And if this abusive relationship continues, and this guy sexually assaults her and then leaves her, she will also emotionally explode. It is a horrible situation but the right answer is the one that doesn’t allow crimes to be committed and your daughter to be in danger. You are doing the right thing, MitzeKatze.
Poor girl…I imagine she’ll be hearing from the FBI once that message is passed on. Does go a long way to nailing that guy to the wall though.
I just wanted to second this. At this point, the current guy is on his way down; he’ll probably never see you or your daughter face to face. It’s the next guy that you have to worry about. Make sure your daughter gets the full pre-sex health and safety talks. Hopefully this experience will leave her cautious in the future, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
One additional point (the only thing i was thinking that i haven’t seen mentioned above): presumably your daughter has internet and email access at school. If she has the slightest bit of deviousness, she may have a second email account that she only uses there. I certainly would in her place.
Please, Mitze, give us an update! I’m starting to get worried!
Or is the FBI just handling things now and you’re just waiting for them to make their next move?
Gotta remember a couple of things here: Daughter was to come home today, so I wouldn’t expect much; Mitze is gonna be busy. Interview with police tomorrow, plus Mitze may have decided <or been advised> that the net is not private, and it would be better to keep things on the downlow until it all blows over.
Hell, I have an acquaintance who is about to put out resumes for the first time in a decade, and one of the first things he had to do was second-guess every post he’s MADE in the last decade, and whether those will look bad to an employer. And he’s a GOOD guy, wouldn’t swear if you paid him; can you imagine having to censor your posts over the last 10 years?
Holy #%#.
Good luck, Mitze. I’m sure you’ll share when you can, and my fingers are crossed for you all.
Thanks everyone! I haven’t meant to ignore this thread, but you know, things have been busy tonight! I will try to hit the highlights, and of course I will still be around for a while. 
No, I don’t think there is any way. I am deliberately vague when I mention “my” message boards and if I speak of it I say, “one of my friends on the internet said on a message board…” I never let my kids know where I am posting or if I am posting because I want to have a place to be able to talk about them without them knowing. And also I don’t want to embarrass them so I keep my screen name as something that most people would be hard-pressed to figure out it was me.
You know, I am wondering the same thing. It has been quiet on my daughter’s end last night and today (but they may have been on the phone, I don’t know) so I have gone to his (Predator’s) FB profile a lot to see if there are any new comments, and he has been adding friends- all girls (but I don’t know their ages). It seems like an odd coincidence if that’s what it is.
It’s a great idea to have the therapist mediate. My husband and I have been preparing, and it took everything we could do today to not just grab her and spill everything right now…but we got through it, and she’s upstairs now (well away from the computer!)
That’s pretty much it. I’ll go to the meeting tomorrow, and from what I understand from the phone calls I have been getting, they really just want the print screens and what-not that I have collected and whatever else they are doing, it is without me knowing about it. So there isn’t much to update, other than my daughter is home and she is safe. Hopefully I will know more tomorrow.
I hope they don’t do that though. I have no one to talk to about this, and if I couldn’t spill my guts here (in a relatively private way, I hope…after all I haven’t given any names, addresses or phone numbers ;)) I’d likely go crazy myself…or the dog would be getting an earful on our walks and anyone passing by would think I was crazy anyway.
I hope to have a better update tomorrow, but I will definitely keep y’all posted, even if it just to say I can’t say anything…
Thanks again for all of your responses… I am reading all of them even if I don’t get a chance to respond to each one.
If she has to, Mitze should say that the FBI/cops came to her because they had been watching him all along. At least then the full anger won’t be on Mitze.
Wishing you good luck and results at your meeting today! And I think needscoffee may have a plan there with saying the FBI was on to him all along and thereby deflecting some of your daughter’s anger at you.
I don’t know the procedures involved, but the FBI does have people trolling the open “airwaves” (chat rooms etc.) for such guys. While getting into a specific person’s FB account may require a warrant, if they’ve spotted him sniffing around other resources, newsgroups, etc., they might already have grounds for the FB account warrant.
A friend found this out, when the FBI showed up at her house to arrest her husband (for molesting her daughter and bragging about it).
As a parent of an almost-13er (who will be allowed to open a FB account on her birthday), there’s NO way to prevent the girl from having an account - she can open it up and access it from the library, a friend’s house, etc. Kids will find a way.
Better the account you know about, than provoking her into opening up a covert one that you don’t know about.
I am still working through the thread so this may be what’s underway, but my definite inclination at this point is to report the guy to the FBI’s task force on such things, and let them be the bad guys initially, then broach it to the daughter “Herbert just got arrested and the FBI told us he was in corrspondence with you. We Need To Talk”.
Let me be the first to publically say: ew.
Yeah. HELL of a shock for the mom… it’d been going on for a while and daughter (who was pretty young) never said anything. “Happy” ending though… he’s in jail and they’re well rid of him. The FBI had a pretty rock-solid case against him.
Just another person chiming in to say this is bullshit. He’s an adult; she’s a child. That makes it *entirely *his responsibility. She isn’t old enough, isn’t mature enough, and doesn’t have enough life experience to properly handle this situation. Almost no 13-year-old would. And that’s why we have laws against statuatory rape.
Quoted for truth. There is no way to control whether or not she can make a new FB, email, whatever account. None.
Yup. Just check the Lolita thread in the CS forum for statements from former young teen girls, posting to say that when they read Lolita as a teen, they thought it was wonderful and romantic that an adult man would find Some Girl Like Me to be special and worthy of attention. And then when they grew up and read the book again, they were horrified.
I have been following this thread closely because I can relate personally and I think your daughter is very lucky to have you for a mother.
First, this kind of stuff is not new although the internet makes it much easier for predators. Second, you and your daughter are both lucky that the attitudes have changed since the 70’s.
My younger sister and a friend ran away with some men in their mid-twenties in 1972. They were both 13 at the time. She was gone 8 weeks. Their were no Amber alerts back then and no “awareness” of such things, they were just two more teen runaways. While my parents were working with the local police at the time there was no involvement of other authorities although she was found in another state (she had been under arrest for vagrancy for about a week but had refused to give her name, finally her friend gave them up).
It was the longest 8 weeks of my life and it was a much longer 8 weeks for my parents. Most of our neighbors didn’t even know because you didn’t talk about stuff like that back then,
I will go into the emotional aspects in a bit, but first I want to mention something that hasn’t been broached yet and that is the physical damage. Having repeated and vigorous sexual intercourse with adult men ( they didn’t think of it as rape back then unfortunately ) caused her a lot of serious damage and she had to be hospitalized for a massive pelvic infection and she was left , at age 13, unable to have children EVER.
She was never treated as a victim in any way whatsoever which in retrospect I think was at the root of the severe emotional problems that followed. She tried to run away a few more times and attempted suicide several times, she also engaged in outwardly violent berhavior like attacking me and my brother and trying to burn down our house.
And there was no real happy ending, she did get a little better for while and managed to get a GEd and an art school degree ( and she married a few times ), but she was always a hardcore drinker and substance abuser and died in a an accident before she was 40. The accident was substance abuse related.
So don’t worry about your daughter being mad about the invasion of privacy, it’s insignificant in the scope of “what if.”
Lastly, in addition to me seconding those who recommend that you highly restrict her internet usage I would also suggest that maybe she doesn’t have the maturity to own a phone with a built-in camera and maybe you should get her one without this feature.
Well, yeah, but that depends on what you think the “it” is that’s being discussed here. I think you’re talking about inappropriate relationships and she’s talking about internet misbehavior. The first one isn’t the girl’s fault. The second one is. I mean, I’m not really going to take a stance either way on any of it. I just want to point out that more than one bad thing has happened here, and you might want to clarify what “it” you’re referring to when you point out culpability.
I’ve just read through the whole thread. As a parent and a teacher of 13-year-olds, I hope this creep gets what’s coming to him. Ideally, the FBI will invent a new “13yo hottie” who will take Creepers attention away from your daughter. Her heart will be broken, but she won’t have to be the bait in some sting operation.
No matter what happens, you need to inform the school. Most schools have a filter to block Facebook and Myspace, but even so, kids are clever. they know about proxy servers and how to run Firefox from a USB flash drive so it bypasses the filter. If the administration and teachers are aware, they can (and will) discretely monitor her with extra vigilance. I have gotten this request more than once when it has come to light that a student was involved with and may try to contact an older man. The teachers will cooperate. We want nothing more than the safety of our students.
My heart goes out to you. I’ll add my vote to the others that you are an awesome mom who is doing everything right. Sometimes kids are just knuckleheads.
As others have pointed out, it should probably stay open, because deleting it will send up red flags and make it harder to catch this creep.
Okay back with updates…I just wish I had better updates, but since this is really a couple of different aspects being discussed, I will try to compartmentalize:
On the legal (PD/FBI) front: The meeting today went okay. It was what I expected on one hand, and what I didn’t want on the other. Basically they wanted all the printouts I had of screen shots etc. and all the info I could give them (all of which had been repeated over and over on the phone too…made me wonder if they were checking to see if I kept the story straight!) and then pretty much thanked me and said have a nice day. They said that they “have reason to believe Predator is not actively communicating with my daughter over the internet” as of yesterday. I have no idea what that means…except that I too noticed the internet lines were quiet. My assumption is that they switched to cell phone/text communication, but the PD was skeptical about that too.
They flat out told me that any ongoing investigation is confidential at this point and they will not be giving me updates. And when I asked if I could/should discuss it with my daughter the response was “if you want to”. That leads me to believe that they have either already done something about it or are not planning to because discussing it with my daughter would be telling Predator too. I wouldn’t think they’d want him to know if he is being watched/investigated, but then I am not FBI so I don’t know how these things work. They did say that they will call me if they need anything else and to contact them if daughter goes missing for any length of time (hours) instead of going through the usual channels. Other than that it was “Thank you, that will be all.” at the end I felt like I was being dismissed, but that might just be me (I am very anxious around strangers anyway, so my perceptions might be way off reality).
On the home front: We told daughter that we know she has been talking sex with boys on the internet, but didn’t give her any more details. The immediate response was that she blocked us from her FB account. That lasted all of 30 seconds before I changed it back, and let her know that such actions would not be tolerated. We also kept her out of her room and off her cell phone today which made her very pissy. She was pretty antsy like she wanted to go, which makes me think she had someone to call. She’s claiming she left her cell phone (which we were not supposed to know about- purchased by bio-mom) at her bio-mom’s house, but that was after denying she had one at all. She has until tomorrow to cough it up or her room will be searched for it (and she knows that). We have new rules for the cell phone. She is welcome to use it, but she may not take it upstairs (or into the bathroom). She can call and text until her little heart’s content as long as she does it in front of us, or in the dining room at the very least for voice calls (we can still hear her but it will be quieter for her to talk). Naturally she is unhappy about that.
The new rules for the computer haven’t been made just yet. The computer is better monitored though and the FB account(s) will probably be taken down soon, it is just a question of when. That is going to wait until the meeting with her therapist to get everything out in the open and addressed. We’ll probably ask the therapist for recommendations on that part, but pretty much there will be no internet access at all without me or her dad sitting right next to her for a while. As we worded it to her “If you are uncomfortable saying/writing/doing it in front of us, then it is probably something you shouldn’t be saying/writing/doing anyway.”
So that’s where we stand right now. It could be worse but it could be better…I am still watching closely (and now listening closely too- If I hear her voice tonight after she has gone to bed, or if I hear the clicking of texting, there will a scene) and just hoping for the best. As far as Predator is concerned it seems I might have to watch the papers to even know if he gets busted or not…not what I wanted at all. It would have been so much nicer to hear “we’ll let you know the second we get him” but since my daughter has not yet been a victim (just a victim in training) I guess that’s the way it works…
Maybe they talked to this guy? I really don’t know what the chances of that are but it could be that they feel they’ve scared him off.
Your instincts here are likely correct. You can usually tell when someone is waiting to be left alone so that they can do something.
Be careful, it’s a near certainty that she’ll be using it at school.
It’s also basically a certainty that she’ll be using the phone when she thinks you’re asleep, too.
You seem to be handling it well and I’m glad that she hasn’t exploded (that’s almost what I expected). Stay firm and let her know that you’re doing it because you love her. We all remember being that age and even if we refused to admit it we all understood that our parents were trying to protect us. She’ll know that when she’s older. Go read the Lolita thread and you’ll see how girls and womens’ views on that stuff changes over time. Shit, you’re a woman, so you probably already do. 
Also, she can text plenty while you are not two feet away with you not knowing what she’s texting.