Recent high-profile sex-crime cases on Long Island bring to mind the most basic and least known childhood sexual-abuse prevention fact that every parent and caregiver needs to understand: Most childhood sexual abuse involves someone with whom a child has an established and trusting relationship.
Childhood sexual victimization begins with the initiation of, or exploitative expansion of, an existing relationship, whether sparked in an Internet chat room or cultivated within a family or on a soccer field.
The year ends for Long Islanders with memories of the June and August mistaken release of two Long Island convicted sexual predators, Christopher Bayer, aka Smiley the Clown, and Robert Bitter. Both men brutally victimized children well known to them. Even after they were convicted, they were mistakenly released to enjoy their freedom while they awaited their sentencing - a slap in the face to child victims and their families.
These two cases illustrate the lack of priority paid to informing prosecutors and judges of changes to statutes designed to protect communities from sexual predators and to bring justice to child sexual-abuse victims and their families. In both cases, the judges and prosecutors said they were unaware of a new law prohibiting release of such convicted abusers on their own recognizance.
These cases also illustrate the point that most childhood sexual abuse happens with someone with whom a child has an established and trusting relationship. Sexual predators are good at what they do. They carefully select their victims and methodically chip away at their boundaries, a process called "grooming." The grooming process can take hours, days or years, depending upon the nature of the relationship between the offender and the child target and child's family.
Internet predators are no different from those who have person-to-person contact with their victims. They still have to court and groom the child by giving the child what he or she needs to feel special or cared about. In August, a 15-year-old Massachusetts girl was transported over state lines by a Long Island couple she met in an Internet chat room. Even after being held hostage, tortured and sexually abused, she told a reporter that she was "hurt" because she "thought they [the alleged abusers] were nice." All children crave love, attention and affection, and predators use this to lure in their unsuspecting victims.
The Internet has become a preying ground for predators who lurk about in chat rooms - waiting to initiate a relationship and to seduce a child through the grooming process, all the while planning to meet the child to sexually victimize him or her. My experience as a sexual-abuse prevention educator is that most parents believe their children are immune from direct-contact sexual victimization and think that their children could never be lured offline to meet someone or be victimized through the Internet.
Shocking statistics from a recent national survey conducted by the Crimes Against Children Research Center revealed that many youths, nearly 20 percent of those using the Internet, are victims of online sexual solicitation. Two-thirds of the solicitations took place in chat rooms and 70 percent of the solicitations happened when the youths were using computers at home. When faced with a sexual solicitation, 49 percent of the respondents did not initially tell anyone. The survey also found that simply surfing the Internet exposes 25 percent of youth to unwanted sexual material in the form of pornography and bestiality.
Some parents mistakenly believe that giving teens privacy while they use the Internet is some sort of rite of passage and that somehow their child earned that freedom. If you are a parent using the Internet as either a rite of passage or as a babysitter to keep your child occupied, you should know that sexual predators are counting on you not to supervise your children and that unsupervised surfing on the Internet can risk exposing children to material that will forever change the way they look at the world.
Parents can easily protect their children from online predators and from unwanted sexual material by monitoring their children's use of the Internet, by not allowing children to create personal profiles, by keeping the family computer in a common space, by sharing e-mail accounts, by setting parental controls and by reporting inappropriate e-mails or instant messages to the Internet provider or to law enforcement if necessary.
The best piece of advice I can give parents is to pay attention. There are predators out there right now, waiting for your child to enter a chat room. You can significantly reduce the potential of your children being victimized by carefully monitoring their use of the Internet.