With the help of the predators, Justin established a pornographic Web site and money poured in from those wanting to see him commit sexual acts. He began other self-destructive activities, including drug and alcohol abuse. In retrospect, he said, he realized he was not in control of his life — the predators were.
“Webcams and instant messaging give predators power over children,” he said at the hearing. “The predators become part of the child’s life. Whatever warnings the child may have heard about meeting strangers, these people are no longer strangers. They have every advantage. It is the standard seduction of child predators, multiplied on a geometric scale.”
Justin Berry’s experience has been repeated throughout the country. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, at least one in five social network users have reported receiving unwanted sexual advances.
Dateline NBC’s television series, “To Catch a Predator,” worked with the organization perverted-justice.com and law enforcement agencies to show viewers how easy it was for young people to attract the attention of predators online. Using decoys posing as teenage boys and girls who were approached online by adults, the program set up homes for the predators to use for sex. Hidden cameras showed dozens of men from all walks of life arriving — usually with alcohol and condoms — only to be surprised by an NBC News reporter stepping out from the shadows instead of a child. Christians of various ages were well-represented among the men caught off guard.
Earlier this year, a 16-year-old Michigan girl ran away from home with the intent to marry a 20-year-old man from Jordan that she met on her MySpace site. She was intercepted by the FBI in Tel Aviv and sent back home.
In Texas, a 14-year-old girl’s family is suing MySpace for $30 million, claiming that the site fails to protect minors from adult sexual predators. The girl agreed to meet a boy she met online who claimed he was a high school student. The boy turned out to be an adult who sexually assaulted her. The lawsuit includes news reports of other assaults that occurred after initial MySpace contacts, such as a Wisconsin man charged with six counts of assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a Connecticut man accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl.
MySpace.com, the most popular social networking site among teenagers, claims 100 million subscribers. It is the secondmost popular site in the United States, behind Yahoo!, and now has an agreement with Google so that those on MySpace don’t have to leave the site to search for someone else. To create a site, a user must include a name, e-mail
address, gender, country, and age. Its account page says users must be 14 or older, but it does not verify the age of the user. None of the other information has to be true, either.
