The NBC show ‘To Catch a Predator’ created and recorded sting operations that lured online predators.
Even as sex crimes against minors decline, a new report from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center released this week found an massive increase in the number of online child predators arrested in undercover sting operations. Despite this, the survey rejects the idea that the Internet is an especially perilous place for minors, and finds that while the nature of online sex crimes against minors changed little between 2000 and 2006, the profile of the offenders has been shifting—and both differ markedly from the popular conception.
Extrapolating from a nationwide survey of law enforcement agencies, the authors estimate that 2006 saw 615 arrests of online child predators in cases involving actual minors as victims (up 21 percent from 2000), and 3,100 arrests in cases where the "child" was actually an undercover law enforcement officer (a whopping 381 percent increase over 2000). During the same time period, the proportion of minors aged 12-17 on the Internet rose from 73 to 93 percent. Those numbers, the authors believe, don't represent an actual increase in the national pervert population, but rather reflect the broader trend over the same period of interactions moving online, combined with more vigorous police sting efforts.
In the vast majority of cases, it's worth noting, the child victims were teens who knowingly went to meet their older interlocutors intending to have sex, which may explain why stings so vastly outnumber actual-victim arrests. Though the victims are too young to legally consent to sex with an adult, relatively few cases involve physical coercion, which makes it likely that many—indeed, quite possibly a majority—don't come to the attention of law enforcement.
Social networking sites, the subject of much angst over online predators, were more or less unknown in 2000, but by 2006 accounted for 33 percent of the initial contacts between (actual) minors and adults in search of illicit sex. While online chat was still the most common medium for indecent proposals, it saw a corresponding drop in popularity—from 80 percent to 40 percent of initial contacts.
But while efforts at protecting kids from predation on those sites often focus on efforts to block registered sex offenders, these represented only a tiny fraction (2-4 percent) of the predators in the survey cases—though about a fifth had a record of some arrest unrelated to sex offenses. Similarly, while parents often worry that pedophiles will use photographs or other personal information on such sites to target kids for stalking or abduction, the authors found no evidence of that occurring. Indeed, all stalking cases the authors discovered involved adults persisting in contacting a minor after the end of (illicit but consensual) face-to-face relationships.
The most pronounced change the study found was in the profile of the adult offenders. The proportion of younger adult offenders, aged 18-25, rose from 23 percent to 40 percent of arrests in cases with actual underage victims, and from 7 percent to 34 percent in undercover police stings. In the former type of case, the authors note, the increase in the absolute number of arrests of young-adult offenders appears to account for the entire increase in that category—no other age group saw similar growth. At the same time, while 40 percent of offenders in 2000 possessed child pornography, only 21 percent did in 2006.
The authors suggest that this may be a consequence of younger adults, who came of age online, being more likely to seek out victims on the Internet than in other venues. Alternatively, it seems possible that the Internet, and in particular the advent of social networking, has simply increased the prevalence of social contacts between teens and college-age adults, who may in turn be more likely to think of each other as peers, even when the law does not. Cutting against that hypothesis is the finding that predators were significantly more likely in 2006 than in 2000 to misrepresent themselves as being teens as well.
Still, the overarching finding is that neither the Internet nor social networking sites pose unusual dangers for minors. As has always been the case, the underaged are most likely to be the victims of sex crimes perpetrated by acquaintances and family members, even if such cases are seldom featured on To Catch a Predator.
