The Cyber Effect (19 page)

I am often asked about parental controls:
Which ones are best?
and
Do they really work?
Shopping for this software can be confusing—like shopping for antivirus ware—and expensive, with monthly fees and updates and occasional bugs. There are plenty of offerings available, which are rated and reviewed online by consumers and parent groups.

My concern isn't so much for the capable parents who are good at researching and finding the best options; it's for the overburdened ones who don't have the time, money, patience, or ability to seek the best options, much less install them. Even after the software is installed, parental controls can give a false sense of security, lulling naive parents into a lack of vigilance. Many tech-savvy kids have lots of ploys they use to get around parental controls. It doesn't require much resourcefulness. If you want a real wake-up call, just go online and do a Google search for “ways to bypass parental controls,” and you will find more than a million results. It is the ultimate expression of democratization of knowledge.

Each year, with the speed of technological changes and creation of new social media sites—I hate to start naming them because by the time you are reading this, there will be new ones—it becomes harder to adequately observe, study, and monitor the content that children are accessing online.

But it is the proliferation of handheld devices—a kind of privatizing of Internet use—that has had the most impact of all, making it unrealistic for parents to watch over their children's shoulders in order to keep them safe by limiting Internet access to a family room or public part of the house. Studies in the past have looked at the content of TV and devices as separate entities, but these have obviously merged now. Kids watch television programs, movies, and YouTube videos on their computers and mobile devices. At least there is parental control software for most mobile phone browsers and tablets now. For many years after the launch of the first iPod Touch, a small handheld device for music-listening and browsing of the Internet, no parental controls were available for it, even when the largest market for it was middle-school-age children. Eventually this was rectified, but millions were sold before any controls were created.

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was known to keep a tight lid on the use of screens in his own household—and Silicon Valley's most tech-advanced parents seem to be the ones who are most strict about Internet access for their children. But even if you're a parent who feels confident that the filtering software for the household and mobile devices is working beautifully, what happens when your child goes to a friend's house?

Many parents simply give up. According to studies, they are overwhelmed by technology and feel they can't keep up with accelerating online advancements. Meanwhile, children take advantage of their parents' limited focus, lack of tech acumen, and lack of time. A large percentage of them “
hide their participation in risky and sometimes illegal activities,” as one study described.

Trying to be helpful to parents in the U.K., the government asked its independent regulator, Ofcom, to recommend proper monitoring of a child's online life after a study in 2014 found that one in twenty U.K. families with young children did no monitoring whatsoever.

A panel of experts came up with a four-point approach to protect children online:

As it turned out, only one-third of families with five- to fifteen-year-old children at home provided all four forms of mediation. I can guess why. Because it's a full-time job!

How on earth can a parent be expected to do all that, while feeding, clothing, and caring for a family—and probably working forty hours a week? The figures vary from study to study, but in general, for homes with children who are a bit older, over twelve, the percentage of homes with no controls or monitoring rises to around one in ten.

As a forensics expert, I believe whistling in the dark is a gamble. In my field, there's a famous case, Situation 21, that speaks to this question. When organizers of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich were trying to prepare for any possible security risks, they called upon West German psychologist Georg Sieber to imagine various worst-case scenarios to help plan for all contingencies.

Sieber came up with twenty-six possible scenarios. The one that he called Situation 21 described a scenario in which armed Palestinian terrorists invade the Israeli delegation's quarters, kill and take hostages, then demand the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israel. But this scenario and all the others that Sieber came up with seemed over-the-top and incredibly unlikely to the Olympic organizers. So dark and so negative! After all, the 1972 Olympics had been given the official motto
Die Heiteren Spiele
, which translates as “The Happy Games.” To even consider Sieber's awful imaginings could ruin the fun, carefree spirit that the organizers hoped for.

Eerily, Situation 21 came true. During the Olympics, eleven Israeli athletes and one German guard were murdered. So much for “The
Happy Games.” The phrase became a grim reminder that merely hoping for the best will not prevent the worst.

The reality: When a risk is unlikely—and unpleasant to consider—there is often a strong desire to overlook it. The explanation is that human beings must continue living, day in, day out, despite the risks we all face, whether it's a car crash, a theft, an act of terrorism, or a visit to your bedroom by a random serial killer with a hatchet. But with the help of laws, government regulations, and technology, we face fewer risks each year. Our cars have alarms, air bags, and better seat belts. The number of airplane crashes varies from year to year, but lessens overall. Same goes for the murder rate in most developed countries. The ability to track serial sex offenders using DNA tests and advanced technology makes them less of a threat too.

From a forensic psychology perspective, I can't help but sympathize with Sieber. The desire for the freedom in cyberspace, and the reluctance to consider its true downside, causes some parents to ignore the risks of what could happen to their children online, just as the Munich organizers in their state of cognitive dissonance refused to increase security or to consider Situation 21 because it would go against their desired concept of a relaxed, fun Olympics. Does the actual degree of risk mean that you shouldn't prepare for it—or discuss these difficult things with children?

My job, as I see it, is to be fully armed with real insights and information, both open-eyed and imaginative, about potential risks so I can be prepared for the worst-case scenario. As we say in risk assessment, “Start at the apocalypse and work back.”

The variety of unsupervised and age-inappropriate content to explore online is almost limitless. And the number of children exposed to it grows every hour. This is a situation 2.0 that we cannot ignore.

Sweetie was a playful ten-year-old Filipino girl with large brown eyes and shiny chin-length hair. “Hello, my name is Sweetie,” she said in singsong accented English as she looked into her computer webcam and greeted new friends.

Online, Sweetie was willing to have webcam sex for a price. Webcam “sex tourism” is a growing business, partially due to the hypervigilance about sexual offenders in the real world. The result: Men in rich countries pay thousands of children in poor countries to sit in front of a computer webcam and perform sex acts, or watch the men perform them.

In the first two and a half months of engaging with strangers in cyberspace, Sweetie attracted one thousand predators from seventy-one different countries. But before you get terribly depressed about this wretched story, let me pass along the good news: Sweetie wasn't real. She was an interactive 3-D computer model that looked and moved and sounded exactly like a real ten-year-old Filipino girl. She was the creation of Lemz advertising agency for the international children's rights network
Terre des Hommes (Netherlands). Sweetie was designed to capture the identities of child predators and pass them along to law-enforcement agencies. At any time of day, according to Terre des Hommes, roughly 750,000 men worldwide are looking for online sex with children.

“
The moment [Sweetie] got online, we were swamped, like an avalanche,” said Hans Guyt, the special projects director of Terre des Hommes at the time.

The government of the Philippines estimates that there are as many as one hundred thousand children in the country who are forced into the webcam sex trade. Legally, the creation of an avatar like Sweetie to lure predators can be considered a form of entrapment in some jurisdictions, so this sort of practice does trouble me. But many countries, like the Philippines, in an effort to fight online abuse and the escalation of webcam sex trafficking, are changing their laws.

Sexual deviants who are drawn to children are broadly described in two ways: content or Internet offenders and contact offenders. One type is looking for content, or images of children, while the other is seeking physical contact with a child. The Internet facilitates both. How?

In the old days, a contact offender had to fly to the Philippines or Thailand to engage in sex with a child. Now they find their children online—in what is called
technologically facilitated abuse
—and by visiting
forums and sites where pedophiles share information and a spirit of camaraderie.

“
Cyberspace allows people with truly pathological traits to find similar comrades who reinforce their problem,” John Suler wrote in
Psychology of the Digital Age: Humans Become Electric
. As discussed in
chapter 1
, the mathematics of online behavior comes into play. Due to the effects of online syndication and escalation, the availability of like-minded collaborators in a new environment, which socializes and normalizes the deviant behavior, compounded by the effects of online disinhibition and anonymity, it is likely that an individual with a predisposition for pedophilia may find that behavior harder than ever to control. Additionally, people with criminal intent are able to access victims more easily.

Once upon a time, a content abuser who collected indecent images of children had to keep a secret stash in a box hidden in the attic. Now the amount of material available to this population is rapidly growing, thanks to the ease of taking digital images with mobile phones and computers and then sending or posting them online. While
child pornography
is the legal term used, children's advocates prefer
child abuse material
(CAM), which removes any implication of consent of the child or a benign relationship with adult pornographic practices. Ten years ago, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received thousands of images. In 2012 alone, the center received nearly 20 million images. As of 2016, the NCMEC archives had grown to a total of 139 million photographs in its Child Victim Identification Program.
When a sample of images was assessed, 70 percent were classified as child pornography, 16 percent were described as online enticement, and 14 percent were classified as self-production. In other words, they were selfies—or sexts.

Interestingly, the profile of the average offender has changed in recent years. I suspect this has to do with technology as well. In the past decade there's been an
emergence of younger online offenders. Some reports indicate that an increasing number of them are under the age of eighteen. What would cause such a phenomenon? Does the access to pornography online have anything to do with it, or more simply, the impact of an adult online environment on children?

Back in 2010, when I was researching online child abuse material and cowriting a paper with INTERPOL assistant director Michael “Mick” Moran, I came across interesting information in the studies. An inappropriate sexualized event in early childhood has been reported by some contact and online offenders. This alone makes me seriously concerned about children looking at adult material online, because I would argue that the viewing of inappropriate content itself qualifies as an “
early inappropriate sexualized event.” If so, the potential consequences could be tragic. As a society, we need to stop and really think about this.

Now, after the darkness of this difficult subject, I think it's time for some good news: Sweetie isn't the only clever development in recent years to fight pedophilia. Increasingly, the solution to technology-facilitated deviancy lies with technology itself.

For three long years, INTERPOL had been trying to catch a particular pedophile—a man who had posted more than two hundred photographs online that showed him sexually abusing young boys. All told, there were a dozen different boys in the photographs, their ages ranging from early teens to—and this is difficult stuff—as young as six years old. Judging from the features of the boys and a content analysis of the images, the location of these crimes appeared to be Southeast Asia.

Posting was a daring move for the pedophile, except that, in each of the shocking photographs,
the face of the man had been digitally swirled, rendering his identity a total mystery.

Mick Moran was a detective at INTERPOL and working in the Crimes Against Children unit at the time of the investigation in 2007. Mick is a big, gregarious bloke, a former Irish Guard who shoots from the hip and is unrelenting in his quest to catch predators of children. He and I met around that time, and he invited me to become involved in research with the INTERPOL Specialists Group. He has a memorable saying about indecent images of a child or minor: “Every image is a crime scene.”