Hunting the Predators

We’ve all seen how the anonymity of the Internet can bring out the very worst in people. From vicious blog comments to fictitious rumors, the new media is a modern-day Wild West. Usually, the ugliness stays in virtual unreality-land; no real harm done beyond hurt feelings — but there’s real danger lurking there too.

Who will read your son’s MySpace profile, and try to learn more? Where did your daughter meet the people with whom she chats for hours on end? What do these faceless strangers know about your children… and why do they want do know it?

Online, everyone’s masked by a monitor, and as a mom, I have no trouble understanding the motivations behind this (from the NYTimes):

Last month, the Web site Perverted-Justice.com posted news of the conviction of Sean Young, a Wisconsin man sentenced to 10 years in state prison for soliciting sex online from a 14-year-old girl. According to a transcript of an online chat posted on the site, at one point Mr. Young had asked the girl, identified only as Billie, what she was wearing. When she answered “sweats,� Mr. Young typed back that if she were his daughter, “i’d make u wear sexy clthes.�

Billie turned out to be an adult volunteer for Perverted Justice, an anti-pedophile group, and when Mr. Young drove to a house where he expected to meet the teenager for sex, he was arrested by sheriff’s deputies.

The conviction was logged as the 104th that Perverted Justice says it has been responsible for since 2003, a tally that as of yesterday had reached 113.

This is the group that Dateline NBC works with for “To Catch a Predator” — a controversial series that films the arrest of adults who have arranged to meet with “young people” encountered online. The show, and the group, have garnered lots of publicity — some good, and some very bad. During one recent sting, for instance, the target of a raid killed himself as the tv crew waited outside his house.

A prosecutor in this Northeast Texas town killed himself Sunday as police tried to arrest him on charges of soliciting sex from a minor over the Internet.

The prosecutor, Louis Conradt, 56, had been caught in a sting operation set up by the TV newsmagazine “Dateline NBC” and an Internet watchdog group called Perverted Justice. An NBC camera crew was outside the house when the fatal shot was fired.

As terrible as that story was, though, I keep thinking about those internet chatrooms, and the unidentifiable people talking to one another there:

Perverted Justice has 41,000 registered users of its online forums dedicated to the cause of stopping predators, 65 volunteers trained as chat room decoys and three salaried leaders: Mr. Von Erck, a woman who is a liaison with law enforcement and a business manager.

Typically, a Perverted Justice volunteer creates a false online profile, posing as, say, a 13-year-old girl on MySpace. The volunteer will wait to receive e-mail messages or will enter a chat room. If an adult contacts the volunteer, the decoy responds and sees if the conversation becomes sexual.

Why would an adult be talking in sexually explicit terms with a 13-year-old, online or anywhere else?

There are valid concerns about whether these sting activities are crossing the fine line between enticement and entrapment. It’s absolutely crucial that the legal i’s and t’s be dotted — not just to preserve the rights of the accused, but to prevent a predator from returning to his electronic lair on a technicality. Someone lurking online hoping to chat up young girls and boys has already signalled illicit intent (imho), and I absolutely don’t want my Adorable Child (AC) to encounter them one day due to an overzealous hunter.

Whether NBC should be paying $70K per hour to the group setting up the stings that they’ll then film, of course, is another question altogether.