Do you know Jack McClellan? He calls himself a pedophile. Law enforcement calls him a reviewer. Sound strange? It is. What does he review? Parents hold your stomachs. He reviews the best places to see little girls and little boys. His choice of words but the point remains the same. His site is dedicated to capturing young boys and girls in public places and rating the best places for other pedophiles to see a large number of them.
Sound illegal? You would think so. But, according to law enforcement’s understanding of the First Amendment, Jack McClellan has broken no law. They admit his site is unimaginable. But beyond that, their hands are tied because he has yet to break any laws. Such a reality should alarm parents who potentially take the security of their children for granted when they send them to the community park to play. On a clear, sunny day with you sitting there resting comfortably enjoying a good book, behind you rests a man taking a still of your child at play.
Has he done anything? According to Jack McClellan, he is a pedophile with a conscious. Someone who understands he has a problem but because of laws refuses to cross the line into pursuing the object of his obsession. The idea of such a man and such a place should be alarming. He admits to having a problem. And calls going to a local park, a ‘legal high’.
This is not Mayberry. This is Memphis. It is Mesa. It is Minneapolis. It is where we live, work and play. It is also on our computer screens. Over the last fifteen years, as the Internet has grown in popularity and usage, pedophiles have turned to it to find their next victim. Jack McClellan uses it to note ideal places for pedophiles to find potential victims. Others with the same horrible disease McClellan has, use the Internet like he uses the local playground. The new monkey bars is MySpace. Social networking sites have become a boon for pedophiles who use sites like MySpace to meet unsuspecting children.
It has always been known that the Internet was a paradise and haven for sexual predators. NBC who does a series on its weekly news program, Dateline entitled, To Catch a Predator, exclusively uses the Internet to catch unsuspecting sexual predators that are pursuing young victims to take advantage of. With laws slowly catching up to the power and potential of the Internet, sexual predators have had a fertile hunting ground to satisfy their illegal, pornographic, and vile desires. When MySpace was pushed by law enforcement officials to scan their profiles to see how many registered sex offenders had profiles it was believed that a miniscule number of 7,000 would be found. In a shocking discovery, that number reaches over 29,000.
As recently as two months ago, law enforcement officers were told by MySpace that the number was closer to 7,000. Whether they knew how inaccurate that number is, is not known. But MySpace executives must now take a hard look at what to do with such a staggering number of registered sex offenders having profiles and posting on other profiles on the MySpace site. With the site unregulated, that number is certainly going to increase, raising the chances and opportunities for pedophiles to prey on unsuspecting victims.
Recently, a Virginia man pleaded guilty to soliciting and ultimately engaging in sexual activities with a 14-year old girl. North Carolina Attorney General, Roy Moore said his office had found over one hundred incidents of sexual predatory actions taking place on the MySpace site. If that is only the tip of the iceberg, there are thousands of young boys and girls whose lives have been permanently scarred by the vile, unimaginable actions of sexual predators who get their kicks off inflicting harm and danger on these innocent kids.
Pedophilia is a growing epidemic in the US. With the number of offenders growing and their quest to offend exploding, the number of cases of pedophilia will only grow over the next decade. Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook will face continued pressures to provide a safety mechanism to avert the possibilities of pedophiles and teens from connecting. What kind of safety mechanism is currently a hot button issue as Internet industry leaders struggle to develop a lock-and-key that will provide a secure way of providing haven for kids online.
With the number of profiles approaching 180 million, 30,000 may not sound like an alarming number. But when you consider the patterns of behavior for sexual predators and their multi-victim practices, the number of victims could total above 100,000 just for the 30,000 registered sex offenders that have been identified. Imagine that, 100,000 kids whose lives have been irreparably damaged by a pedophile who took advantage of them without anyone knowing it. That struggle is the problem legislator’s face when it comes to regulating parental consent on the Internet.
Parents are vehement about the Internet establishing some safeguards that would provide that safe haven they want the Internet to be. But with the Internet being a free flowing system of networks, the viability of a safeguard is difficult to imagine today. If you visit a pornographic website today, the expectation is that viewers will be honest when asked the question if they are over the age of eighteen or not. As if a teenage boy would not lie for a chance to look at a scantily clad woman. In the same way, sites that require parental notification or verification have the same problems as kids can just as easily scribe their parent’s names and birthdays or whatever information is necessary to gain access to a site not designed for their young eyes.
What social networking sites like MySpace will do in the future is unknown. Obviously, they can do the random scan checks, running their profile lists through the registered sex offender database. But what about those that are not registered? Or what about those that have yet to be caught and brought to charges? The possibilities are endless and the consequences deadly.
The possibilities are too profane to imagine. With an untold number of victims already, Congress and the tech sector should move expeditiously in developing the technologies necessary to provide the lock-and-key necessary for teens to access the Internet without fear of predators. And predators should have the safeguards in place to prevent them from taking advantage of these innocent, unprotected children. Otherwise, MySpace will do a profile check two years from now and that 30,000 registered sex offender profile number will number in the hundred thousand. And that is truly unimaginable.
Have you seen Jack McClellan?
