After a Midwestern teen ran off in late July for sex with a Nevada adult she met online, a new study came forth saying children befriending adult sex predators online often enough know the adults want sex with them.
The Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire said August 2 that only five percent of the Internet sex offenders observed tried deceiving their victims about being older adults, while only 21 percent lied about their sexual motivations – findings, the researchers said, suggest the need for new ways to stop Internet sex crime.
The 14-year-old Indiana girl who ran off with the Nevada adult, Sidney Moreno of Reno, was found in Utah with $5,000 in case she took from her father’s safe and the hard drive from her computer, the researchers said, indicating just two of “several items that should catch the attention of parents.”
Those items, according to several reports on the crime, included Moreno reportedly sending the girl flowers three times; calling the girl at her family’s home; and, telling her to remove the computer hard drive before she left – removing any and all evidence of their conversations and his screen name that might have helped police identify and catch him.
Moreno was captured after an Amber Alert notification on the girl went out, with police stopping Moreno and the girl in a Utah desert town, Wendover, four miles from the Nevada state line along Interstate 80, and with a four-man police force. They had been missing for an entire weekend before being found on a Monday, with the girl kept in custody until she was returned to her family and Moreno in federal custody in Salt Lake City until he was transferred to Indiana.
“There are two different kinds of kid victims,” Internet attorney Parry Aftab, a longtime activist on behalf of children’s online safety, told AVNOnline.com. “There are the ones who are the loners… we thought they were the only kinds of victims. They are emotionally needy, they may be shy, they feel unpopular, they are looking for love online. And they tend to believe the person they meet is the cute 14-year-old they say they are; they may think he’s 23, but they think they’re young enough and they think they are a confidante, a potential spouse, a real love interest, someone who understands them. It starts with confiding in the predator, then it moves to trust, then it moves to sex.”
The second kind, Aftab said, was personified tragically by Christina Long, a Connecticut girl who was lively and popular and active in school, until she was murdered by a man she met online. These victims are “probably a much larger group,” Aftab said, “but they never report it. They’re the high risk kids in that they are generally super achievers, very attractive, very popular, and lead an exciting life. And it’s the same way that [such] kids will experiment with drugs, or drive too fast… these same kids are now intentionally meeting [adults] online… The high risk kids are doing it for the sex, the thrills, and even then they tend not to report it because they think somehow they asked for it.”
Without blaming the victims one iota, Aftab said teenagers don’t have the best record of making judgment calls – a record online predators exploit successfully, especially because they can work behind a barrier that a real time/real world predator can’t.
“The difference is now that a lot of slimy characters can get to them and get them to lower any inhibitions by talking to them online in a safe environment,” Aftab said. “The kids who are always naïve are now easy listeners. If the same guy had shown up at a mall to talk to the same girl, she would have told him to take a flying leap. Because they have this safe, secure, anonymous conversation, they get into the kids trust, the kids heads, they do the things teens always do.”
Aftab is now working with one such victim – Katherine Tarbox, an Internet predator’s victim at age 13, who published a memoir of her experience and trauma at 18, and is now a children’s online safety advocate – in preparing a Website for kids who have been victimized by online sexual predators to get information and talk out their experiences.
