Dr. Frank Kardasz (Ed.D)

By Luke Jennett, Messenger staff writer, 12/28/06

The Internet offers numerous avenues through which predators can seek victims, including such sites as MySpace and Facebook.

Kurt Allen Olson, 48, of Rutland, spoke at his sentencing hearing in Cedar Falls Dec. 18. He apologized to his friends, family and the court. He said he was very embarrassed by the choices he’d made and that he would try to earn back the respect he lost in June, when he was arrested in Cedar Falls for attempting to meet with a young girl for sex.

From May 15 to June 1, Olson was talking through an Iowa-themed romance chatroom through Yahoo messenger, using the name ‘‘Ice Blue,’’ to a person whom he believed was a 15-year-old girl. After weeks of conversation, Olson arranged a meeting with the girl, leading up to it by asking about her sexual experiences.

The young girl turned out to be an investigator with the Cedar Falls Police Department, one of three local members of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. When they arrested him in Cedar Falls, the divorced father had a notebook with him showing that he’d kept up conversations with several underaged girls, although Black Hawk County officials said it was unknown whether or not he intended to meet with them.

Olson pled guilty and was given a suspended sentence of five years, with two to five years of suspended probation and a suspended fine of $750. He was ordered to comply with sex offender treatment and will be added to Iowa’s sex offender registry.There are 64 registered sex offenders in Webster County, most residing within the Fort Dodge city limits.

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, more than 30 million children under 18 use the Internet, almost half of the total underaged population of the United States. Iowa is one of eight states, according to the NCMEC, that is successfully prosecuting cases of online enticement without specific language in its code. Three ICAC members who are with the Cedar Falls Police Department are continually running investigations like the one that caught Olson. The officers, said Charity mcdonald, assistant county attorney of Black Hawk County, troll the chats in addition to their other duties, presenting fake bait for potential offenders in their spare time.

The threat

Imagine five kids. It shouldn’t be too hard; think of a neighbor’s children, or a family member’s, or your own. Imagine you put five of them in a room and asked them if they’d ever been sexually solicited online. In 2000, statistics say one of the five would have raised their hand.

The first Youth Internet Safety Survey, done by the University of New Hampshire with the backing of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, looked at kids from 10 to 17, and did phone interviews of 1,501 youths. They found that one in five received a sexual solicitation over the Internet in the last year, and one in 33 was aggressively solicited by someone who asked to meet them somewhere, who called them on the telephone, sent them mail, money or gifts. One in four had had an unwanted exposure to pornography. Only a fourth of the kids who were solicited told a parent about it.

A second study was done in 2005 to test for changes in the patterns first observed in the study. Researchers uncovered some good news; the average percent of kids who’d received solicitation had fallen — to one in seven. An improvement, but perhaps not much of a comfort. Meanwhile, unwanted exposure to pornography had risen to one-third of those surveyed.

The report attributed the decline in sexual solicitation to more cautious behavior on the part of cyber-capable kids and their parents, with fewer hanging out in chat rooms with people they don’t know. This may have been a benefit of educational and media reports about online dangers, the study said.

But the most serious kinds of sexual solicitation, where predators attempted to make outside contact with youth, did not decline, the study said.

The response

‘‘We’re not going to arrest our way out of this,’’ said Mike Morris, supervising special agent with the Division of Criminal Investigation. Morris is the local head of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, an agency that provides training and information to both police and social groups who work at combating sexual predators online. Morris’ department does computer forensics, sifting through hard drives to find illegal photos or chat logs that can be used as evidence to put predators behind bars.

The task force also trains officers in proactive approaches, such as the methods used by the Cedar Falls Police Department to snag Olson. But one of the Task Force’s most powerful tools is education. Although ICAC investigations have resulted in 38 arrests this year, cyberspace is too big, and its access points too widespread, for police to protect everybody all the time. Children, Morris said, have to be taught the dangers of the Internet before they are allowed to wander along the superhighway by themselves.

‘‘At some point, you have to teach your kids to go to the mall by themselves. You have to teach them to go to the swimming pool by themselves. You should teach them to use the Internet the same way. Until they can use it safely and responsibly, you’ve got to be there.’’ Morris said the number of people reached by the group’s educational outreach programs was staggering; he said they’d done 270 programs and spoken to 15,249 students, parents and community group members.

Arrests for Internet crimes against children are on the rise, Morris said, owing to the fact that higher awareness among users and better techniques by police are attacking the problem better than in the past. ‘‘It feels like there’s a lot of anonymity on the Internet, but it’s not quite there like you think it is,’’ he said. ‘‘A lot of it is traceable.’’

The law

These sorts of sting operations weren’t always legal in Iowa. Legislation in the 2001 Iowa Acts changed the language of the Iowa Code, which was previously set up to protect only actual minors who were the targets of enticement. The new language included those who reasonably believed they were enticing away a child under the age of 16, with stricter penalties if the child was under 13.

Derek Johnson, a Fort Dodge attorney, said that the change in the law allowed police to perform such investigations. While the measure is preventative in nature (the point, presumably, is to catch offenders before they locate a real-life minor to exploit), the language of the law allows for it.

The enticement stings have been equated to entrapment, but the two are legally distinct, Johnson said. The Iowa standard for entrapment is for the defense to prove that a reasonable person in the defendant’s position would have committed the crime. Since reasonable people do not arrange sexual liaisons with children, Johnson said, it would be difficult to prove in such cases. ‘‘The way I think about entrapment is, would the defendant have committed the crime if the police hadn’t done what they did?’’ said Johnson.

Contact Luke Jennett at (515) 573-2141 or ljennett@messengernews.net

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