The Threat
At first, the internet seems like a very handy everyday tool for both children and parents, and indeed, that's what it is. However, those who have spent any time online know that certain people use the internet's unique anonymity and open communication to try to exploit those who log on in any way that they can. This can come in the form of spam, spyware, adware, scams and hoaxes, amongst a myriad of other typical pitfalls that we see and hear about every day. The regular, everyday adult computer user is always finding new ways to solve these problems and secure themselves against future attacks, usually with a great deal of success. These users are making the internet a very safe place to be for those who take the time to practice being safe.
However, with more parents needing the resources of the internet in their own homes, exploiters have a new target - children - who are getting online unsupervised more and more frequently than ever before. Alongside noticeable increases in E-Crime over recent years has been a growing phenomenon of increased online sexual solicitations of underage children. Chat rooms fill up with sexual predators everyday, many of which are only targeting underage children. While an adult is well guarded from such solicitations, children are often ripe targets, especially when unsupervised.
This is where Perverted-Justice.com (or as we like to say, "PeeJ") comes in. Concerned citizens from all walks of life who saw this problem got together and formed civilian watchdog group "Perverted Justice", a website dedicated to finding and exposing those users in regional chatrooms with predatory tendencies towards children.
What Does PeeJ Do?
Perverted-Justice.com recruits volunteer contributors who pose as underage children in chatrooms. Posing from a variety of ages (standard ages are 10-15), these contributors simply go into chatrooms with fake online screennames and wait for predators to instigate conversation with them. Are you curious as to what our contributors see when they go into chat with these underage names? Finding out for yourself is easy. Simply go to Yahoo.com, create a new profile, put underage information in your profile (works best if you are posing as a girl), then log into any regional chatroom (perhaps even the one closest to your own community). Without even saying anything in the chatroom, you will often be deluged by PM's that will occassionally be open solicitations for sex or "grooming" (an adult preparing, through conversation, an underage child for such solicitations). Now simply imagine if, instead of you, it actually was a young child logging online only to receive this "perverted" greeting from fellow chatters. Hence, the problem.
We at Perverted-Justice.com discourage you from taking the ruse beyond this point, going this far proves the point we're trying to make - that sexual predators are online looking for young children - and any further dialogue you make with the people on the other end is your responsibility, and yours alone.
The carefully selected, screened and trained Perverted-Justice.com staff take this escapade one logical step further, in an attempt to find out more about the problem. Using their underage personas, they strike up conversations with the people who PM them. The people we find in these chats talking to our underage personas typically range between 25-60 years old: so much older than the underage personas (which range from 10-15) that it gives cause for alarm. In our experience, the vast majority of these chatters express an interest in physically meeting our underage personas, even luring them away from family and friends to a discreet, private location for a rendezous of an explicitely sexual nature.
During the course of the conversations our contributors have with these chatters, we watch out for signs that the chatter is soliciting the "youth" for sex, and after that person demonstrates the clear intent or interest to go beyond chat and meet with these underage personas (often through the form of real received addresses, names, phone numbers and meeting locations given voluntarily by the chatter during the course of the chat to help facilitate a meeting), our PeeJ contributors post all information in the chat logs to the Perverted-Justice.com database (not before careful verification proceedures to ensure authenticity). We feel exposing these "wannabe pedophiles" illustrates for others the problem of predators and internet pedophilia, and helps raises community awareness.
You can find out more about us in the "What you should know about Perverted-Justice.com" section.
How to make the Web Safer
The only way to truly help make the web safer is to practice good parenting when your children are online (we have tips in the "What Parents Can Do" section), and go out and find out more about the potential threat of online pedophilia and predators, so you know about the mechanisms predators employ to contact children online. On the main Perverted-Justice.com website, we have even more resources for you to investigate the problem at depth, including full lists of sex offender registries in all states and state-relevant legal information. The one thing to remember is that this is a constant problem, in every major region of the United States (even internationally), and like any other internet problem (spam/hoaxes/scams/hacking) it has a host of various characteristics and solutions. The best weapon for a parent against this threat is information, so they know what is involved with the grooming and solicitation methods that predators use online, how to spot it as it occurs, and go on to prevent it from happening.