Pandora’s Blog

Another huge development in the Child Online Protection sector… As I am sure you have heard, the new reigning Miss America, America’s Most Wanted and New York’s Suffolk County’s computer crimes unit have teamed up to bust online predators.

You can read the AP article here.

Basically, the Suffolk County PD created the profile of a 14-year-old and used photos of Miss America (Lauren Nelson) as a teenager. She entered chat rooms and just waited for the men to flock to her. She eventually provided a voice on the phone and a bait to ensure predators would eagerly come into the house where she waited on Long Island, NY.

At least four men were arrested and face charges. Some came from as far as New Jersey for the chance to have sex with the “14-year-old.”

Mr. Walsh and co. seem to have jumped on the project in an effort to capture some of the success that Mr. Hansen and the Dateline crew have accrued. The sting operations were recently conducted and filmed by America’s Most Wanted, to be aired this Saturday, April 28th.

John Walsh and Lauren Nelson, who was a near-victim of an online predator when she was younger, have been giving interviews and were even on The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet on FOX this morning. There is some great footage of these dirtbags realizing they’ve been caught… which, incidentally, is my favorite part of these shows – that moment when you see “Oh Sh*t” scroll across their mind!

Thankfully, there were no real 14- or 15-year old girls involved, but the issue of child online safety is hotter than ever. The events documented and publicized by the Walsh/Nelson/Suffolk County trio are definitely a big win in two categories: most scumbags off the Net – and more spotlight on the issue.

But it also clearly shows that predators are still out there, and there is an endless supply of them. Protect your kids.

A final note to all parents: Protect your kids from the dangers online. Talk to them. Know what your kids are doing on the Internet and whom they are coming in contact with. A few easy steps and helpful software (like our PC Pandora) can go miles in keeping your kids safe!

I raise my glass in toast to Lauren Nelson for committing her reign to the safety and welfare of kids who just want to have fun on the Internet!

Todd Krysiak of the Portage Daily Register has written an in-depth 3-part series that examines the use of undercover police to arrest suspected pedophiles who travel to meet the underage children they believe they have met online.

Right up our alley!

You can read Part I, Part II and Part III here… Each one is very-well done.

Using the Columbus (Wisconsin) Police Department as the subject to initiate discussion, Part I looks at the question are the tectical approaches progressive or entrapment. A debate that, sure, can be formed – but who is going to defend the offenders that do show up at a house truly hoping to have sex with a child/teen? If it’s a matter of picking the side of a police officer lying and posing as a young girl OR an adult male trying to have sex with that “young girl,” which would you chose?

Do two wrongs make a right? No, but sometimes you have to play bad to catch evil.

Part II takes a look at how long it takes for an explicit sexual discussion to take place when a “15-year-old” girl enters a chatroom. It’s pretty shocking and leads back into whether the tactic can be considered entrapment. An arrested individual’s attorney will first look at the chat conversations and figure out how the arrested got to the point where they crossed the line — whether they crossed it themselves or whether they were pulled across it.

Again, who’s side are you going to take? But knowing that chat records will be used in court, officers usually play it safe and wait to be approached and questioned by the predators. It doesn’t take long for something to happen either…

The final part, Part III, asks Are online predators pedophiles? What this question examines is the difference of someone trying to have sex with a 4-ft-tall, 9-year-old girl… or a “voluptuous 14- or 15-year-old girl.”

Is there a difference? A source in the article notes that the 9-year-old chasers are pedophiles, where as the guys chasing the teens are just pursuing the “Brittney Spears” image that the music industry flaunted and continues to do so with teen pop stars.

That may be true, but I have a hard time making one of the crimes lesser than the other.

I encourage all to read the articles and comment… what do you feel about these issues?

Stumbled across a pretty good resource for parents online. Plugged In Parent is run by Sharon Miller Cindrich, a columnist and mother of two. She is also the author of the forthcoming book, E-parenting: Keeping Up With Your Tech-Savvy Kids, which I personally can’t wait to read.

The site has some Tech Tips, a good resources directory, more info on the book and Sharon… and a pretty amusing blog.

Check it out: www.pluggedinparent.com

Our condolences to all parents, families and friends of the Virginia Tech victims.

Words cannot express the sorrow we feel for all involved. We mourn your loss and you are in our thoughts…

I was reading a very excellent NY Times article by Alina Tugend this weekend. It’s a pretty standard –but also very good— look at keeping kids safe online.

Unfortunately, we were left out.

But that wasn’t my biggest irk…

One of the interviewees, Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist who oversaw the coming report entitled the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said that monitoring “certainly changes the climate of trust in the household, although a lot of parents do it when there are a lot of problems and they’re trying to keep their children safe.”

Being triggered by this, Tugend added, “monitoring — or let us call it what it is, spying — seems far more repellent. But my oldest is just coming up to the teen years; when I hear parents of teenagers talking about MySpace and blogs and instant messaging, I want to bypass the monitoring software altogether and just toss the computer out the window.”

The article continues to say thus:

“The problem with snooping on your child, as Lawrence Balter, professor of applied psychology at New York University said, is: “How do they develop common sense if someone is breathing down their neck? Then they spend all their time trying to evade you.”

While none of these statements vehemently oppose monitoring and toss the idea out, they do raise a question: do monitoring and trust work at opposite ends of the spectrum – or do they go hand in hand?

The answer is simple to state, but complex to practice: it’s all up to the parents.

Just as is the case with taking control of the Internet in your home and protecting your kids, trust is 100% up to the parents. If you don’t let your kids know and feel they are being trusted, they won’t trust you… that will spiral downwards in to real crappy territory.

So how do you let your kids feel comfortable, well, I am not a parenting expert, but what my parents did worked: they trusted me.

Granted there was no internet (and we only had an old MAC Plus), but the same rules applied for staying out late with friends and going to hang outs and parties in high school. My parents trusted me, I felt trusted – so I didn’t do anything to destroy that trust.

Pandora Corp. has ALWAYS advised that parents talk to their kids and explain why they are monitoring the computer. By being open with your kids, they should understand that you are doing it to prevent any harm from coming to them.

NOW, in the real world, there are instances where spying may be appropriate. We recognize that as well… Whether it be a complete lack of trust to begin with, or a misguided/problem teen, there will be cases where monitoring secretly will work to the family’s advantage. The bottom line is that the safety of the entire family should come first.

That is why we say it is 100% up to the parents to place trust and monitoring in the same side… and not at opposite ends of the spectrum.

What do you think?

Thought I’d go out for the weekend on a positive note.

I stumbled across this website called Section 21: Tactical Corps. It’s an activist organization and intelligence network dedicated to confronting Internet activities by child abusers and pedophiles.

On the site they have a bunch of tips to parents, plus they take a deeper look into the child abuser/pedo mind through science and research. There’s even a profile/psych section.

There are also links to support groups, other activism groups (in the genre), a discussion board and a blog (not very updated).

If you feel your child is being abused or sexually assaulted online (or physically), check out the site. They have lots of useful information and I give them thumbs up for their effort and mission!

Item #1: Another sicko is busted for having sex with a kid he met on MySpace.

This jerkface scumbag, Stephen Letavec, is a volunteer firefighter from Elrama PA. He met a 14-year old girl on MySpace and traveled to her home in Oxford CT, THREE times to have sex with her. As a result he has been sentenced to 10 years in prison, and must serve 10 years of supervised release, after he gets out.

What a sh*tbag!

But the remarkable thing: why did the girl allow it to happen TWO times before telling anyone?! In fact, the story doesn’t even say whether or not she told anyone… Maybe her parents caught her or someone found out.

Takeaway from this story: there are pedophiles out there that will travel for the chance to have sex with your kids — and some of your kids will let it happen.

Knowledge is power. Know what your kids are doing online!

Read the story and watch a short video clip on Hartford’s NBC station.

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Item #2: A very cool and helpful website.

In my search for helpful answers and tool found online, I cam across this very nicely laid out website: chatdanger.com. It is a resource for parents and families about the potential dangers on interactive online services, such as chat rooms, IMs, online games, email and even mobile phones/devices!

You can get tips, read true stories and even give advice yourself!

I give it a thumbs up and am putting it in the blogroll — check them out!

So, why do all these pedophiles and online predators think they can have sex with teenagers they meet online…?

Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the free market technology think tank The Progress and Freedom Foundation, has authored a new paper titled Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions.

While the paper does focus on the scope of social networking and dismissing age verification tactics used online, it also contains some interesting information on the presence of online predators.

He believes the media has “overstated the actual number of dangerous incidents happening on [MySpace] and other social networking websites.” In a Forbes.com interview he says, “That issue has been greatly overblown. No doubt there are bad guys lurking online, just like they are lurking on offline venues. The question is: Is it some kind of national epidemic that will be effectively addressed with age verification mandates? I do not think that is the case.”

While I agree with the fact that age verification is useless (that will be another post), I couldn’t disagree more that the issue is “greatly overblown.”

Thierer notes that the problem lies within “at-risk” kids and that they are the “real concerns.” In his paper, he states:

Not only is it a myth that there is a growing epidemic of Internet-facilitated child abductions, but it is also a myth that all children are equally susceptible to falling prey to online predators. In reality, the population of “at-risk” youngsters who are most likely to become the victim of online predators is very small.

A 2004 study by researchers from the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes against Children Research Center surveyed more than 2,500 cases in which juveniles became the victims of sex crimes by people they met through the Internet. The authors found that those children—almost all of whom were teenagers—were not, generally speaking, the victims of the stereotypical scenario that most parents and policy makers fear: “strangers who are pedophiles and who deceive and lure children, frequently over long distances, into situations where they can be forcibly abducted or sexually assaulted.” In fact, the opposite was the case.

The study found that “although they undoubtedly manipulated juveniles in a variety of ways, the offenders in the Internet-initiated crimes did not generally deceive victims about being older adults who were interested in sexual relationships. Victims usually knew this propensity before their first face-to-face encounters with offenders.”

The survey results supporting this finding are startling:

· Only 5% of the adult offenders lied about their age and tried to pass themselves as being minors.
· Only 21% of the adult offenders lied about their sexual desires with the minor.

Yet, despite the fact that most offenders did not hide their desires:
· The great majority of victims (83%) who met with offenders face-to-face voluntarily went somewhere with them afterward (a hotel, movie, restaurant, etc.), and many (41%) spent at least one night with the offender.
· Most victims (73%) willingly met with offenders more than once.
· In 89% of the cases, the victims willingly engaged in some sort of sexual activity with the offender; only 5% of the cases involved violence or rape.

This basically states that the majority of teenagers are KNOWINGLY meeting up with these older strangers with the intent of having sex. And what problem does the study and Thierer immediately point too? A bad relationship between parent and child. Thierer does say in his paper “there is no substitute for good parenting and mentoring of our kids. We should not be calling in government to act as surrogate parent when parents already have the tools and the ability to handle much of this problem themselves.”

To this I couldn’t agree more. But going back to my original grievance with his stance, as long as predators still lurk online, and as long as teenagers are -apparently- willingly meeting up with older men/women they meet online with the intent of having sexual relationships – maybe this issue isn’t overblown enough?!

I encourage everyone to read Thierer’s paper and discuss your own opinion of the issue at hand. He makes some great points, but I feel is completely wrong upon thinking the issue of online predators is exaggerated and overblown. The “at-risk” pool should maybe be renamed the “higher-risk,” because really - aren’t all children at risk? These sickos are still out there. So shouldn’t the welfare of all kids, not just a select group, be at hand and not minimized?

I do, however, think he hits the nail on the head with his closing thoughts:

Parents and policy makers should embrace a “3-E” solution: Empowerment, Education and Enforcement. Empowerment refers to the tools and methods available to parents to better monitor and control their children’s online behavior and activities [like our PC Pandora]. Education refers to the need to industry, government and parents to do more to teach our children about online risks and proper online etiquette. And enforcement refers to the need for legislators and law enforcement officials to do more to weed out and adequately prosecute the real bad guys looking to prey on our children.

Discuss…….

Over the weekend, 28 sicko pervert wackjobs were arrested when they showed up to a house in Orlando Florida, hoping to have sex with (people) whom they believed to be boy and girls, ages 13 and 14.

You can read a story here and watch video here.

Ok… so let’s think about this and how it relates to your kids…

THANKFULLY, and I can’t stress that enough, there were no actual children harmed in the incident. “Operation 15 Minutes,” as it was dubbed, was set up by Perverted Justice, a California-based, nonprofit organization and the Orlando Police Department’s Computer Crimes Unit.

It gets better though, turns out that when the guys showed up, adult actors who looked the part of 12-to-15-year-old boys or girls greeted them at the door and took them inside. And then Chris Hansen, host of the “Dateline NBC” series “To Catch a Predator”, confronted them. The show filmed the encounters for a segment it plans to air in July.

Of course all the men were arrested, so there are now 28 less threats online. YAY!

But let’s look at these threats: there was a school bus driver, an Air Force mechanic, a lifeguard, an engineer, a court administrator, a pizza maker… and even THREE Disney employees (not necessarily workers at the theme parks). That is just some. The list reads like a list of common Joe Schmoes… And that is often what these online predators end up being.

The fact that these sickos came from 5 states – New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and as far as Washington State! – illustrates the fact that online sex-offenders take their hobby seriously.

I mean, think about that. These guys wanted so bad – and thought they really had the chance – to have sex with young teens, that they took time off work, bought a plane ticket, rented a car, and traveled across the country…

Ridiculous.

Again, no kids were harmed, but this clearly illustrates the need to talk to your kids and be aware of their online activities. Watch what they do, be aware of their friends and connections online… These guys are out there and they do NOT have your child’s best interest in mind.

But it also leads to a second, potentially bigger issue -> Why do these guys think they can have sex with teens? Why do they think they have a shot…? The answer is, simply, because some teens are actually doing just that.

But I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow…

Thoughts on this story?

Hi!

Welcome to the new PC Pandora Blog. You may ask, why does PC Pandora want to have a blog…?

I’ll tell you!

Every day a new story surfaces about a person or group of people caught and arrested, as they try to meet up with and have sex with teenagers whom they met online. Government agencies, local community groups and non-profit associations are consistently embarking on new education campaigns and holding awareness meetings aimed to educate and inform both parents and kids of the dangers online. And yet the slimeballs on the Internet continue to interact with your kids.

I realized that as the stories appear and the meetings come and go, there is no open forum to discuss the news, the updates and share personal stories of good parenting… I’ve started this blog to be just that place.

Here, we will discuss news and developments surrounding the safety of children online. I encourage all to chime in. Give advice, give tips and give help. This is an issue that affects everyone - so everyone has a voice (except for the slimeballs!).

So, here we go…