 Thank you for inviting me today. At the Crime Against Children Research Center, we've come at the issue of online sexual abuse, or sexual abuse that arises from online contacts, from two different perspectives. We've conducted national surveys of youth, and Michelle gave you a lot of information about our youth internet safety surveys. And we've also conducted studies with national samples of law enforcement agencies, one that looked at crimes that happened in the years 2000 and 2001, and we are currently finishing another study that we're replicating the circumstances of the first study for the year 2006. These are national samples of law enforcement agencies that include all of the agencies that specialize in these sorts of internet-related crimes, as well as random samplings of all other U.S. law enforcement agencies. They're big samples, and we do very detailed interviews with law enforcement investigators who've worked on these cases. So today I don't have numbers for you from our current study, but I do have a lot of examples of the kinds of cases that we see in our current study. And what I'm going to do is first talk to you a little bit more about our youth internet safety surveys and what we found about unwanted sexual contacts, and wanted sexual contacts. But then I'm really going to focus on the most serious kinds of incidents, the actual sex crimes that we see arising from online contacts, bisexual offenders toward kids who are actually victimized in criminal incidents. As Michelle pointed out, we saw a decline in online sexual solicitations between our first and second youth internet safety surveys, and we think the reason for this decline is that young people were becoming a lot more cautious about who they communicated with online. And I also want to emphasize that a lot of these online sexual solicitations were not serious incidents. We did ask kids to describe to us what happened. A lot of what they described were the kind of rude, vulgar comments that unfortunately you see in the hallways and cafeterias of middle schools and high schools all across the country. Also, a lot of these incidents did not necessarily come from adults. We ask kids what they experience online, but we also ask kids what they do online. And so we think that a lot of these incidents do come from other kids. A lot of them were not very devious. A lot of them were not particularly upsetting to kids. In fact, most of them weren't. We ask kids, very few kids reported these incidents. We ask why they weren't reporting incidents, and when they didn't report something, they usually said it was just too trivial. It wasn't important enough. So there's absolutely no evidence that the bulk of these sexual solicitations come from adult sex offenders who are targeting or trolling for victims on the Internet. We did, however, try to isolate more serious incidents. And particularly the first bullet talks about aggressive solicitations. We did ask kids a lot of details about these solicitations. So we did find a small percentage of incidents where the solicitor either attempted or actually did make offline contact with youth. So I'll emphasize that still a lot of those aggressive solicitations didn't come from adult sex offenders. Some of them came from other kids. Some of them came from kids that the victims knew. Some of these, again, were relatively mild. As someone who said to a kid online, give me your cell phone number. I'd like to call you and the kid rolls their eyes and says no way and then blocks that communicator would be in this category. Nonetheless, we think in these aggressive solicitations are where you find sex offenders who are online looking for victims. It's within that 4%, 3% of kids. In our first youth Internet safety, we didn't find any kids who had been sexually assaulted as a result of some sort of an online contact. In our second youth Internet safety survey, we found two kids who were in that category, but this was too small a number for us to make any kind of an estimate of how often young people are assaulted as a result of some sort of contact that begins on the Internet. We also asked kids about relationships that they formed with adults online. We did find a small group of kids who formed online had formed close relationships with adults. A lot of these seem to be completely benign, but we did find some incidents that had sexual overtones and these were included in our numbers about unwanted sexual solicitations even if the kids didn't call them unwanted when they involved an adult who was 5 or more years older legally that would be considered an illegal contact in most situations. So this very small group were considered in our solicitation figures. We also asked kids about if they had talked online about sex with people that they didn't know in person. This certainly was not a typical youth behavior, but we did find a small amount of kids who said yes. As many girls as boys, almost all high school kids, it also did seem to be a group activity for a large number of kids. Now, I'm going to move from talking to that to talking about crimes where sex offenders use the Internet to meet victims. These crimes have gotten a lot of publicity as you all know. We've been told that sex offenders are moving from the playgrounds into our homes through the Internet, that the Internet is becoming increasingly dangerous, that child molesters are using the Internet, that pedophiles are using the Internet to target children. But our research has found that the image of the devious, violent sex offender who's gathering information from the Internet and using that information to track down and stalk and abduct kids is very inaccurate. And one thing I want to point out is that, well, two things. First of all, inaccurate stereotypes hamper education and prevention because they mischaracterize what really goes on in crimes. And the other thing is these sorts of stereotypes have happened before when we talk about sex crimes against children. For example, all the information, all the talk that we've had about stranger danger has deflected attention away from the true fact that the great majority of sex crimes against young children, against school-aged children, against adolescents are committed by people they know, often people they know, very well. Young people are indeed getting sexually abused by people they meet on the Internet, but the kinds of crimes that we're seeing are less dramatic, probably less frightening, and more complicated than a lot of the news stories that have been portraying these crimes. So let me give you an example of a case that was described to us by a law enforcement investigator in our current study. Mindy was 14 years old when she contacted Owen online through his social networking sites. On his site he claimed to be 19, but he was actually 24. They developed a relationship by communicating on the Internet and in most of these cases involved multiple forms of communication, by the way. Wherever kids first meet someone, whether it's a social networking site or in a chat room, invariably they exchange email addresses and website addresses and they use a lot of different forms to communicate. And also very typically in this case, Owen and Mindy were communicating by cell phone. They met each other several times over a period of about four months. They went to the mall together, they drove around in Owen's car together, they went to his apartment and had sex for several times. Now Mindy's mother and stepfather found out about this. They reported the case to the police. Not before, however, they tried to extort money from Owen to keep from reporting the case, but when he couldn't pay up, they reported the case. Now Mindy came from a very troubled family. She was the oldest of seven kids by several different fathers. She had problems with drugs and alcohol. She was failing in school. She had a social networking page that contained suggestive pictures of herself according to the police investigators. These pictures made her look much older than 14. And it wasn't the first time that she had met a man on the Internet in this manner that police found at least two other men that she had met this way. Mindy's mother, by the way, had her own web page where she advertised herself as a swinger. Owen had a record of arrest for petty nonviolent crimes. He was a suspect in another online enticement case, although he hadn't been charged yet. He thought this case, claiming that because the police didn't have any DNA evidence, they weren't going to be able to convict him. Mindy had to testify, but she was quite a good witness. And court gave very detailed testimony. And he was convicted, although the police investigator didn't know what his sentence was. So I've talked some about some of the myths of these online meeting crimes. Let's talk about some of the realities. The first reality is the victims in these cases are adolescents. They are not young children. And our first police study, 99% of the victims were ages 13 to 17. None of the victims were under 12. And I'm not seeing anything in our new study that suggests that this has changed in any way in the past few years. A second reality, and this is something Michelle noted, has to do with the role of deception. Deception just doesn't play a very big role in these cases. Most of the offenders are open about being adults. Now, some of them don't emphasize that fact. Some of them do shave some years off their ages, so you'll have someone who's 40, who's telling a 13-year-old girl that he's 35. And some do come off as being considerably younger. But as the relationships develop, and most of these relationships take time before there's any face-to-face meeting, as the relationship develops in almost every case, these offenders say, oh, I'm not really 19, by the way, I'm really. So in almost every case, the victims know that they are dealing with someone who's considerably older. Also, there is very little deception about sexual motivation. The great majority of these offenders are upfront, some of them immediately. And in some of these cases, the victims are quite aggressive sexually. In some of the cases, there is a more seduction is what happens, and over time, the offender brings up sex and introduces it. But in almost every single case, when there is a face-to-face meeting between an offender and the victim, the victim knows that they are going to meet the offender for some sort of sexual activity. Also, these crimes do not involve violence, and very few of them involve violence. I don't want to say that never happens, but very few of them. Most of these are what we call non-forcible sex crimes. And these are not uncommon types of crimes. Most of these cases involve what most of us know to be or called, although it has different names in different states, statutory rape. Every state has a law that says young people under a certain age, in most states at 16, can't consent to sexual activity. So, no matter if you're like Mindy, meeting men online, already sexually active, knowingly going to meet someone for sex, none of that matters. Mindy is clearly a victim because she is too young to consent to sexual activity, no matter what her behavior is in the case under these statutory rape laws. So, this is what we see in most of these cases. I do want to emphasize something about statutory rape cases, by the way. Usually, the law deems the participation of the youth to be voluntary. But voluntary has a lot of different meanings and a lot of different degrees. Remember, we are talking here about kids who are middle school, early high school ages in most of these cases. Some of them are, as I've said, quite aggressive sexually. Others have sex with an older person because they believe they're in love, because they have been seduced, because they want to please. In some cases, you do have kids who go along with a situation that they really don't want to be in, but they don't know how to get out of. So, I think it's important that we recognize that kids this age don't have very much experience, no matter how much bravado they have. And that the reason we have these statutory rape laws is to prevent the exploitation of kids by adults. Kids who have very little power in these situations. Now, we also have some myths about victims in these cases. I already mentioned the image that these kids are young children, but there's also the notion that they get in trouble because they are naive about the Internet and they're naive or innocent about sex. First of all, let's talk about the Internet. Most teenagers are very sophisticated Internet users. And what gets kids in trouble is highly sophisticated, very interactive Internet use when kids behave in certain ways online, when kids interact indiscriminately with a lot of people, when they interact sexually with people. So, it's not naivety about the Internet. Kids are quite aware that they don't know who other people may be online. But rather, it is the fact that it's a dynamic interactive environment that these kids really participate in. And when you participate in a certain way, you are likely to have results. The problems in online behavior and risky online behavior tend to be atypical behaviors that only some certain kids partake of. Also, in terms of kids naivety about sex, when we talk about kids being inexperienced, naive, innocent, it doesn't really capture the nature of the sexual activities that get kids in trouble online. We need to remember that from a very early age, any of us can look back on our own youths, from a very early age, adolescents are extremely interested in and extremely curious about sex. And the offenders in these cases know how to take advantage of that. So, we have to look at these cases in the framework of normal sexual development and how, no matter what generation we're talking about, there have always been a group of kids who engage in very precocious sexual behavior. In the U.S. right now, the median age for first intercourse is 17, but a considerable number of kids become sexually active before that. And we know from research studies that as many as 13% of young girls become sexually active before age 15 with considerably older partners. So, we're talking about kids who are behaving in precocious ways. There are also certain characteristics that get kids in trouble. There are some kids who are more vulnerable than others. I've mentioned particular online behaviors. Kids who have particular issues about their sexuality. In our first police study about a quarter of the victims were boys. In almost every case, there was something about their cases that made it clear they were grappling with being gay or having questions about their sexual orientation and turning to the Internet. Trouble teens, teens who have conflict with parents, teens with histories of sexual or physical abuse are more vulnerable, particularly when they turn to the Internet to find friendship or to find guidance. In other words, risk is not evenly distributed among the teen Internet user population. Risk, as Michelle was pointing out, is falling in certain groups. Groups that most of us would call troubled kids. So, here's some descriptions of crimes from our latest study. A 40-year-old man met a girl 15 at a BDSM website, Bondage, Discipline, Pseudomasochism. I only know that because I do this kind of work, I promise. They met twice for sex where she worked at gym in a mall. A man 23 met a girl 14. After several lines, she sips school, spent the day with him. For those of you who are in my generation, I actually felt a little flash of nostalgia that kids are still making out in cars and police are still tracking them down when they're doing it. But the way these offenders and victims met was on the Internet. These are, indeed, crimes. I want to emphasize this. These are adult men who are exploiting young teenagers, but they're not the kinds of crimes that we are... The sort of stereotypes of the Internet predator are leading us to think that are happening out there. Now, I want to talk just a minute about Internet offenders. And I'm going to tell you another story because I want to illustrate the fact that these Internet offenders, the offenders who are using the Internet to meet victims, aren't as different from other sort of sex offenders as we may think they are. Maya was 14. Her parents were divorced. Her mother suffered from cancer. Her mother was grateful that Patrick, the 35-year-old pastor of their church, took such an interest in Maya. He took her to church functions and to his home. Now, sometimes his wife was there, but his wife's mother lived in another state and was quite ill, so his wife was often not home. Patrick emailed Maya often. Maya's mother trusted Patrick completely. She had no idea that Patrick was using these emails to seduce Maya into a sexual relationship that lasted for months. They had sex in Patrick's car on the way to church functions and sex at his home when his wife is away. I apologize if some of these cases are a little graphic and disturbing, but this is what we're seeing. They spent hours online together using instant messages to talk. Patrick would text message Maya while she was at school. In the summer, Maya went to visit her father in another state. When she got to his home, she discovered that he had a webcam. One of the things Maya and Patrick had talked about was having cyber sex on a webcam, so Patrick went out and bought one. Maya saved the very graphic images from their cyber sex, and her father found them, told Maya's mother who called the police. Patrick was charged with statutory rape and statutory sodomy. He pled guilty and was given a 14-year sentence. So online child molesters. I want to make clear in one respect we don't know a lot about them. This is a fairly new phenomenon, so this specific group of child molesters haven't been studied, but there has been a lot of research about child molesters in general. And there's a lot of evidence from these cases that the online child molesters occupy a really pretty narrow range of the spectrum of child molesters overall, one that excludes both pedophiles and violent offenders to a great degree. First of all, these online child molesters are not pedophiles. By definition, pedophiles are offenders who are sexually interested in prepubescent children, not adolescents. Also, we don't see a lot of violence in these cases, but I also want to point out that most child molesters are not violent. There is a subgroup of violent child molesters. Some of them lack the social skills to get close to and victimize a child in other ways. Some of them have statistic tendencies. But we're not seeing those sorts of cases in this group of online crimes. It may largely be because the internet just isn't conducive to those sorts of cases. Online molesters have to be pretty patient. An online meeting isn't always going to develop into an offline relationship. They also have to have a high degree of social skills to get close to teenagers to gain their trust, to move the relationship off the internet, to maintain it in the real world. Because when these relationships, or when these, I'll call them relationships, they are from the point of the victims. They're also crimes, move offline. In most cases, like both Maya and Mindy's case, they involve repeated sexual contacts, not just one. I want to emphasize that abductions and stalking are extremely rare. I have heard people worrying that sex offenders are using the internet to find victims, to track down where they live, to stalk them, and to abduct them. I can tell you, I haven't seen a single case out there that matches that profile. In two national studies, and I talk a lot at law enforcement conferences, and I ask about this. That doesn't mean there's never been such a case, but they're extremely rare if they're actually happening. I will tell you an example of a stalking case. A 13-year-old girl, this is from our recent study, a 13-year-old girl gets off the school bus, she finds a man there, a man in her neighborhood, he says, I am looking for a babysitter, give me your email address, I'll email you about this, she does, he starts sending her extremely inappropriate emails, she and her mother go to the police, the police do an undercover investigation, the guy's arrested. There was offline contact, clearly he saw her, became obsessed with her, and then used the internet to find a way to communicate with her. But I haven't seen any of the other situations. We have seen some violent cases, most of them involved rape or attempted rape, and we all know there have been in the last decade at least two young girls who are murdered, but these cases are extremely rare. I want to skip ahead and make one final point because I know my time is running out here. Another area that has been the cause of a lot of anxiety is, are we seeing an increase in sex crimes because of the internet? The fact is, child sexual abuse in the United States has declined significantly in the past 15 years. At the same time, we have seen internet use grow exponentially. Now, we have a lot of information, and I included a handout about the work that some of my colleagues, David Finkelhor and Lisa Jones have done about the decline in sexual abuse cases and also in other phenomenon that are related to child sexual abuse among teenagers. And I don't have time to go into any details, but just to make it clear, we're not seeing any sort of an explosion in child sexual abuse cases. We think, and actually these slides are going to be released, but we do think that the internet-related crimes make up a very small proportion of the actual sex crimes that we are seeing among children and adolescents. And my final point is going to be simply that a lot of people are not aware that adolescents are sexually assaulted at high rates, twice the rates that adults are, particularly adolescent girls. The great majority of the offenders in these cases are adults they know face-to-face and other youth. So we have consistently, at the Crimes Against Children Research Center, urged frank and candid education of young people about avoidance, about coping with situations like the kinds of statutory rape potential situations where kids are coached on how to get out of these situations, about educating kids about what crimes are. Because not every 14-year-old knows that it's a crime when a 24-year-old gets in touch with her on the internet, and to give resources and reporting and counseling to kids. And we have a lot more information on our website.