Glancing at the front page of today’s edition of the legal newspaper here in New York, I saw that the US Court of Appeals upheld a “sting” leading to the conviction of a man for attempt to entice a minor to engage in prohibited sexual activity (18 USC 2422(b)). The Second Circuit joined other circuits in holding that you can be convicted of attempt even though the underage girl you thought you were meeting for sex was a police informant or officer.
This conviction started in a chatroom called “I Love Older Men” when the 62-year old defendant started a conversation with “Teen2Hot4u”, also known as 13-year old “Lorie”, actually an adult FBI informant. After several IM conversations in which the Defendant detailed what he wanted to do with “Lorie”, “Lorie” said she would meet him, but only if her 13-year old friend “Julie”, actually an FBI agent, were there. After some more messaging between the defendant and “Julie”, the defendant came (bearing condoms and Viagra) to meet the girls in Manhattan, where he was arrested by the FBI. He was convicted and sentenced to the mandatory minimum term of five years.
We’ve all heard close variations of this story innumerable times, not to mention the Dateline NBC series in which they videotape the men coming to meet what they think are underage girls. What I find surprising is that these stories never seem to mention about other young girls they have actually succeeded in seducing from the internet.
My question is whether are there any purportedly underage girls trolling chatrooms for sex with older man who are not in fact police informants. Less flippantly, is there any information about how many actual young children are actually seduced (or have attempts to seduce them made) like this, as opposed to the percentage of them that are police officers or agents.
Are there any 13-year-olds interested in anyone 1.5 generations or more older than them at all? I remember when I was 13, and someone even three years older than me seemed in a different world. People in their twenties or older were unimaginably remote.
I’d be very surprised if there were real 13-year-olds interested in anyone past their twenties. I’d say that the cops were definitely relying on wishful thinking on the part of the 60-year-olds.
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My question is whether are there any purportedly underage girls trolling chatrooms for sex with older man who are not in fact police informants. Less flippantly, is there any information about how many actual young children are actually seduced (or have attempts to seduce them made) like this, as opposed to the percentage of them that are police officers or agents.
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Man, that has to be about the weirdest question I have read recently.
You want to know if there are actual 13 year olds out there soliciting sex who are not cops? ‘’
Of course there are. The real question is why do you want to know?
What are you trying to do, compute the odds of getting caught? Because that’s what it sounds like.
I think a better way of putting it may be: Of the older men who have been busted by a sting, have any been found to have been previously sucessful in meeting with a minor? It seems to me that the computers of the men who have been caught would be seized as evidence, and inspection of the computers might lead to other convictions for previous encounters. It seems unlikely that Dateline would ignore such follow-on stories, but I’ve never hard of any (but I don’t watch Dateline much either).
Sadly there are many, a huge percentage of them in bad home environments looking for any way out they can, not realizing they are kind of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Many of the behaviors and preferences for mature stable mates are already in place in 13-14 y/o girls, they are after all biologically speaking, ready to reproduce. Older men are the mature and more stable, and more so the older they go. What drives them to seek 14 y/o mates is another issue.
When I was in HS I knew at least 5-6 girls with “college guys”, some in their mid 20’s, for boyfriends, many dopers could name a bunch of similar scenarios.
I don’t think the pervs find minors on “I am underage and I wanna bang old dudes” websites very often, its that the pervs go to sites frequented by young girls, and then try to talk them into it.
I think the OP asks an excellent question, and it is one that has very serious societal implications.
ARE these guys just following a fantasy and taken off of the street before they rape OR
is this their 15th encounter, and the 14 previous times they had sex with a 13 year old girl, only this time they got caught?
If it is #2, then we have a VERY VERY serious problem in society. If it is #1, then we only have a VERY serious to maybe not that serious problem, in that these guys would never have had a real opportunity to get around a 13 year old girl anyways, and these arrests are only preemptive.
Why yes. Come meet me at the Waffle House on Skymall Avenue at 1:00 and I’ll let you meet one, but only if my friend Tina comes. Don’t worry, she’s super cool.
Zambini57, I don’t think this kind of comment is necessary here. Billdo is known personally to a number of members of the board and I hardly think he would be posting this here if that was what he were after.
I can recall back in… probably 2001 or 2002, I was chatting in either MSN or Yahoo chat.
I actually had a 13 or 14 year old female IM me and go about the same sequence of questions that an adult woman in that venue would ask of a guy she was trying to assess for ‘courting’ material.
When I informed said individual that I’d be glad to chat them, but wouldn’t be interested in meeting up with them until they were both employed and the year was 2008, the interest there fizzled.
Was said person really the age and gender in question?
I’ll never know.
Was it a cop? I doubt it, since none of the stings I’ve seen reported involved the cops messaging the subject FIRST.
I think this is a pretty interesting question. It’s been 8 years since I was 13 and hopping Yahoo chat rooms, but I know I only liked meeting new people to talk about Nirvana and how cute Edward Norton was with. Definitely no dating and I barely knew anything about sex. A lot has changed in 8 years, but I wouldn’t think that there are just tons of young girls trying to find a new ‘daddy.’
However, by watching a few different TV shows on the topic (no cite because I don’t remember any specifics on what show it was, what channel, etc, just remember seeing it, so take this for what you will) the FBI agents or whoever that catch these people don’t go out of their way to ask for sex. They act like ‘normal’ 13 year old girls. They act like they just want to make a new friend, talk about soccer or school, etc. It’s the guys trolling for sex that bring the dirty stuff up and try to coerce girls into meeting them for reasons not necessarily sexual in hopes they can get some anyway.
But if someone knows more about how the FBI works cases like this, and isnt’t talking about of their ass about a TV program probably shown on E!, then please help me fill in actual facts.
Something like that happened on a message board that I’ve been a member of for several years. Someone working for the Baltimore Police Department was posing as a fourteen-year-old girl. A forty-six-year-old man stared hitting on her. She made it abundantly clear that she was not interested and did everything she could to dissuade him. Unfortunately, he just wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. She finally capitulated and agreed to meet him in a hotel room in Baltimore, which he paid for. So maybe it’s SOP to give the guy every possible chance to back out while the backin’s good.
Sure, why not? They’re teenagers, teenagers do all kinds of stupid shit. I did stupid shit when I was 13. That’s the whole point of that “age of consent” thing.
I doubt that this is a particularly new development either. History seems to be pretty rife with examples to indicate that this kind of thing has been happening in every human culture since the dawn of civilization. Laws and societies come and go but people are not going to ever stop wanting to have sex with everything.
There has always been members of the teen population who realize they can turn around the “jailbait” angle to get themselves sugardaddied. Just think of the archetypal 30ish-or-older rock band members giving the “all-access backstage tour” to underaged groupies with a swell time being had by all. But no, generally not 13-year-olds; still, enough legal minors that it’s generally a good idea to check ID if your hook-up seems rather immature.
But the stings have a different angle than that. For the specific case of NBC’s “TCAP”, seeing its association with PervertedJustice, one can take a look at the sting logs at the latter website. Think what we may about that organization (opinions about them range from a very vigorous web neighborhood watch protecting our children, to a dangerous lynch mob of zealot cybervigilantes), it so happens that the logs from those subjects who actually did solicit sex from the minors DO every so often (not always, though) include statements by the man to the effect that he has done this before. One would wish to think they were all merely puffing themselves up, but some of that bragging may be for real.
As mentioned by myskepticsight, most of what you see in these cases is NOT young teens overtly and deliberately trolling for adult sex, but rather more like teens “out looking for fun” in general, with the potential “predator” being the one trying to steer the cyber-relationship in a sexual direction.