The Online–Sex Predator Panic

12-9-2015 North Carolina:

Laws Against Online Luring Harm Children

North Carolina’s Supreme Court just upheld a law making it a crime for a former sex offender to use social media that minors also use—that is, any social media.

In New Hampshire a judge rejected the appeal of Owen Labrie’s conviction for using a computer to “lure” a fifteen-year-old girl into sex. If Labrie, the prep school senior whose rape trial made national headlines, had called the girl on the phone instead of making arrangements on Facebook and by text, he would not have been breaking the law. The computer-related conviction will put the nineteen-year-old on the sex offender registry for life; he could also serve years in prison.

And the district attorney in Cañon City, Colorado, is mulling over whom, among a hundred or so high school students caught trading naked pictures of themselves via smartphone, to prosecute on child pornography charges.

Laws such as these, against “electronic solicitation of a minor” and online trading of child pornography, are troublesome for many reasons. For one thing, they are easy to abuse in order to load on penalties when the state is frustrated by an acquittal or lesser conviction than it sought. That is what happened in New Hampshire, where Labrie was acquitted of felony sexual assault but found guilty of misdemeanor statutory rape.

For another, because we all increasingly—and kids almost exclusively—rely on social media to conduct our family, social, business, and, yes, sexual lives, enforcement of these laws would require NSA-like blanket surveillance and would seriously damage freedom of speech. Indeed, challengers to North Carolina’s law argue that it is an unconstitutional curtailment of sex offenders’ First Amendment rights.

And then there are the patent absurdities created by such laws—signs that legislators, in search of novel ways to torture so-called sex offenders, have abandoned consideration of efficacy or justice. In the case of underage sexting, for instance, a person is both offender and victim at the same time.

But here is the deeper problem: the online offender statutes—not to mention press coverage, social analysis, education, parenting advice, and general fretting that go with them—are built on nothing but fear.

The underlying assumption is that Internet communication is fundamentally different from other means of communication. But not just different, the laws suggest. It is more dangerous. Specifically, it is dangerous to children, and in a particular way: sexually. The stated intent of these laws is to protect children from “Internet predators”—even if those predators are themselves. But as a growing body of research shows, the Internet is not especially sexually dangerous for kids—not more dangerous than anywhere else.

Online sexual solicitation of minors is rare and getting rarer. A comparison of three successive national surveys of kids aged ten to seventeen found that those receiving such come-ons dropped 50 percent from 2000 to 2010, to just 9 percent. At the same time, “the proportion of such crimes committed by offenders who use the Internet to meet victims is quite small in comparison to sex crimes against children overall,” according to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health and Medicine. During the period studied, the mid-aughts, there were 615 arrests for such offenses. Meanwhile, an estimated 14 million young people aged twelve to seventeen were accessing social media sites.

The study is part of ongoing research on online sexual and criminal behavior conducted by the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, considered a foremost authority on such matters. The researchers there also found that adults who meet minors online for sexual purposes “are not different or more dangerous” than those who seek sex with kids they already know, either online or on terra firma.

Contrary to the image of the grizzly fifty-year-old satyr scattering emoticons across the screen like a middle-schooler, hardly anyone is deceiving anyone about their age or sexual intentions. In fact, the only people routinely lying about their identities are vice cops lurking in chat rooms posing as thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds. In the 2010 study of adult-minor sexual contacts through social media, almost three-quarters of the cases originated with investigators in sting operations, closer examination of which frequently reveals entrapment. ..Continued.. by Judith Levine