Sexual predators online

This transcript records an actual online conversation which, after this point, became increasingly sexual with ‘caspercock’ trying to persuade ‘angelgirl12yo’ to send photographs of herself masturbating. ‘Angelgir12yo’ was in fact a male Special Agent from the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, while ‘caspercock’ was Timothy Wales, already on probation for an earlier sexual assault. Wales was convicted of one count of attempting to entice a minor to engage in illegal sexual activity (18 USC § 2422(b)) and one count of attempted child sexual exploitation (18 USC § 2251(a)(d)) and sentenced to just over fifteen and a half years in prison.

In its relatively short life, the internet has introduced us to many new terms and phenomena. One that has received considerable attention is the online sexual solicitation of children or ‘grooming’. Although widely used, the term ‘grooming’ describes a complex phenomenon which is neither well-defined nor understood. Its stages have been defined as ‘(1) the use of a variety of manipulative and controlling techniques (2) with a vulnerable subject (3) in a range of interpersonal and social settings (4) in order to establish trust or normalize sexually harmful behaviour (5) with the overall aim of facilitating exploitation and/or prohibiting exposure’. For our purposes it may be summarised as ‘the process by which a child is befriended by a would-be abuser in an attempt to gain the child's confidence and trust, enabling them to get the child to acquiesce to abusive activity’.

While grooming itself is not new, the internet and other forms of electronic communication have provided offenders with greatly increased opportunities for contact with children.