidly about sexual victimization without resorting to boogeymen.

While it’s important to protect youth from dangers, a society based on fear-mongering is not healthy. Let’s instead talk about how we can help teenagers be passionate, engaged, constructive members of society rather than how we can protect them from statistically anomalous dangers. Let’s understand those teens who are truly at risk; these teens often have the least support.

(This piece was first published at Psychology Today.)

Facebook’s Panic Button: Who’s panicking? And who’s listening?

First, I commend Facebook for taking child safety seriously. When I was working with them as part of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, I was always impressed by their concern. I think that there’s a mistaken belief that Facebook doesn’t care about child safety. This was the message that many propagated when Facebook balked at implementing the “Panic Button” in the UK. As many news articles recently reported, Facebook finally conceded last week to implementing it after enormous pressure by safety advocates. Their slowness in agreeing to do so was attributed to their lack of caring, but this is simply not true. There are actually very good reasons to be wary of the “Panic Button.” My fear is that the lack of critical conversation about the “Panic Button” will result in people thinking it’s a panacea, rather than acknowledging its limitations and failings. Furthermore, touting it as a solution obscures the actual dangers that youth face.

The “Panic Button” is actually an App called “ClickCEOP”. Users must add the App and then they get a tab so that there’s a button there whenever they need to talk to the police’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. They’re encouraged to share the badge as a way of protecting their friends.

Pressure to create the “Panic Button” came after the horrific murder of 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall by a 33-year-old serial sex offender named Peter Chapman who approached the teen on Facebook. Reports suggest that he told her he was a teenage boy, although she also knew that none of her friends knew him. She lied to her parents to leave the house to meet up with him at which point he abducted, raped, and murdered her. Why she started conversing with him is unknown. Why – after being convicted of other sex crimes against minors – he was out on the streets and not being monitored is also unclear. All that is known is that this is the kind of tragedy that constitutes every parent’s worst nightmare.

Safety advocates used Hall’s terrible death to rally for a Panic Button. But what would this have done? She was clearly willing to converse with him and had no reservations about meeting up with him. None of her friends knew she was conversing with him. Nor did her parents. The heartbreaking reality of most rape and murder cases of this type is that the teen knowingly meets up with these men. When it involves teens, it’s usually because they believe that they’re in love, value the attention, and are not even thinking about the risks. Online Panic Buttons do absolutely nothing to combat the fundamental challenge of helping youth understand why such encounters are risky.

CEOP invites people to implement the ClickCEOP tab with the following questions:

Do you sometimes struggle to find answers to things that worry you online?
Had bad wall posts from people you don’t know?
Had a chat conversation that went sour?
Seen something written about you that isn’t true, or worse?
Has your account ever been hacked, even just as a joke?

These are serious questions and serious issues, the heart of bullying. They aren’t really about predation, but that doesn’t make them any less important. That said, how can the police help with every teen who is struggling with the wide range of bullying implied, from teasing to harassment? Even if every teen in the UK were to seriously add this and take it seriously, there’s no way that the UK police have a fraction of the resources to help teens manage challenging social dynamics. As a result, what false promises are getting made?

Many of the teens that I encounter truly need help. They need supportive people in their lives to turn to. I desperately want to see social services engage with these youth. But what I find over and over again is that social services do not have the resources to help even a fraction of the youth that come to them. So when we create a system where we tell youth that they have an outlet and then they use it and we don’t live up to our side of the bargain, then what? Many of the teens that I interviewed told me of their efforts to report problems to teachers, guidance counselors, parents, etc. only to no avail. That left them feeling more helpless and alone. What’s the risk of CEOP doing this to youth?

Finally, what’s the likelihood that kids (or adults) will click on this as a joke or just to get attention? How is CEOP going to handle the joke clicks vs. the real ones? How will they discern? One thing you learn from dealing with helplines is that kids often call in to talk about their friends when they’re really looking for help for themselves. It’s easier to externalize first to test the waters. The CEOP may get prank messages that are real cries for help. What happens when those go unanswered?

The press are all reporting this as being a solution to predation, but the teens who are at-risk for dangerous sexual encounters with adults are not going to click a Panic Button because they think that they know what they’re doing. CEOP is advertising this as a tool for bullying, but it’s not clear to me that they have the resources (or, for that matter, skillset) to handle the mental health issues they’re bound to receive on that end. And users may use this for a whole host of things for which it was never designed. The result, if anyone implements it at all, could be a complete disaster.

So why do I care that another well-intentioned technology is out there and will likely result in no change? I care because we need change. We need to help at-risk youth. And a tremendous amount of effort and energy is being expended to implement something that is unlikely to work but makes everyone feel as though the problem is solved. And I fear that there will be calls in the US to implement this without anyone ever evaluating the effectiveness of such an effort in the UK. So I respect Facebook’s resistance because I do think that they fully understand that this won’t help the most needy members of their community. And I think that the hype around it lets people forget about those most at-risk.

To my friends across the pond… Please help evaluate this “solution.” Please tell us what is and is not working, what kinds of cases the CEOP receives and how they handle them. Any data you can get your hands on would be greatly appreciated. I realize that it’s too late to stop this effort, but I really hope that people are willing to treat it as an experiment that must be evaluated. Cuz goddess knows the kids need us.