I do not condone the actions of men, or women for that matter, who ‘chat’ on line about sexually explicit subjects with minors or send them pornographic material. It is evil and corrupt and our children need protecting from themselves and predators that lurk in the anonymity of the internet.
There have been several high profile cases of men, both locally – a sheriff’s deputy – and nationally - a press secretary in the Department of Homeland Security – who have been caught in sting operations by law enforcement officers posing as minors.
In the latter case, the accused is charged with transmitting harmful material to a minor, in the former of arranging to meet the minor for sex. Is an adult, posing as a minor, a minor or an adult? Is it an offence to think the person is a minor, when in fact they are not? These are matters for lawyers to argue and the courts to decide. As wrong as these actions are, they got me thinking about my own experience with the question, “How easy is it to become a target of a sting?”
I recently enrolled in MySpace.com, a website used in the main, but not exclusively, by teens and Gen Y’ers for social networking. My purpose was to read the blog of a young adult relative and to be able to leave comments, an action for which enrollment is required. I put up a profile, since these are the steps the site leads a new member through, which clearly indicates that I am a 53 year old male (incidentally about the same age as the two men charged above) and a writer interested in meeting private investigators and FBI Agents, literary agents, editors and publishers. It was a piece of humor, but as I am a mystery writer, I never know when networking if a chance introduction will lead to greater things.
The profile had been up about a month when I received an invitation sent to my home email address from ‘Denise’. She wrote that she was trying to hook up her friend ‘Kelly’, who had seen my profile and picture and had developed what ‘Denise’ described as a “her first crush”. ‘Denise’ had written because “Kelly was too shy to contact me herself”.
Now to my mind and somewhat distant memory, my first crush happened when I was 12 years old and Josephine, my amour, was about the same. Somewhere in a scrapbook I still have the birthday card, in which she describes the rumors of her liking a rival – Paul Harris – as bunk. It was not until she wrote his name that I sadly realized I had a rival, but I digress. First crushes surely happen to teenagers and minors. I was mortified by two possibilities. The first was that there was a girl out there, potentially a minor, who would want to “hook up” with a 53 year old man and the second was that this was stage one of a sting.
My instinct was to reply immediately and to determine if there was a minor at risk, to warn them of the dangers of internet chat and persuade them to desist and seek parental advice. The alternative was to delete the invitation and head for the hills or the internet equivalent, as far away as possible from a set up and the FBI agents I was purporting to want to meet. I chose the latter out of fear of creating even the faintest chance I might become an innocent victim of a sting operation and in doing so I regret that I may have left an equally innocent minor to become a victim of a less concerned and well intentioned adult.
