The Toronto Sun is doing a series, starting today, on cyber-molesters. Reading Part One was enough to chill my blood and numb my mind.
One of their reporters posed as a thirteen-year-old girl and in very short order had a wide variety of men propositioning her, masturbating for her via Webcam, and offering to drive thousands of miles to "make her happy". She stressed that she didn't have to go looking for these perverts...the perverts found her, and in seemingly innocuous online venues. In a few short weeks, she'd made well over a hundred contacts.
I would have found this astonishing had I never been online myself.
I first got on the Internet in early 1991. Cyberspace was primitive back then. The only graphics you tended to see online were ASCII art. Webcams were unheard of, and so were porno sites. When you checked your email, you didn't have to weed through offers to increase your penis size or show you "horny lezzie teens" or "Suzi and her horse".
That's not to say the 'Net was purer, necessarily, only that the sleaze was slightly less blatant.
Usenet (which still exists today) was my trolling ground. It was, and is, a collection of "newsgroups" on every conceivable topic...local to international and narrowly academic to widely recreational. Each group worked somewhat like a chatroom does today, without the capability of instant messaging.
When I discovered this stuff, I jumped in with both feet and promptly drowned in it. Imagine a place where my opinion could be read and praised by somebody on the other side of the planet. Or ridiculed: it hardly mattered which. Either way, I was getting my name out there and learning a lot from reading the opinions of other people. There was an ardent Quebec separatist on the can.politics group, my first glimpse of that sort of creature. On rec.sport.hockey, I was for a time venerated as a net.hockey.god, thanks to a few trenchant observations and lucky predictions. On alt.polyamory, I "met" a whole bunch of people who loved more than one person at a time; for quite a while I tried very hard to make their philosophy work for me. And, being a young man with working hormones and--at the time--nobody to share them with, I confess I spent some time browsing through the alt.sex hierarchy of newsgroups, a full listing of which would take probably a hundred pages and turn your mind inside out. I remember reading somewhere that the Internet was a vast repository of perversion...if you typed in that you wanted to have sex with a goat that was on fire, the computer would come back with "specify type of goat."
Then there was soc.penpals.
I happened to be skipping through that group one day, more out of idle curiosity than any real need for a penpal. What to my wondering eye should appear but an ad from somebody who said she was suffering from "empty mailbox syndrome"...and who attended my university.
After writing back and forth a few times--and we were probably in the same computer lab at least once when we exchanged emails--we agreed to meet.
That was the start of a close, five-year long relationship. In the end, I played the fool and threw it away, but it was important for me and wonderful while it lasted. But it was the beginning of the relationship that has bearing here. Anne, as I'll call her, told me that the only reason she responded to my initial sally was that I 'sounded okay and didn't propose marriage'. She showed me her mailbox, empty no longer. We counted no less than thirty marriage proposals, many of them originating from the Indian subcontinent.
I couldn't believe it. There were quite a lot of strange people out there.
Later, I came to learn that the Internet universe was not only stranger than I had supposed, but stranger that I could suppose. One girl offered to pay my airfare to the Southern U.S...and told my mother, in an email, that once she got me down there I wasn't likely to want to leave. I had a girl in upstate New York send me a picture of herself--not, I hasten to add, anything indecent, but then again, on very short notice, after no more than half an hour of idle online chit-chat.
The only link with my Internet past that I still maintain is one of the first links I ever forged: the Iowa Student Computer Association BBS (telnet:whip.isca.uiowa.edu). It's a smaller, self-contained version of Usenet, but with limited instant messaging capability. I used to get into conversations with six different people at once. You've got to be careful doing that, especially if you're flirting with one of them. Or worse, two of them. It's far too easy to send the wrong message to the wrong person.
I did have some reasonably healthy relationships on ISCA. And in introducing the BBS to a real-life friend, I unwittingly handed her the means by which she would meet her fiance; they've been together a good deal longer than Eva and I have been married. We have other friends who met online and have since married and had children. By no means am I against Internet relationships per se.
But male or female, you have to be exceedingly cautious!
The least reason you have to be cautious is that anybody might be misrepresenting themselves. Not everyone does, of course. But I have met a "woman" online who turned out to be a gay man, and it goes without saying that most personal ads on the 'Net are at least half creative fiction.
A much bigger reason to be concerned is the manufactured closeness that can be established so easily in the netherland between screens. In this world, everyone can be distilled to an essence, and that essence can be digested very quickly. It's possible to chat with someone for a few hours and feel you've known them for years. Believe me: I know this from repeated personal experience. The gullible can easily be convinced that lifelong love awaits them after a few keystrokes. You don't have to be young to be gullible: a little loneliness and a lack of self-esteem will do it every time.
You don't have to be young to be gullible, but it helps. According to a survey published in today's paper, 68% of kids surf without any supervision. Truly scary. Our computer will remain here in the living room where anyone can see it, and I don't care if every friend our kids make at school has a computer (with a webcam, no less!) in their bedroom. I recognize there's no surefire way to keep children safe, but I don't see the logic in actively courting the psychos.
Parents out there, beware: your computer monitor only looks like the screen you use as a rugrat-shutter-upper, pacifier, and general babysitter. As of yet, no sick freaks can reach through your television screen and beguile and befriend your sons and daughters. But it's depressingly easily done with a computer.
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