main page

Nanaimo Daily News

June 9, 2007 Saturday
(British Columbia)

Internet can become a threat to children; Predators on the web tempt underage boys and girls under a guise of online anonymity

Derek Spalding

At an undisclosed location, Seth Paine met with a young Parksville girl and had sex. At the time, he was 30 and a member of the Oceanside RCMP. She was 14 and on a break from school.

They met on an Internet site used by adults looking for sexual encounters. It took about a month of e-mailing and talking on the phone before they met face-to-face in February 2006. It was just a single incident, but that one afternoon of lust had its consequences.

Two months later, the young teen lashed out and mutilated her own thigh while soaking in her bathtub. Paine has since resigned from the police force. Even though his lover was the legal age, and consented to the sex, Paine found himself in a Nanaimo courtroom this week, charged with using the Internet to lure a child under the age of 18 and one count of touching a young person for a sexual purpose.

After four days of hearing evidence, provincial court Judge Michael Hubbard acquitted Paine on both counts, indicating that the former police officer had no influence over the young girl, who was seeking out a relationship.

This incident -- stretching from the disturbing sexual encounter to Hubbard's surprising verdict -- highlights Canada's political debate surrounding the proper age of consent, but it also shines a dim light into the dark corners of the Internet.

Whether or not Paine's decision to have sex with a 14-year-old girl was legally or morally wrong, it happened because the two had met in the growing electronic community of the Internet, a place where an increasing number of adults can shop for unsuspecting boys and girls. Evidence presented in Paine's case gives little suggestion that he originally sought out a young girl for sex, but many online predators have used sites for just this purpose.

"Cases like that are not uncommon," said Julian Sher, author of One Child at a Time: The Global Fight to Rescue Children from Online Predators.

"The predators are us. They're professionals, they're football coaches, they're not dirty old men in raincoats."

Sher added that the popularity of chat rooms and social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, have created a "perfect storm" where people can not only meet, but where adults can lure children in order to fulfil their sexual fantasies.

In the Central Vancouver Island region, 6% of boys and 23% of girls felt unsafe on their computers after meeting a stranger online, according to a results of the 2003 Adolescent Health Survey issued by the McCreary Centre Society. In 2005, Cybertip.ca - Canada's National Tipline for reporting online sexual exploitation of children - received 274 reports of child luring, compared to 111 in 2004.

Police have come up with innovative ways to catch the offenders, but parents need to be more vigilant with their children, according to Sher.

"It's scary. Parents who would never let their child in a park at 9 p.m. would think it nothing to let their child play in the basement on the Internet alone, and the (Internet) is the world's biggest playground."

Sher's book cites U.S. studies that show 61% of American teenagers have public profiles online and 30% of those have considered meeting a stranger in person, while 14% said they met with a stranger.

As reported incidents increase and police find new ways to catch criminals, the potential for getting caught also rises. But the risks may not be deterring adults from pursuing children.

Even those caught on television, have tried again. The Dateline NBC television series To Catch a Predator caught 200 potential child abusers, and they even found some men doing it on more than one occasion.

The studies and the television features help experts to illustrate the types of people looking to have sex with young men and women. The stranger could be a neighbour who wears a suit and drives a luxury sedan to work. Shocking to some experts are the profiles of offenders who risk everything, including their marriages, to fulfill their fantasies.

Studies show a common trend among those using the Internet to seek out young sexual partners. One U.S. report on the success of sting operations indicates that all the offenders were men and 61% of those men were between the ages of 26 and 39. The majority of them were high school graduates, but 26% had a college education. The majority of them were married and 12% earned more than $80,000 US a year.

For educated men to risk it all, they may greatly misunderstand the chances of getting caught, according to John Anderson, a professor of criminology at Malaspina University-College.

"The perception of being caught can vary by age and people's exposure to the criminal justice system," he said. "Offenders who commit a lot of crime have a more accurate understanding of getting caught, but people who aren't involved in crime have an exaggerated sense of the risks."

Convicting adults for sexual encounters with children could get easier in the future, as politicians in Ottawa move closer to raising the country's age of sexual consent. Raising the age from 14 to 16 will give the legal system more ability to protect children against Internet luring, according to the bill's supporters.

The proposed law has a "close-in-age" exemption, allowing teens within five years of each other in age to legally have consensual sex, but some youth groups argue that the new regulations will drive teen sex underground.

But raising the age makes little difference for the 11- to 14-year old girls and boys who already fall victim to online predators.

A London, Ont., youth recently made headlines when an informal survey showed one in four children aged 11 to 14 have met in person with strangers they met online. Rise for Youth, a group that looks to reduce sexual exploitation, surveyed 600 Grade 6, 7 and 8 students.

To help secure convictions, police sting operations are "extremely effective," according to Sher.

"If a police officer can nab a person (by posing as a youth), that person was going to meet your child, your daughter or your son."