Self-help Articles

by John Suler, Ph.D.

One dilemma of online life is that you can never be sure that other people indeed are who they say they are. That 17 year old flirtatious girl could be a 47 year old man. Some chat rooms are supervised in order to protect children from predatory adults, but many are not. Even in those communities that are well supervised, there is little that can be done to prevent sexual predators from pretending to be teens in order to win the favors of young people.

The Masks of Sexual Predators
If a sexual predator doesn't use an adolescent disguise, he (and usually they are males) may present himself as a supportive, sympathetic confidant who encourages the adolescent to discuss personal problems and become emotionally attached to him. Troubled adolescents who feel alienated from their parents are especially vulnerable.

These are the same types of strategies used by sexual predators in the in-person world. The internet is just another avenue they use to launch their abuse against children. Children need to be taught the same sorts of rules that apply to real world encounters with questionable adults:

• Don't divulge personal information to strangers. Don't give out your phone number or address or identify your schoiol or church or anywhere you frequent in the real world.
• Log off if someone makes you uncomfortable or asks you to do something that is wrong. Write down the username of that person, and inform your parents about it so they can contact the people who operate the chat room.
• Don't accept gifts from strangers or call someone, even if they invite you to call collect.
• NEVER meet anyone offline without adult family supervision.

Parents should make it a point to learn whom their children are chatting with online. Actually, many kids do show considerable savvy in dealing with unpleasant advances and those strategies should be encouraged by parents. One parent told me:

My daughter did have one instance of having an "inappropriate" comment made to her. (She was on a webpage-based text chat specifically for teens) Her response? She just typed "ewwwwwwwwww" and ignored the person after that! Kids these days seem to be generally more streetwise and know how to handle themselves online. Issues of abuse and sexuality are discussed in schools from an early age.

When I discussed this issue about sexual predators with experienced online adults, some of them wanted to emphasize the REVERSE scenario: adolescents who pretend to be older in order to flirt with unsuspecting adults. Some of the people I spoke to felt that this was an even more common situation than teens being approached by an adult predator. Sometimes the sexual advances of these teens in disguise can be quite explicit.

The unfortunate dilemma with the adult predator scenario is that some online adults are indeed understanding, caring people who are happy to look after adolescents. While attempting to separate from their parents and distance themselves from everything about them, some adolescents miss out on the opportunity to use their folks as role models.

In troubled families, teens may need a benign adult figure to fill in where the parents have been deficient, or to support them and advise them on their real world troubles.

I have spoken with many online adults -- some of them parents themselves -- who were happy to take young people under their wings and help them out as best they could. Sometimes they see themselves as a kind of "surrogate parent."

In those cases where adolescents feel especially distant from parents who know nothing about or are hostile towards the internet, the online "parent" may become a sympathetic, emotionally powerful figure in their lives.

One person told me a story that presented an interesting twist on this issue of parenting on and offline. A father confessed that he and his daughter had a horrid relationship. They fought constantly, often about the daughter's preoccupation with the Internet, her cell phone and iPod.

He feared the worse for her. Then, in what turned out to be a stroke of parental genius, he used his computer at work to get on the net and attempted to connect with his daughter online. It worked, better than he had imagined it would. Whenever they had difficult matters to go over, somehow it was easier to chat online -- quietly in a room somewhere.

Important feelings surfaced and they worked out a lot of problems that way. Later, he confessed that these online encounters were the best thing that ever happened in their relationship.

(Advertisement)Resource:
The issue of online sexual predators and the latest research is very well discussed by Dr. Larry Rosen in a 2008 TeleWorkshop through SelfhelpMagazine. See here for details.

About the Author:

John Suler, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychology at Rider University and a practicing clinical psychologist. He has published on psychotherapy, mental imagery, and eastern philosophy. He currently maintains several web sites.