Mikhail Bell
September 8, 2011
Pimps and pedophiles are using the Internet to ensnare minors. (Photo credit: Polaris Project) |
A recent “Family Life Today” broadcast emphasized Internet safety and warned of the easy access strangers have to minors using popular online platforms. On August 17-19, Enough is Enough president Donna Rice Hughes appeared in a three-part series to discuss hidden online dangers.
Enough is Enough, officially launched in 1992, is a non-profit organization that monitors and raises awareness about internet predation. It was crucial in passing the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000, aimed at shielding minors from adult content.
The 2008 Hollywood blockbuster “Taken” brought renewed attention to sexual exploitation, but the real life process is usually more subtle. “The abductions, they do happen, but they are not the norm,” Hughes said.
Instead, the “Protector of Children Award” winner pointed to online gaming and social networking sites as the new playgrounds for predators. “All it takes is a screen name and a little of information to” strike up a conversation with an unsuspecting child, Hughes noted. “You’ve got very savvy kids, you’ve got savvy predators, savvy pornographers, and un-savvy parents,” she said. Hughes recommended that parents establish accounts on social networking sites and explore them in advance of permitting use.
Digital dangers to unwitting minors abound due to the confluence of technology usage and the demographics for runaway youth, one major study reflects. Entitled Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico by University of Pennsylvania researchers Richard J. Estes and Neil Alan Weiner, the 2001 study revealed the average age of entry into prostitution is 12-14 years old. The same report reveals a pool of nearly 300,000 at risk youth that contribute to the average. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children president Ernie Allen once described the group as mostly “runaway, throwaway, or homeless kids.”
Closing Craigslist
Increasingly, traffickers are using the Internet to recruit unsuspecting victims. Often these nefarious agents prey on naiveté and access to chat rooms and online hybrid sites such as Craigslist.com.
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark started the popular website in 1995 as a San Francisco-based email list among friends looking for social events. Now the Internet hotspot allows users to post housing and personal ads for free. In July alone web analytics monitor Compete.com recorded 63 million unique visitors to the site.
Whilst growing a faithful following, Craigslist simultaneously developed a dark side whose repugnance put Newmark on a collision course with anti-trafficking activists.
In late 2010, Craigslist lost a protracted battle over its notorious Adult Services section. For several years Newmark maintained that the website was doing its best to report incidents of human trafficking. Police seldom received actionable reports of such activity.
Business calculus explains why Craigslist traipsed around the issue. As Mashable revealed, Craigslist generated about one third of its annual revenue, or $36 million, from the sordid section. On September 15, 2010 New York Times reporter Claire Cain Miller confirmed the welcomed closure of Craigslist’s Erotic Services section. By December, the company shut down its adult section worldwide and tacitly acknowledged its complicity in facilitating commercial sexual exploitation.
In the absence of continual professional counseling, victims often struggle to recover from the emotional scars of sexual exploitation. Years of intervention can follow trafficking survivors whose reality was formerly consumed by gang rape, beatings, and verbal abuse. The road to recovery is long, but many survivors embody hope.
According to the U.S. State Department, approximately 12 million people every year globally are considered trafficked. This number includes adults and minors who are abused in agricultural sectors, restaurant, domestic services, and as is popularly reported, the sex industry.
Chillingly, a 2003 University of Central Lancashire study depicted how pedophiles escalate and exploit emotional connections with minors. The researchers depicted a five stage process predators employ to ensnare minors. Commonly known as grooming, also noted among pimps, it involves escalating steps: friendship, forming a relationship, risk assessment, exclusivity and sex talk.
Time is a predator’s greatest asset. They will spend “weeks, months, even a year developing a trusting relationship with a child,” Hughes disclosed.
Responses and Consequences
In addition to Enough is Enough, Christian organizations have been out front keeping minors safe online and offline at home and abroad. The Salvation Army and Shared Hope International are among several faith-based voices in the battle to address sexual exploitation of minors, specifically as victims of human trafficking. In 1999, the Salvation Army headed a coalition that passed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), this country’s first anti-trafficking legislation.
In 2000, Shared Hope established the Women’s Intervention Network as an initiative to equip survivors with skills to provide financial support for themselves and their families outside of the sex industry. More recently, the organization began issuing national report on domestic minor sex trafficking. Since then the non-profit has continued to play a crucial role in enacting legislation and raising awareness.
Ultimately, the exposure of children to sexual material can lead to confused minors with troubling questions about intimacy for their parents. It also raises tacit expectations of sexual behavior within romantic adolescent relations. For example, young girls may feel pressure to replicate acts with their teenage love interests that they saw women act out in popup ads on a computer gaming site.
Increased exposure of minors to adult content online propagates the number of youth who become desensitized to age and circumstantially appropriate intimacy. Such dalliances make minors less sensitive to abnormal sexual advances and more acceptable targets for unsavory adults. In other words, it contributes to the positioning of minors as sexually desirous objects.
“You have to understand, you know, that what pornography teaches is the counterfeit of healthy sexuality the way God designed it” the Enough is Enough head concluded.
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