Policing, Parenting, and Persuading: Assessing the Effectiveness of Current Anti-Predation Practices
April Kontostathis · SSRN Electronic Journal · 2012
One of the most publicized dangers of the Internet age is that of the sexual predator, turning the very same services that teens love to use into tools for offenders to solicit them for sexual activity. The sexual solicitation of minors over the Internet is a problem that is both complicated and growing. Since 2000, a concerted effort from parents, educators, politicians, and law enforcement officers has led to a decrease in non-aggressive sexual solicitation in middle to upper class families. However, for low-income families and new Internet users, non-aggressive sexual solicitation has increased, while aggressive sexual solicitation statistics have remained the same in all demographics. Law enforcement officers, parents, and legislators have used a three-pronged combination of sting operations, preventative messages directed at youths, and legislation to combat Internet predators. Despite these efforts, unfortunately, one in seven children were sexually solicited online as of 2006, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Equally disturbing, public perceptions about predation – concerning the predator and the victim – are inaccurate. Unlike the scary, trenchcoat-wearing strangers of yore, or the hapless young men who arrive naked to find Chris Hansen awaiting them, many online offenders are married men with children holding respectable positions in the workplace. They are frequently tech-savvy manipulators who are adept at assessing and exploiting their victims’ vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, this renders the current model of preventative messages, legislation, and sting operations less effective than they could be, allowing far too many teens to fall through the cracks. To further complicate the issue, in households classified as new Internet users, the parents are often not at all well-versed in Internet social behaviors, and as such, are poorly equipped to properly supervise their children as they interact with friends and strangers on the Internet. This paper explores the effectiveness of changing the current persuasive, deceptive and legislative approaches to preventing cyberpredation by: 1) providing an exhaustive review of the current legislation against online enticement in the U.S., including successful and failed challenges to it; 2) analyzing current preventative messages to determine how accurately they reflect the needs of their audiences, both youths and parents; 3) analyzing current communicative strategies used by offenders to assess applicability of the aforementioned preventative messages, and 4) reviewing the success rates of supervisory software used by parents to monitor their teens’ online behavior. The ultimate goal of this research is to begin the process of determining where the cracks in the three-pronged protection approach lie in order to better address the problem of sexual predation.