Online Child Exploitation: The Risks
While there can be great benefits for children and youth who use the Internet, it also holds potential dangers. Some of the main risks to children and youth include being exposed to unsuitable or offensive materials or from adults who wish to exploit children using the Internet as a point of contact.
Online child sexual exploitation is a serious problem. Approximately 1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online.1 Because you can’t see the person who you are communicating with online, it is very difficult to know if they are telling the truth about who they are. Chat rooms, a popular place for children and teens, are a susceptible place where abusers may look for victims. They may adopt a child/youth identity, strike up friendships with children or youth and then attempt to meet them in person.
Identifying offenders can be very difficult even when the child does report the incident to parents and/or police: one never knows if the age and sex that the individual has given to the victim are accurate. In some cases where meetings have taken place, the person has been much older than the child was led to believe; in others the offender was in fact an older man when the child/youth had been told the “new friend” was a female. Despite a few highly publicized arrests that have been made, the United States’ rate of conviction for online offenses against children is currently about 1,000 individuals annually (Carr, 2001).
Luring
The term “luring” can mean a variety of activities — enticing a child or youth t reveal personal details about themselves and family members; send photos of themselves; or meet, usually in a different city or country. Sending photos over the Internet is potentially risky because an exploiter can intercept the photos and cut and paste the child’s image into a pornographic photo and then distribute it.
Internet exploitation typically starts in a very non-threatening way. This process may take place in a single interaction or over a period of weeks or months.
Other routes of access are through teen telephone networks. At a growth rate of 15-20% a month, youth are signing up for these networks as an alternative to Internet chat rooms. Personal information is often revealed and sexual offenders thereby gain access to youth through this phone-chat service (Recchia, 2002).
How Online Predators Can Find Your Child’s Information2
- Member Profiles and online white and yellow pages:
There are various web sites that allow users to create profiles and search for members with similar profiles. The white and yellow pages contain addresses from various sources that often share contacts.
- Chatrooms:
Spammers and sexual predators harvest names from chatrooms, as it allows them to “target” their mailing lists. To target kids, sexual predators will go where the kids are. Examples of such places are game rooms, kid-friendly sites, and teen-support sites.
- Surfer’s Web Browser:
Some sites use various tricks to extract a web searcher’s E-mail address from the web browser, sometimes without the searcher noticing it. One example of this is making the browser fetch one of the page’s images through an anonymous connection to the site. In order to access the page, some browsers give that email address the user has configured into the browser as the password for that account.
- Chain Letters and Hoaxes:
This method means the spammer or sexual predator uses a hoax to convince people to give him or her valid email addresses. For example some use chain letters with promises of free gifts to you and anyone the letter is forward to as long as it is copied to the person who started the chain letter. They often claim to be associated with large reputable businesses.
There are legitimate Internet resources that can be misused. Once someone has your email address, there are legitimate Internet resources that can be misused to find additional information about you. For instance, by inputting an email address and conducting a reverse lookup on a people-finder, someone can find your full name, home address and telephone number. With that information, people can use a mapping tool on the Internet to determine where you live and exactly how to get to your house.
In addition, they can conduct web and newsgroup searches to see if you have a web site, are on a web site, or have posted any messages to newsgroups. In essence, within one hour, someone may be able to find information such as your name, home and business addresses, home and business telephone numbers, preferences and hobbies and even information about your family and neighbours.
Children and Youth at Risk
Some children and youth are more vulnerable than others. Finkelhor (2000) describes “at risk” children as those who may:
- have experienced prior maltreatment
- be emotionally immature or shy
- have low self-esteem or peer problems
- be troubled or depressed
- have a strong respect for adult status
- be willing to cooperate for a desired reward.
1 David Finkelhor, Kimberly J. Mitchell, and Janis Wolak. Online Victimization: A Report on the Nation’s Youth, Alexandria, Virginia: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 2000, page ix.
2 National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Adapted from “How Do Spammers and Online Stalkers Find You?” in The Front Line, August 2001, Volume XXXXIV, page 8-9. Copyright 2001.
