Handbook on Sexual Violence (80 page)

This last quote also illustrates another central, and this time more positive, theme from the web survey descriptions, which is that many, and perhaps the majority, of children seem to learn very quickly how to end unwanted contacts as soon as something happens that they don’t feel comfortable with. ‘Blocking’ a person in the way described by the girl in the quotation means that you no longer actively have to reject contacts from a person trying to reach you via an instant messaging application because any messages they subsequently try to send you will be filtered out by the application itself. Someone who really wants to reach you can get around this of course, but blocking people in this way makes things more difficult for them. In our material, with a few exceptions, this kind of ‘blocking’ activity appeared to be sufficient as a means of avoiding further contacts from the individuals concerned.

Contacts involving web cameras

The material included two principal categories of contacts involving web cameras. The first of these involved men attempting to persuade children to take off their clothes and/or to engage in sexual acts in front of their web cameras.

...I didn’t think of it as a particularly bad experience, it was more that I got irritated at the guy. He wanted me to photograph myself with the web cam in string panties, which I did, out of curiosity as much as anything. Never had much self-confidence, especially not about my body, . . . and I suppose I hoped I’d get a few compliments. Anyway, he wasn’t satisfied with the picture I sent, he wanted me to stand up in it . . . I got stressed then because I knew mum and dad were downstairs ... It didn’t feel all that bad, a bit degrading because the picture wasn’t good enough and I’d really tried to make it good . . . I took him off my MSN-list and that was the end of it.

(girl aged 13; man, age unknown)

Once again, many of these webcam contacts effectively involved adults attempting to persuade children to participate in the production of child exploitation images. The police data included a number of much more serious incidents than that described above, however, where girls aged 10 to 13 had been given money to pose naked on several occasions over a number of months. The police data also included cases where the adult had first persuaded the child to pose partially nude, and had then saved these pictures and used them to blackmail the child. For the most part the children were blackmailed into sending even more revealing pictures or into participating in cybersex, but there were also cases where blackmail had been used to try to coerce the child into agreeing to an offline meeting.

The other main category of webcam contacts involved men manipulating children into opening their webcam windows and then exposing themselves to these children in various ways.

It wasn’t actually that he wanted me to do anything, but he contacted me on MSN, and turned on his webcam pointed at his sex organ where he was sitting and masturbating. Then he wrote a load of dirty things to me. I shut everything down as quickly as I could of course, and then I blocked him. But it was very unpleasant all the same.

(girl aged 13; man, aged 25–35)

A number of descriptions were about incidents where adults had both exposed themselves and attempted to get the child to do the same.

He asked me to show my breasts in the webcam and to have camsex with him, and he wanted to give me a dildo for my birthday ... and he sat and had a wank for me in front of his webcam, etc.

(girl aged 13; man over 35)

And as the following quotes show, the descriptions occasionally gave an indication that adults had been able to exploit the respondents’ own curiosity and willingness to participate in online sex.

We chatted for a while, then we started to talk sex. In the end we used webcams to see each other. I was totally up for it.

(boy aged 14; man aged 25–35)

He was nice, and showed me a picture of himself ... then we discussed sex and he asked if I knew what cybersex was. Um, yeah ... then he taught me.

(girl aged 14; man aged 18–24)

Extending contacts to mobile phones

The following two descriptions are examples of cases where the adult had succeeded in extending the contact offline by obtaining the child’s mobile phone number:

I chatted with him for a bit, then we swapped mobile phone numbers, and he sent a few texts asking friendly questions, then it got a lot dirtier.

(girl aged under 12; man over 35)

He started talking about totally ordinary things, then he asked for my MSN, and I gave it to him. Then he wrote a load of nasty questions, and wrote that he was doing sexual things to me. So I blocked him. But somehow he got hold of my number and called me and said he was going to stick his sex-organ into me and, well, loads of things like that.

(girl aged 13; man aged 25–35)

Here it is worth noting that in those cases in the police data where children had actually met sex offenders offline, extending the contacts to the child’s mobile phone was almost without exception the first stage in the process of moving the relationship from the online to the offline environment. Research has also noted that this represents a very significant step (e.g. O’Connell 2004). Once the adult has the child’s phone number he
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has gained access to him or her 24/7 and irrespective of whether or not the child chooses to spend time online. The police data included several examples of contacts where children had been sexually harassed by phone (for example in the form of sexually abusive texts and/or pornographic MMS messages) for upwards of a year before the contact had been reported to the police.

In some cases the children had provided their phone numbers themselves; in other cases, they had given out their names, and the adults had been able to obtain their mobile phone numbers using various kinds of online directory enquiry services, as in the following example.

He was nice at first, got my MSN, started saying weird things, started pestering me, said that I had to answer his questions or he’d come round my house, and then he sent me all my personal details that he’d got from hitta.se (or somewhere similar) although I didn’t know you could do that back then, and I got very scared.

(girl aged 14; man aged 18–24)

Attempts to arrange offline meetings

The web survey respondents reported that the adult with whom they had been in contact online had attempted to extend the contact to the offline environment, for example to phone contacts or by trying to arrange to meet the respondent, in just over 20 per cent of cases. The descriptions from the web survey that described adults having tried to arrange offline meetings showed that the adults had sometimes been very clear about the fact that they wanted to have sex with the respondent, as in cases for example where the child had been offered payment for sex, or where the adults made their sexual interest obvious in other ways, as in the two examples presented below.

A man in his fifties wanted me to perform sexual services and meet him and get money for it. Then I asked if he didn’t care about my age and he said the younger the better.

(girl aged 12; man over 35)

It was a man who wanted to have sex with me, and he wanted to pay for me to travel to meet him, said he really fancied me . . .

(girl aged 12; man over 35)

In other cases, it was more a question of the adults saying that they wanted to meet as friends, to maybe watch a film or video, or do something fun together.

He started talking to me about my interests and he said he was 15, then

after a week it came out that he was at least 25. He wanted to meet and do something fun, but my parents had scared me off stuff like that, so I gave up talking to him. But after a while I got a dirty mail where he said he’d met another boy.

(boy aged 13; man aged 25–35)

A small number of the web survey descriptions showed that the respondent had either met, or been on his or her way to meet, the adult offline. None of these descriptions described sexual offences having taken place at any of these meetings, however, and online contacts leading to offline sex offences are therefore described below on the basis of the police data.

Online strategies leading to offline sex offences

The search of the police report databases identified a total of 69 reports relating to offline sex offences committed by perpetrators who had met the victims online. Of these, almost one-fifth occurred between perpetrators and victims of roughly the same age (an age difference of at most five years). All the victims in these cases were female, the majority aged between 15 and 17 and the perpetrators were males aged between 15 and 22. The victims had come into contact with the perpetrators, or with friends of the perpetrators, online and had then met them, often together with friends both of their own and of the perpetrator, to do something together on the evening that the offence took place. At some point during the evening, the perpetrator had then sexually assaulted the victim. In some cases the assault had gone no further than unwanted sexual touching, but in many cases the victim had been raped, sometimes saying that she had been too drunk to resist or that she had been asleep at the time of the assault. The offence almost always occurred on the first occasion that the victim met the perpetrator offline.

The analysis of the remaining offline sex offences in the police data identified three strategies that had been employed by adults to persuade the victims of these offences to meet them offline. These are referred to here as ‘Friendship and romance (or just sex)’, ‘Promises of modelling work’, and ‘Offers of payment for sexual services’.

Friendship and romance (or just sex)

The largest group of offline offence reports (n=29) related to cases where the perpetrators had for the most part developed friendships with the victims, first online and then also by means of mobile phone contacts. In some cases the child had fallen in love with the perpetrator. The victims were for the most part under 15 years of age, and the youngest victim was aged 11 at the time of the offence. All victims with one exception were female. The age of the perpetrators (all male) ranged between 17 (one case) and 44 years.

In approximately one-third of these cases the perpetrator was at least 20

years older than the victim, and it was relatively common in this particular group of offences for the perpetrators to have lied about their age. It was rare for them to have claimed to be the same age as the victims, but a 34-year-old

had claimed to be 26, for example, and a 37-year-old claimed online to be 25, only to then ‘confess’ that he was in fact 28 when he eventually met the victim (a 13-year-old girl). Some perpetrators had also sent very misleading images of themselves to the victims in the course of their online contacts.

The length of the Internet contacts varied greatly. In approximately one- third of cases the online contact had continued for over six months (and for up to over two years) prior to the commission of the offline offence. Many of these longer online contacts involved children who described having problems at school, with bullying for example, or at home, and having felt a need to talk to someone. Initially the perpetrators had been very understanding and were often described by the children as ‘kind’ and ‘considerate’, or similar. The contacts were sometimes very intensive, at least for short periods, with telephone contacts and long chat conversations several times a day. The victims’ parents were nonetheless mostly either completely unaware that their children were in touch with the perpetrators, or had no idea where these contacts were heading.

Virtually all of the offences resulting from these longer-term contacts had been committed in the perpetrators’ homes, and the victims had often travelled to another town to meet them. Sometimes the children knew they would be having sex with the man before going to the offline meeting. In other cases, however, they had been raped or forced to engage in other sexual acts and described having been shocked at the men’s behaviour. Some of the victims said that they had been in touch with the man for so long that they felt they really knew him, but when they finally met him offline he was a completely different person.

In cases where the online contact preceding the offline meeting had been shorter than six months, it was usually much shorter. In these cases, the perpetrator and victim had typically been in touch online and by mobile phone for less than a month (and in two cases for less than a week) before deciding to meet offline. As a rule, the material in these cases also included indications that the children were experiencing sometimes quite serious problems in other areas of their lives – such as long-term exposure to bullying, serious problems at home, and contacts with the child-psychiatric sector and the social services. Two of the victims had been placed in compulsory care institutions.

In some of the cases in this category of offence reports the police interview material shows that the victims did not feel any great emotional attachment to the perpetrator. Instead the perpetrator was able to exploit the fact that the child was herself open to the idea of meeting an older man for sex. Among these victims there were also a few who did not want the offences to be reported to the police since they did not feel the perpetrators had done anything wrong. Two of the victims (both aged under 15) stated, for example, that they had already met men aged between 20 and 35 for sex. They also stated that they often talked to people on the Internet and talked sex with the majority of them. One of these girls described how she had also had phone sex with a number of men she had met online.

Even in those cases where the victim had been coerced into offline sex, the child did not always break off the contact as a result. In several cases, the child

had continued the contact with the perpetrator subsequent to the assault, and some of the children had met the perpetrators again and had been subjected to additional sexual assaults.

Promises of modelling work

Seven of the offence reports related to cases where the victims had been lured to an offline meeting with an offer of some kind of modelling job. All these victims were females aged between 13 and 17 years. The perpetrators (all male) were aged between 23 and 62. In one case the victim had answered an Internet advert for a modelling job, but the girls had otherwise been contacted on communities or by email by men who had seen a picture that the girls had themselves published online, either on an Internet community or on a home page of their own.