talkpolitics | To Thwart a Predator

malasadas.livejournal.com posting in

Anyone who ever watched Chris Hansen's heavily hyped Dateline NBC show To Catch a Predator is familiar with the profile of the modal sexual predator on the internet. In many respects, the internet has greatly enabled a category of abuser who had limited capabilities before the technology. While criminal statistics make it very clear that those who are most likely to abuse children sexually are those familiar to them and entrusted with their care -- parents, relatives, teachers, clergy, etc -- the classic episode of "stranger danger" becomes much more possible with the invention and dissemination of remote communication and community tools like the net. Simply put, before the internet, sexual predators who victimized strangers or bare acquaintences had to do their work at least partially in the open, risking direct observation of their activities by other adults.

To clarify this problem, I am going to use a composite predator based upon publically available court documents. Let's call him...."Phil".

In most respects, Phil fits the stereotypical internet sexual predator portrayed in Hansen's series of reports. The word "predator" in its wild and awe inspiring form does not apply:

Phil is better symbolized by THIS type of natural predator:

Grotesque, bottom feeding, using trickery and mimicry to lure in victims.

Phil's pattern is as follows: Using earlier iterations of the net, Phil infiltrated chat spaces that had been created for survivors of sexual abuse. In those spaces, he identified the most isolated and vulnerable members of the community and tried his best to earn their trust, even to the point of offering them the use of anonymous servers for posting that resulted in his gaining even more access and information about his intended victims.

Phil's machinations would lead eventually to his offering to help the invariably adolescent women in the real world, encouraging them to travel to him with offers of "sanctuary" from their abuse -- where he would try to seduce or force sexual contact with them.

Phil's activities were relatively well-shielded in the spaces where he operated because the chat spaces were mainly venues with which he could initiate contact -- the most manipulative behavior happened outside of the view of most members. Phil was eventually caught luring a teen ager across state lines FOR A SECOND TIME and was sentenced to a very short prison term. Upon release, he resumed his online activities and was caught again and sentenced to a much longer term. Upon release from that prison term, we can only assume that he will head directly back to the internet.

And here is the rub: Predators like Phil do not stop. Ever. When pedophiles operate in meat space to lure prepubescent children into sexual assault and rape, conditions of their release restrict their activities and contact with children. For example, it would not be uncommon for a child rapist to be forbidden to be within a 1000 feet a school or playground, even if that meant that he could not shop at a wide variety of stores that are adjacent to those spaces. Electronic monitoring makes it possible to know when they violate those conditions.

Phil is not a pedophile, per se. His victim patterns tilt towards Ephebophilia and Hebephilia with a specialization towards seeking out the emotionally vulnerable in those populations. His criminal behavior involves custodial interference of his victims as well as sexual assault and rape. His reasons for this are, obviously, open for debate. As Chris Hansen's show demonstrates, these serial sexual pradtors are not typically suave, sophisticated or, perhaps even, capable of healthy romantic relationships with women of their own age and circumstances. They seek out younger, easy to manipulate victims in many respects because it is the only way that they can feel powerful, mature and capable. And they keep doing it.

So my question is about how to THWART the Phil's of the internet because it seems impossible to do so while he has ACCESS to the internet. Courts routinely impose restrictions on internet activities for people paroled or released from incarceration for such crimes, but we all know that hacking and cracking remain several steps ahead of authorities so giving a predator ANY access to the internet is an invitation to thwart restrictions from chat, blogging or social media sites -- even though we KNOW that people like Phil are enabled far beyond their natural ability to harm by access.

Can we develop better ways to monitor, restrict and thwart such predators? Can we attach devices to their computers that will short out their motherboards when they go from shopping for Hello Kitty gear on Amazon to Facebook? I'd personally favor attaching an electroshock device to their genitals, but I'm mean.

Alternately, we could realize and acknowledge the actual threat these people represent, release half a million petty drug possession offenders from jail and keep Phil in prison for 25 to life.