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Table 1b. Fictional profiles of vulnerable child
Table 1b Fictional profiles of non-vulnerable child
Social networking platforms – three examples Three different social networking services were chosen to place the fictional profiles. They varied in terms of their scale and community orientation. As noted in this research we give them the nom de plumes: Adulescentia, Osirus and Horizon. Adulescentia had two layers of membership: one for the 14-18 year-olds and one for the 18+ age group. The 14-18 age group membership did not have publicly viewable profiles. Instead, the user had to allow a request from another member to be part of his or her ‘friends list’ for access to the full profile, or be a part of that age group membership. There was a member search function on Adulescentia similar to that contained in personal websites. This enabled a user to search by sex, age, relationship or marital status, and also to seek out what a member was searching for on Adulescentia (dating, relationships, networking or friendships), plus a host of other descriptive factors such as height and physical build. The 14-18 year-olds had access to search for members from the age of 16-68, while the 18+ age group could only search for those over the age of 18-68. In order to test the integrity of the security that protects underage users on Adulescentia, Michaela and Kelsey were placed in the 14-18 age group. Both profiles stated that the user was actually 12-years-old from the outset. Alicia and Kate were placed in the 18+ age group and also stated openly that the user was actually 12-years-old. The Osirus platform was originally designed for use by university students for networking purposes. It has been expanded, however, to include other interest groups and regional groups while retaining a focus on educational establishments. Profiles only become available to the groups that the user chooses to partake in: the general Australian regional group was selected which exposed the four profiles to around 52,000 members. Thus the Osirus platform, due to the non-public nature of their profiles, was an ideal control for the experiment. The same profile information, including the specified ‘real’ ages of the users, was supplied. Horizon is a Canadian-based social networking platform with a worldwide membership and is unique in that it has no layered memberships and has completely public profiles. The lowest age permitted is 14, which is also Canada’s age of consent (with certain exceptions). Horizon is much more community-oriented and is designed with an ethos similar to Internet forums and moderated chat-rooms than only online websites and profiles. This is reflected in its strong administrator and moderator presence. It has over 1,000,000 members, with around 300,000 of them active. A large number of its users are below the age of 18 and as such, the service is targeted more at a younger membership.
Responses of social network sites Within the experiment and the structure of these social networking platforms, three broad responses types are available. The first is the ‘friends list’ feature, where members can send a request to be added to another member’s list of friends. In Adulescentia’s 14-18 age group, an acceptance of such a request gives access to the member’s complete profile. It is similar to the contact list available in email software and instant messenger software[7], and as such provides a means of tracking and bookmarking the profiles of people of interest to a member. The second response type is the private message, which is similar to an email that can only be accessed through the social networking platform and is limited to members. Private messages can be sent without members having accepted any ‘friends’ request, with the exception of the 14-18 age group in Adulescentia, where only those within a friends list can exchange messages. The third response type is a direct email using addresses supplied with Alicia and Kate’s profiles. Suspicious responses within these three types are defined as those from accounts that are not spam (advertising for musical groups or musicians, products or services) and are from members above the age of 18. The primary indicator of a suspicious response was sexual content in the first instance, or after a reply. Once sexual content is established, all contact with the responder ceased. The limited scope of this study, of course, excludes the possibility of an experienced pedophile initiating a long-term sexual grooming process or establishing one by posing as another child. Research about such responses would necessitate more in-depth and correspondingly long-term studies.
Results
Our findings are reported over the three stages of the experiment – each stage leading to more adventurous exposure of the profiles. In the first stage profiles were initially set up on Adulescentia and Osirus and left untouched for 14 days in order to ascertain the ‘unencouraged lure’ of young girls. Within this period, no photographs were used for Alicia and Kate. Instead, two avatars were created using an online ‘doll’ maker. A doll is a cartoon representation of a person and the software allows the user to change the doll’s clothing, hair and expression. To match their characteristics, Alicia was given paler skin, a blank expression and darker clothes as well as a set of black wings, while Kate received tanned skin, a happier expression and trendier clothes in bright colors. There were no results for this initial experiment from the Osirus platform at all, though there were limited results from Adulescentia, as can be seen in Table 2,
Table 2 Responses to profiles at 14 days
There were no responses for Michaela and Kelsey, which were the profiles without avatars. In fact, an examination of the count of individual visits to these profiles, listed in the profile page, showed no visits by any other member of Adulescentia at this stage, even by other members within the 14-18 age group. In searching for other members within Adulescentia, users could choose whether or not to search for members without avatars and most did not. In fact, the default option was to search only for members with avatars. The next stage of the experiment involved answering all legitimate responses from Adulescentia (Table 2), to discern which were innocent or suspicious. Alicia’s single legitimate ‘friends request’ proved to be innocent, with the member deleting Alicia off her friends list after realizing her ‘true’ age. Her single legitimate private message, however, was suspicious. After establishing contact, the conversation rapidly turned sexual, with the member asking about masturbation and boyfriends. Three of Kate’s four legitimate friends requests were innocent, with one proving to be a member randomly adding profiles and the other two not fully reading her profile and her true age. One, however, looked suspicious after three replies, asking for personal details about intimate clothing and requesting personal photographs, despite having again been reminded of Kate’s age. Similarly, both of Kate’s legitimate private messages were suspicious, with the members becoming sexual soon after the reply. This process of answering legitimate responses was carried on throughout the remainder of the experiment. The modest response to the first stage of the experiment was indicative of the presence of pedophiles willing to track and solicit young girls. The experiment, however, required the presence of these girls on the Internet to be known, or put another way, to be ‘advertised’. In a normal situation, these girls would have been heavily active in forums, chat-rooms, other networking platforms, instant-messenger programs and so on. These would all feature links back to the profiles. The experiment had to advertise the profiles in order to achieve this degree of realism. The third stage thus involved three expansions of the experiment: (a) the addition of profiles to another social networking platform, Horizon; (b) the use of photographs as opposed to graphical avatars and (c) the participation in Internet Relay Chat chat-rooms for advertising purposes. It must be noted that expanded research should utilize more than chat-rooms for advertising. A complete online presence must be maintained for each girl, including the activities listed above. For this explorative study, however, it is sufficient that such advertising be tested to gain an understanding of the effect on the number of suspicious responses. Horizon provides human security in the form of moderators who accept or reject each profile as they are created. For this reason, Alicia’s and Kate’s profiles were created one day before Michaela and Kelsey’s, and their ‘true’ ages were omitted until after they had been accepted. When all were accepted into the system, Alicia’s and Kate’s profiles were updated with childhood photographs[8]. The childhood photographs were in turn slightly digitally manipulated to ensure the safety of the women who had provided them and to make them appear to be photographs taken from a digital camera. After the photographs were uploaded, all four profiles were changed to reflect their ‘true’ ages. Although receiving plenty of attention (mostly spam messages and requests), within three days all four profiles were suspended by Horizon staff. Although it is impossible to ascertain, this was probably done via the option for members to report any illegal profiles to the moderators. Expanding on this, the photographs replaced the avatars on Alicia’s and Kate’s profiles within the Adulescentia and Osirus platforms. Both platforms were used in the advertising, with one week’s advertising for each. The Undernet network of Internet Relay Chat (IRC), arguably the largest, was chosen for the advertising because of the un-moderated nature of the medium and the presence of tens of thousands of users at any given time. An IRC client called mIRC software[9] was used to access the Undernet network[10] as it was the mainstream software for IRC. The two chat-rooms chosen from Undernet’s list were #Teens and #Teenchat. Other directly sexual chat-rooms for all age groups were available but were rejected for the purposes of this study because the solicitations should occur within an ‘innocent’ medium. Due to practical considerations involved in advertising two sets of four profiles within a short exposure period of two weeks, it was decided to sacrifice a realistic schedule (particularly due to the international nature of IRC) and to partition each day into four slots, advertising each of the four profiles six hours apart and rotating them each day into different time slots as shown in table 3 below.
Table 3 Timetable for Adulescentia and Osirus Profiles Advertised in IRC
Profiles were advertised both in the main chat-room and in private chat to any person who initiated a conversation. An example of an advertisement in the main chat-room would be, “Hi I’m Alicia, 12/f/Australia, bored n’ lonely, anyone wanna talk or whatever add me on Adulescentia!”, followed by the appropriate URL. If there was conversation going on in the chat-room, the characters would participate with the appropriate knowledge of Internet abbreviations and speech patterns. The roles of Kate and Kelsey, being the non-vulnerable profiles, were appropriately more spirited and socially aware in discussions, whilst Alicia and Michaela were shy and withdrawn. It is interesting to note that Kate and Kelsey received more attention from real or supposed younger people, whilst Alicia and Michaela attracted attention from those who didn’t identify directly as young and were more dominant in conversation. There were also many requests for photographs, with Alicia and Kate responding with links to their profiles, while Michaela and Kelsey denied having access to digital cameras. While there was plenty of suspicious attention directed at the girls within the chat-room, it was beyond the scope of this study to explore these interactions, though it is an area that needs further research. This is especially so as IRC is particularly involved with content crimes such as the trading of child pornography (Forde and Paterson 1998; Hellard 2001). The results of this final stage in the experiment were mixed. The Osirus profiles attracted some attention but mostly from other young members, actual or posing, some of whom became sexual as well. Alicia and Kate received all of the responses, with Alicia receiving 3 ‘friends’ requests, one of which turned sexual after 3 replies, and Kate receiving 5 friends requests, with 3 becoming sexual after a few replies. It must be noted that the chat-rooms, while primarily intended for what #Teens specified as ‘clean chat’, were also used by these younger people to initiate sexual discussion with the opposite sex. This has been argued by some sources, for example social worker Patrick O’Leary (cited in Munro, 2006: 23) to be a part of normal sexual exploration. Of course, as Taylor (2002) points out, these younger people could be victims of child abuse who copy the abuse they’ve suffered and inflict it on other children, being the result of learned behavior (see White and Haines 2004: 60-62). The results of the Adulescentia profiles were more pronounced and are reported in Table 4.
Table 4 Stage 3 Results for Adulescentia
Discussion and Analysis
The main objective of this explorative study was to discern how best to conduct direct criminological research through experimentation, utilizing a sting-oriented approach. Stage 1 showed that even a passive approach netted results. The results gained, however, are relevant only for a specific category of pedophile that actively sorts through profiles. But such results are still surprising in a number of ways. The objective of the experiment was to find which profile (and which set of variable characteristics, the major one being vulnerability) attracted the most suspicious contacts. Or put another way, which profile was the most attractive to online pedophiles? The research of Mitchel et. al. (2001), reiterated the common belief, reflected in official government literature that one of the most at-risk groups are ‘troubled’ children (NetAlert, 2005, Stanley 2002). By Stage 2, the profile with the most suspicious contacts was Kate’s, which was non-vulnerable with an avatar and a contact email, which is similar to the finding of Mitchel et. al. (2001) that 75% of those contacted were not troubled. These results, however, were limited due to the lack of advertising in the other sites of interest – chat-rooms. By Stage 3, these results had evened out further. Alicia and Kate received the most attention and, ignoring direct emails, received 44% and 42% of suspicious responses respectively out of the total they attracted. While a lengthier study may yield more results which may show a more significant percentage increase for one or the other, the presence of public profiles and photographs seems to indicate that vulnerability may not be the key issue as has been previously thought. It must be noted though, that a vulnerable child would be psychologically easier to control and manipulate than a non-vulnerable child. More interestingly, the difference between Michaela and Kelsey was more pronounced, with the more outgoing Kelsey receiving 17% suspicious responses of her total, as opposed to Michaela’s 30%. It may be misleading to focus on the view that vulnerable children are more likely to be targeted than non-vulnerable children – comforting perhaps to think that non-vulnerable children are at low risk. Thus pedophiles who have the patience, intelligence and understanding of the psychology (or pathology) of children may succeed by undertaking the complex child sexual grooming process so succinctly summed up in NetAlert’s Pedophiles and Sexual Grooming article (NetAlert 2005: 2) and explored so thoroughly in O’Connell’s (2003) study. Nevertheless, even outgoing and family-oriented children such as Kate and Kelsey were at possible risk. It is important, therefore, to avoid perceiving pedophiles, especially those encountered online, as the type of sex offender who selects and only strikes a vulnerable target – a woman walking alone, drugged or drunk for example – then disappears. It is equally important to bear in mind that children are essentially vulnerable, in the sense that they are naïve and inexperienced, eager to please an adult and to make new friends. The results for Michaela and Kelsey seem to indicate that without the presence of public profiles and photographs, the results tend to support Mitchel, et. al. (2001) concerns about ‘troubled’ or vulnerable children on the Internet. The presence of an email address does not seem to affect the risks to the extent anticipated, with Alicia receiving a 5% increase and Kate, a 4% increase. This seems to indicate that ease of access and a photograph spur on pedophiles, either from a rational weighing up of the ease of action and knowledge of the victim or because the presence of a photograph sparks off an attraction that overrides security and safety concerns. This would be closer to a psychologically positivistic explanation of pedophilia outlined by White and Haines (2004). The use of photographs in Stage 3 was revealing from the outset. One of the initial private messages received by Alicia via Adulescentia, for example, seems to support the positivism perspective: ‘Nice pic good angle on your face. You are very cute and I would like to chat with you. Australia is one of my favorite places, have not visited yet. Hope to chat with you soon.’[11] This supports O’Connell’s findings that describe how pedophiles in chat-rooms commonly seek more information via online profiles and requests for photographs (O’Connell 2003, 7-8). Unlike IRC social networking platforms provide an easier and more subtle way of gaining this personal information before contact has even been established. While the avatars made a difference, the photographs for Alicia and Kate seemed to tip the scales of interest, as seen in the results from the Osirus platform in particular, with Michaela and Kelsey not receiving any responses at all. From a security standpoint, the best solution seems to be to design social networking sites around forum communities rather than as an abstract service governed by rigid staff-member hierarchies. Horizon has by far provided the best security, with profiles being suspended as soon as the ‘true’ ages of the fictional girls were revealed. This seems to have resulted from the integration of users as staff: the platform is further moderated by the users themselves. Thus, the more intense the sense of community the more likely they will intervene as responsible members of that community. The relatively small size of Horizon as compared to Adulescentia and Osirus too, is probably a major factor. Horizon though, is sufficiently large for a purely ‘elitist’ staff to be unable to handle all the services alone. Had there been no media attention on child abuse within social networking platforms such as Adulescentia and Horizon (Mah 2007; Rawthorne 2007) during the time of our research and had Adulescentia, in particular, not upgraded the security and structure of its service as a result, it is not inconceivable that there would have been even more suspicious responses than observed. The Adulescentia upgrades resulted in a safer environment for the 14-18 age group. It is difficult, however, for any social networking platform to take into account the de-individuation theory which Demetriou and Silke (2003) explore in their study. In the world of the Internet, responsibility is low. It is tempting for underage users to have an 18+ profile because it is publicly viewable and has certain advantages that being in the 14-18 age group does not. It is also tempting for pedophiles to create accounts under the guise of young children to gain the trust of their chosen victims (O’Connell, Price & Barrow 2007) or to view the Internet as a safe and anonymous environment in which to freely interact with children. Further, it is tempting for both predator and prey to feel completely safe within at homes while allowing the world to visit via their computers.
Conclusion
An effective way to conduct direct research on online child sexual solicitation and the activities of Internet pedophiles is by establishing several complete Internet identities. Focusing on one medium alone – for example chat-rooms, without social networking platforms or forums – leaves an incomplete picture of underage users’ Internet activities. Social networking platforms can provide a major arena for pedophile activities and when expanded with advertising, constitute an almost unexplored domain for study. Although our study provided limited exposure and advertising it did demonstrate that such techniques can yield useful data. With the cooperation of social networking platforms, this study has shown that action oriented research could be undertaken by utilizing as many different profiles and characteristics in order to discover how Internet pedophiles operate and what factors – such as avatars, photographs, publicly accessible profiles, email addresses and personality characteristics – affect their behavior. In this case, the initial experimental design proved too passive and short-lived to be a method for attracting enough responses from Internet pedophiles. In our small pilot study the strongest variables involved were the presence of photographs and email addresses. With these in use, suspicious responses for both vulnerable and non-vulnerable profiles were roughly equal, showing perhaps that these factors encouraged pedophiles to ignore caution and security in favor of gratification. Profiles without these variables had a more predictable outcome, with vulnerable profiles receiving more attention than non-vulnerable profiles. From these initial results, it is recommended that all underage users of social networking platforms be very cautious about placing photographs of themselves in their profiles and to avoid publication of email addresses. In general the education of both parents and children about the importance of privacy and the power of the databases underpinning much of the internet is essential (Barnes 2006). In terms of security, Horizon was by far the best of the three tested and suggests that a community-based social networking platform seems to be the safest. This platform probably enabled self-policing to occur. Paradoxically, Horizon allows 14-year-old members to create completely public profiles. Both Adulescentia and Osirus appeared to have insufficient security in place to detect and suspend the accounts of underage members. Osirus’s completely non-public profiles, however, did provide a measure of security as compared to Adulescentia’s layered membership feature. In the end, the best security must come from within the user’s home and habits. Underage users such as the one in Kurt Eichenwald’s investigation are at greater risk by having computers in their bedrooms and un-supervised, unlimited Internet access (O’Reilly 2005). The Australian Government’s concept of the distribution of free filtering software falls short of the ever-increasing knowledge of Internet technology which children possess and the increasing role of on-line friendships or ‘friending’ among teens that will undermine these forms of control (Boyd 2006). This was proven when a 16 year old male ‘cracked’ the NetAlert filter in 30 minutes and cracked an upgraded filter within 40 minutes (Higginbottom and Packham 2007: 1-23). The alternative of an Internet Service Provider level filter has been dismissed as ineffective in blocking all pornography (a problem with the filtering software as well) and may also limit access to legitimate sites (for example health; see Minow 2004). The impact of the associated slower internet speeds (LeMay 2006) will also be resisted by e-commerce and it is unlikely the speed of Internet connections may be sacrificed for the safety of vulnerable users. Ultimately, the best form of Internet security is parental monitoring in the form of human supervision and the education of children about the dangers posed by the Internet and the importance of privacy self-protection (Barnes 2006). We may do better to empower children to police the Internet and to recognize their rapid absorption of the changes released by Web 2.0 and the relentless privatization and commercialization that is now increasingly apparent.
Acknowledgement The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Nick Chantler, Warren Reed and Peter Grabosky for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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Vonck, T. 2007. Introduction to mIRC. Retrieved April 3, 2007 http://www.mirc.com/mirc.html
[1] School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Australia [2]Hon. Professor, Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice & Governance, Room 4.12b M10, Griffith University, Mt Gravatt Campus, Qld. Australia, 4011. Email: r.broadhurst@griffith.edu.au [3] However, not all jurisdictions share the same age definitions and also variations occur in the age of sexual consent (for example in Japan the age of consent for sexual activity is thirteen). It remains legal to possess child pornography although Article 7 of the 1999 “Laws for Punishing Acts Related to Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, and for Protecting Children” prohibits distribution, sale, rental or display (see www.interpol.int/Public/Children/SexualAbuse/NationalLaws/csaJapan.asp visited October 10, 2007); [4] Newsgroups are discussion groups that utilize Usenet, a worldwide, non-centralised group of services that stores messages and files and forwards their content to other servers on demand. Alt.Sex.Stories is one of many discussion groups within Usenet. Newsgroups are accessed through Newsgroup Readers software, which is designed to use access Usenet (see M. Feather, 1999).
[5] Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a protocol using TCP communications between computers and servers, facilitating chat-rooms (called channels), which are used for group communication (see Feather, 1999). [6] Forums are discussion groups that use IP-based communication and present a graphical interface for messages and discussions to be read. Information is usually stored in a single location, within a database. Forums can be accessed through a browser’s normal HTTP protocol and is presented as a website, albeit one with dynamic content. [7] Instant Messenger programs are software than can be used to communicate with people who are also signed up to use the same software and are added onto a private friends list (Gross, Juvonen and Gable 2002).. [8] Provided with the informed consent of the two adult women associates who agreed to be involved in the experiment.. [9] See T. Vonck, Introduction to mIRC, accessed on April 3, 2007 at http://www.mirc.com/mirc.html [10] S. Okeefe, C. Ovidiu, J. Angliss and B.B. Adnane, Introduction to Undernet, accessed on May 27, 2007, at http://www.undernet.org/ [11] Private message, June 12, 2007.
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