7
We Catch Sexual Predators—What You Don’t See on TV

The Internet has helped transform what used to be a nearly hidden crime—child exploitation and pornography (referred to by law enforcement as KP or “kiddie porn”) into what was estimated in 2006 to be a $20-billion-a-year criminal enterprise. According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, there are more than 10,000 child porn sites involving more than 300,000 children.

The Dateline Debacle: To Catch a Predator

Millions of people have tuned in to watch Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator series with investigative reporter Chris Hansen. This series chronicles undercover investigations in which alleged pedophiles are lured to a house after conversing online and expressing the desire to have sex with someone they believe to be a minor, but who is in actuality an adult member of a group called Perverted Justice. The first episode aired in 2004. Since then, 11 Predator segments have aired. Although the television viewing public can’t get enough of the series, the show has turned out to be a nightmare for law enforcement.

Perverted Justice and To Catch a Predator in Action

Perverted Justice has been called an “anti-pedophile activist organization,” a “civilian watchdog” group, and a “civilian vigilante” group. The site began in 2002 and started out by publicly posting chat logs to shame men who engage in sexual chats with purported children. Some members of the site allegedly went further by harassing in real life the sex chat perpetrators, as well as their friends, neighbors, employers, and family. The group now focuses on working with law enforcement to have the perpetrators arrested.

According to an article in Wikipedia, “… in 2006, Perverted Justice received $802,000 from NBC for its work on To Catch a Predator. In 2007, the site expects to receive another $450,000, and in 2008 another $600,000”.

According to that same article, “In May 2007, Perverted Justice was criticized in a now-dismissed employment lawsuit brought by former Dateline producer Marsha Bartel”. In the filing, Bartel alleges that NBC provides financial incentives to the group to use trickery and to humiliate targets to “enhance the comedic effect of the[ir] public exposure”. According to Bartel, some of the men caught in the Predator sting operations have reported that the decoys begged them to come to the sting houses, even after they had decided to walk away. Perverted Justice responded to the criticism by labeling Bartel a disgruntled former employee motivated by financial gain. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed after the New York Supreme Court ruled that “an employer is free to terminate an employee at any time for any reason or no reason”.

During the first two Predator “sting” operations, law enforcement was not involved. Since then, law enforcement in the local jurisdiction has been involved. The setup leads to some pretty dramatic footage. The predator arrives at the house, which is set up with covert cameras, and is lured inside by a legal-aged adult actress pretending to be a minor. Chris Hansen appears out of nowhere and grills the suspect about why he’s there and describes in sexually explicit terms what the suspect had offered to do with the minor via the chat logs. Hansen then lets him walk out of the house, where he is met at gunpoint by law enforcement and is arrested.

Although this makes for great television, experts have questioned the partnership between Dateline, Perverted Justice, and police agencies—in some cases calling it an “unholy alliance”.

Problems with To Catch a Predator

There are some stumbling points in the Dateline NBC series. First of all, law enforcement must be very careful to steer clear of any possible charges of entrapment. They don’t want to provide a defense attorney with ammunition from an investigation that might be tainted by questionable tactics. Someone doing this type of investigation should not be lurking in chat rooms that have any ties to sexual content or sexual deviance, because this immediately casts a negative light on the case. Furthermore, a good investigator adhering to accepted ethical standards will not harass or prod a target to make a case.

Does To Catch a Predator Hinder Law Enforcement?

From an investigative standpoint, To Catch a Predator has made it more difficult for law enforcement to pursue predators who exploit children. The purpose of the show is not to aid law enforcement or prevent victimization, but rather to win ratings. Investigative techniques have been disclosed by the series that have helped educate the perpetrators on how to circumvent the law. This has made our job so much harder while making things more convenient for the bad guy. The evidence collected in the To Catch a Predator series has been questioned. Questionable evidence can result in a case being thrown out entirely. When law enforcement conducts its own undercover pedophile operations, all online chats are carefully logged and documented. The investigator must be willing to swear in court that the evidence has not been compromised in anyway. This kind of integrity cannot be sworn to when the evidence—Internet chat logs—come from an outside source.

As the predators are confronted by reporter Chris Hansen, they often make “on-the-air” confessions. This has raised the question of whether Hansen is acting as law enforcement’s “legal agent”. If so, the suspects should be advised of their legal rights before being spoken to.

The Good and the Bad

We understand what the intent of the show is and that many who were caught in the trap have plead guilty to charges.

As women and mothers, we’re all for bringing this heinous crime to the forefront, especially if it encourages parents to keep a closer watch on what their children are doing online. As members of law enforcement, however, we’re frustrated that while To Catch a Predator had good intentions, the show has made it a lot harder for us to conduct these types of undercover operations.

In our opinion, To Catch a Predator has not reduced the number of predators soliciting minors online for sex. These individuals, commonly referred to by investigators as “travelers” because they actually travel to a destination to meet with their target victim, are not rare. A captain of ours has likened finding “traveler” suspects to “shooting fish in a barrel”.

At any point in time, Kristyn can go online posing as an adolescent and receive numerous solicitations within minutes. The only thing To Catch a Predator has done is to spook the pedophiles so much that they are now far more cautious. This leads to many difficulties in trying to run these operations.

For example, when Kristyn began doing this kind of work, the predator would take her word during the chat that she was a legitimate underage child. This is no longer the case. Predators demand phone calls, pictures, and even live video. Many will offer to provide a live webcam at their own expense to ensure that the undercover detective or real victim can give them live video. This presents a major problem to law enforcement who cannot use a real juvenile in these types of operations. Dateline hires actresses to portray minors. Law enforcement cannot and will not because of protocols, ethics, and safety standards.

Misdemeanor Versus Felony

Any crime is generally classified as a violation, misdemeanor, or felony. A violation is akin to a speeding ticket, where a conviction results in a fine but no jail time. A misdemeanor-level crime can result in a monetary fine up to a couple of thousand dollars and a potential jail sentence of up to 1 year.

A felony, the most serious level of crime, can result in many thousands of dollars in fines and many years in prison. States vary on their sentence structure, and courts have the discretion to be creative on whether the standard minimum is even ordered. We routinely see multiple felony-level offenses, which would theoretically result in a sentence of 3 1/2 to 7 years for each charge, get pled out to less than a year in jail, with most of that time suspended. It is frustrating, to say the least. The federal system has mandatory minimum sentences for crimes that meet its criteria; however, meeting those criteria is often difficult, and therefore, cases will customarily proceed in state courts. We are seeing more and more Internet crimes in which children are exploited being accepted by the United States district courts. These cases result in a considerable amount of time behind bars in federal prisons.

Laws Vary from State to State

Ironically, in several states, certain crimes where children are exploited are not felonies, but rather misdemeanors. For example, in Maryland, possession of child pornography is a misdemeanor, not a felony. Even in our home state of New Hampshire, child pornography possession was a misdemeanor up until approximately 10 years ago. There are still certain online behaviors that occur during Internet chat sessions that are misdemeanor-level crimes and are not necessarily even covered under statutes in some states—but things are changing. These laws are finally being scrutinized across the United States by lawmakers in an effort to appropriately criminalize any behaviors that sexually exploit minors. Laws across the country are becoming more consistent from state to state.

Although laws vary from state to state, with the passage of the Adam Walsh Act and federal initiatives such as Project Safe Child, states are working toward more consistency in cases involving the possession, manufacture, and distribution of child sexual assault images, as well as online enticement, in regard to legislation and penalties.

Lessons Learned

Whenever we do Internet safety presentations, we emphasize that had this been a real 14-year-old girl chatting with the predator in the chat room, and had the man met and had sex with the child, the resulting crime would have been rape. The 32-year-old male subject was coming to New Hampshire to rape a 14-year-old child in her parent’s bed. Regardless of a conviction and resulting prison time, if a real child had been victimized, no jail sentence could make up for that. It often takes this harsh and graphic description of the incident to put things into perspective. This is reality—a scary and common occurrence on the Internet.

Free Babysitting

Of course, the question arises as to why children are in chat rooms to begin with. Many parents are naive to the dangers of the Internet and even their own children’s activities online. Parents assume that if Suzy is in her room “doing her homework” on the computer, she is safe under their roof. They know where their child is, and because the child is not technically outside of parental supervision, she is certainly not in any danger. If the choice were to have your child at home in her room on the computer or hanging out at the food court in the mall, out of sight, which would you choose? Some parents have allowed the computer to take on the role of babysitter in the same way that television once did, but there’s little chance your child will be inappropriately approached or solicited from a television set.

The Internet is a double-edged sword—it is an amazing tool that opens an infinite number of doors to new ideas, education, cultures, art, and different people and places. It can also be a very dark place for a child if not monitored carefully. Felicia likens the Internet to a car. Would you hand over the car keys to your child who has never driven before without any training or warnings about the dangers of driving? Of course not. Yet every day, millions of children are speeding across the Information Superhighway, with no supervision and no driving rules. The Internet should be thought of as a privilege. If the “rules of the road” are not adhered to, you need to take away the keys.

The Internet—A Pedophile’s New Playground

Just recently, the Spanish periodical El Pais in Madrid printed an article quoting child pedophile expert Guillermo Canovas, who stated that there is “no doubt that the use of the Internet by pedophiles has led to the increase of this type of crime [child exploitation]”. Canovas said that, “the web has broken the isolation and guilt of pedophiles, allowing them to get in touch, to justify and encourage each other, to give each other tips on where to find pornography or children”. Canovas further stated that while pedophiles often find themselves attracted to children at an early age, “the majority of them develop the tendency later on,” but the Internet can precipitate the tendency.

The daily El Pais further reported that “far from being a marginal loner, the typical pedophile is a socially integrated and successful person”. The Internet simply opens the door to a target-rich environment that is not limited to the perpetrator’s community. No longer does the child molester have to place himself in a social setting where children are located, volunteer for child-related projects, or hang out in playgrounds or school yards—he simply has to jump on the Web and log into his Instant Messenger account.

12 Million Hits in 72 Hours

To put this ease-of-access in better perspective, consider that in June of 2008, 70 men were arrested in Australia as part of a global crackdown on online child pornography after they visited a site created by a hacker who posted child porn images on a legitimate European website. That number of 70 arrests, in and of itself, is significant, but what is even more disturbing is the fact that the website attracted over 12 million hits in only 76 hours.

Soon after this story broke, Australian Federal Police quickly stated that not all hits were deliberate. Some of the hits were inadvertent when users were redirected from a legitimate website to the kiddie porn site, but we still find this disturbing because we know it was not 12 million “accidental” hits. We know from other cases that, unfortunately, kiddie porn sites attract hundreds of thousands of hits in very little time. Among the men arrested by Australian police was a federal police officer. A million images of child pornography were seized.

Male Versus Female Offenders

Although the offender in the preceding scenario is a male—and the majority of sex offenders are males—make no mistake that there are female perpetrators out there. It is more common for a child to be victimized by a male adult; however, there are many documented cases where a female is the abuser. We generally hear about these cases in the news when a female teacher takes advantage of a male student. New Hampshire holds the dubious distinction of being host to one of the most notorious predators, teacher Pamela Smart, who seduced some of her male high school students and then orchestrated a plan for them to execute her husband. She took child exploitation to the extreme.

Unfortunately, society still has not accepted that a male can be victimized by an older female. Even male teenagers might not see themselves as victims of the “older woman”. Not too long ago, Kristyn was involved in the investigation of a 31-year-old woman who provided alcohol to several underage boys and sexually assaulted some of them. During the course of the case investigation, interviews, and arrest, Kristyn heard numerous jokes about how lucky the boys were and how they must have been the envy of their friends. When the arrest hit the media, even Jay Leno on The Tonight Show chimed in with a few zingy comments about the woman’s activities with the young males. Sexual assaults involving males as victims are still underreported, possibly because of a combination of societal expectations and the embarrassment of being a male who has been taken advantage of by a female. Although this stereotypical notion of the strong invincible male who cannot be victimized is changing, we are still not there yet. It is still difficult for a male to come forward, and when these cases are reported, we believe that juries still have a hard time seeing a 14-year-old male as a victim, particularly when the victim is often near adulthood by the time the case goes to trial.

Much to our dismay, the female suspect in this case was acquitted at trial despite her victims testifying about what she had done. Part of the problem in obtaining a conviction may have been the fact that the young teenage victims were not seen as victims by the time the trial occurred. The boys’ appearance had dramatically changed and they more closely resembled men than the children they truly were at the time of their victimization.

Recently, a female public sex offender came in to register—a requirement since she had just moved into the community. At the age of 18, she lured and seduced three 13-year old boys in the area in which she lived. All three boys gave statements confirming the sexual assaults; however, only one jurisdiction sought an indictment. Although the woman was convicted on one count of Aggravated Felonious Sexual Assault against a 13-year-old child, the investigating officer relayed that other law enforcement officials gave him a hard time for pursuing the case. Had the roles been reversed and the victim been a 13-year-old female, our guess is that all three communities would not have hesitated to seek indictments against an 18-year-old male perpetrator.

The Cyber Playground

We want everyone to understand that although many parents feel their children would never be exposed to the horrors of sexual predators online, it happens with a great deal of frequency. We understand that parenting is hard enough without the added complication of having to police your child’s Internet activities, but we both feel strongly that this has become the “virtual playground” for our children. Just as you wouldn’t send a young child off by himself to a playground with no adult supervision, you must think of the Internet as the child’s “cyber” playground, which requires the same parental oversight and monitoring as any other activity your child might be involved in.

Awareness is the key. Parents who are aware of the dangers of the Internet are already armed to prevent intrusions on their children’s innocence.