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Only
1/3 of the households with Internet access are proactively
protecting their children with filtering or blocking software.
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75%
of children are willing to share personal information online
about themselves and their family in exchange for goods and
services.
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About
25% of the youth who encountered a sexual approach or solicitation
told a parent.
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One
in five U.S. teenagers who regularly log on to the Internet
say they have received an unwanted sexual solicitation via
the Web. Solicitations were defined as requests to engage in
sexual activities or sexual talk, or to give personal sexual
information.
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One
in 33 youth received an aggressive sexual solicitation in the
past year. This means a predator asked a young person to meet
somewhere, called a young person on the phone, and/or sent
the young person correspondence, money, or gifts through the
U.S. Postal Service.
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77%
of the targets for online preditors were age 14 or older. Another
22% were users ages 10 to 13.
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75
%of the solicited youth were not troubled, 10 percent did not
use chat rooms and 9 percent did not talk to strangers.
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Only
25% of solicited children were distressed by their encounters
and told a parent.
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Only
17%of youth and 11 percent of parents could name a specific
authority, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI],
CyberTipline, or an Internet service provider, to which they
could report an Internet crime.
» Go To Top
What
happens when a child is targeted in a chat room?
The first question
often asked when anyone enters a chatroom is “a/s/l?” This
is a request for their age, sex and location. The answer they
give might be: 13/f/doncaster. From then on they may be targeted
as a potential victim of a predator.
There are statistics
from the US which show that, in a group of 1501 young people
aged 10 to 17 interviewed by phone about their Internet experiences,
just under one in five claimed to have received some kind of
sexual solicitation on the Internet within the previous twelve
months.
There is a
known pattern to the behavior of online child molesters. They
will:
- establish
a friendly relationship with a child, possibly over a period
of months.
- gradually
introduce a sexual element to their online conversations, assuring
the child that everyone knows about these things.
- ask the
child to perform minor sexual acts, often asking them to go
and lock their bedroom door first.
- speak to
the child using a microphone attached to their computer because
they know that the relationship will seem more real and 'normal'
if it includes voice contact.
- may ask
the child to get a microphone and/or a web-camera so they can
watch them and listen to them.
- try and
move the communication beyond just the chatroom and will encourage
the child to give their email address and mobile phone number.
They may email the child sexually explicit pictures.
- try to
persuade the child to meet them in secret. This meeting can
have disastrous consequences.
This process
is known as 'grooming' a child. It is upsetting to read about
as a parent, but recent successful prosecutions have shown that
it is a strategy used by child molesters and that it can and
does result in serious sexual assaults.
» Go To Top
Links:
:: www.protectkids.org » :: 
::
www.predator-hunter.com » ::
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