By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO (Reuters) -
The typical online sexual predator is
not someone posing as a teen to lure unsuspecting victims into
face-to-face meetings that result in violent rapes, U.S.
researchers said on Monday.
Rather, they tend to be adults who make their intentions of
a sexual encounter quite plain to vulnerable young teens who
often believe they are in love with the predator, they said.
And contrary to the concerns of parents and state attorneys
general, they found social networking sites such as Facebook or
MySpace do not appear to expose teens to greater risks.
"A lot of the characterizations that you see in Internet
safety information suggests that sex offenders are targeting
very young children and using violence and deception against
their victims," said Janis Wolak of the Crimes Against Children
Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.
"Especially since social networking sites became popular,
people are suggesting that these offenders are using
information to stalk and abduct their victims," said Wolak,
whose study appears in the journal American Psychologist.
"We are not seeing those types of cases," Wolak said in a
telephone interview.
Instead, she said most cases arise from risky online
interactions such as talking online about sex to strangers.
"The great majority of cases we have seen involved young
teenagers, mostly 13-, 14-, 15-year-old girls who are targeted
by adults on the Internet who are straightforward about being
interested in sex," she said.
The study was based on telephone interviews with 3,000
Internet users between the ages of 10 and 17 done in 2000 and
again in 2005. The researchers also conducted more than 600
interviews with federal, state and local law enforcement
officials in the United States.
They also combed through data from similar studies.
They found Internet offenders pretended to be teenagers in
only 5 percent of the crimes studied. They also found nearly 75
percent of victims who met their offenders in person did so on
more than one occasion.
Wolak said Internet predators use instant messages, e-mail
and chat rooms to meet and develop intimate relationships with
their victims. "From the perspective of the victim, these are
romances," she said.
"One of the big factors we found is that offenders target
kids who are willing to talk to them online. Most kids are
not," Wolak said.
U.S. state attorneys general have been working with
privately held Facebook and NewsCorp's MySpace to protect users
from registered sex offenders.
But Wolak said it is important for parents and children to
have a clear picture of who these predators are.
"If everybody is looking for violent predators lurking in
the bushes, kids who are involved in these relationships aren't
going to be seeing what is happening to them as a crime," she
said.
(Editing by Will Dunham and Mohammad Zargham)
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