The Net is a circuit of safety concerns

ByABC News
November 7, 2007, 10:01 PM

— -- If you watch TV or read the news, you know sexual predators hang out on the Internet, looking for underage victims.

Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator" features men being lured by the promise of meeting underage girls. Several state attorneys general recently have called on social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook to ban registered sex offenders and make their sites safer. Newspapers have been filled with stories about the dangers children face when they post too much personal information. And victims have testified recently at congressional hearings.

Some worry that parents are falling victim to "predator panic" and overreacting to unlikely dangers, unintentionally turning children off to safety messages altogether.

"One of the misunderstandings that we think is widespread is that what sex offenders are doing is picking out kids (online) and stalking them and deceiving them and abducting them and raping them," says David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

"That's not what's going on."

Abductions by strangers are so rare that many experts can't name a single case in which a predator attacked after only seeing a child's profile online.

'Grooming' their victims

In most cases, predators seek out vulnerable teens those who post sexually suggestive pictures of themselves, talk about sex online or frequent places where hook-ups are made, Finkelhor says. They spend weeks, even months, forging a relationship and gaining the teens' trust.

Usually, those who become victims eventually agree to meet the perpetrator face to face; often they know that the person they're meeting is older. But by the time they meet him (usually it's a man), they often think they are in love. It's a process called "grooming," Finkelhor says.

"It's the kids who respond to somebody and start talking about sex that puts them at risk or kids who use sites to communicate with lots of people they don't know, or put very sexualized images online," he says.