Friday, February 3, 2006

Men Who Prey On Children

Have any of you seen the recent Dateline expose on men looking for sex, who surf online chatrooms to target vulnerable, under aged teenage boys and girls? It's eye opening and quite disturbing at the same time. Further, because everything is captured on videotape, there is no ambiguity here.

The show lays out for you in sickening detail how these sexual predators go about using the Net to troll for children, sometimes as young as 12-years-old. But it doesn't stop there. The intent of many of these men, after establishing online conversations with these kids, is to then arrange to actually meet them for sex. Working with an organization that has adult volunteers pose as children in online chatrooms, the show drives the point home just how easy it is for an adult male to strike up a chat with someone whom he has every reason to believe is a child (the volunteers will specifically mention their ages as being either 12 or 13-years-old several times during the chat), then turn the conversation on a dime into disgusting sexual territory, often asking for a chance to meet in person for sex.

To see if any of them would actually show up, Dateline had the volunteers offer these guys the opportunity to hook up with them face to face at a suburban home, which was equipped with hidden cameras, for a presumed sexual encounter. What really hits you is not just the number of men who come to the house during a three day period of filming--nearly 30--but it is who they are. One is a rabbi, another is a high school teacher, still another is an ER physician. Further, many of them are married with children of their own.

When the show’s correspondent finally confronts them about why they are there, they all basically say that it was their "first time" doing such a thing, and that they didn't really have any intention of actually having sex with the child they had come to meet(even though some admit to having brought condoms with them).

Tonight at 9 p.m., Dateline will air an all new expose on this topic, it's the third in a series. Parents in particular might want to watch.