Searches for "aggravated criminal sexual assault" or "predatory criminal sexual assault" yeilded 53 opinoins.
Searching Illinois 7th Circuit Decisions at Google Scholar for "Facebook", yeilded 47 results, while seaching 2013 Illinois Appelate Decisions for the same keyword only retunred 49 decisions.
Searching 2013 Appelate decisions for MySpace only returned 3 decisions, while searching for 2013 Federal Court cases rertuned 118.
The wide discrepancy in the numbers is due largely to the time it takes for cases to find their way through the appeals process. Case law is accumulating daily as Illinois slowly but surely builds its library of Internet Case Law.
But examining child Molester statistics overall returns some fascinating anomalies.
• "There are 400,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, and an estimated 80 to 100,000 of them are missing. They're supposed to be registered, but we don't know where they are and we don't know where they're living.- Ernie Allen, President of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Childrento co-anchor Hannah Storm on The Early Show- (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) (was in Juvenile Justice Bulletin: Nov 1998 OJJDP: U.S. Department of Justice)
• Dr. Gene Abel estimates that between 1% and 5% of our population molest children
-CNN Specials Transcript #454-Thieves of Childhood.
• Dr. Gene Abel estimates that between 1% and 5% of our population molest childrener-CNN Specials Transcript #454-Thieves of Childhood.
The percentage of child molestation and sexual assault cases in the social media sites under discussion averages near 33%, with a few points either way. Why the disparity?
Ease of use, the likelihood of getting away with the crime, and relative anonymity are just a few of the reasons that continue to plague criminal justice enforcement. The Internet, here typified by Facebook, and to a lesser extent MySpace and Twitter has been the Wild, Wild West since it's inception in the mid eighties. The Author ran a Bulletin Board System, Publisher Information Service, dedicated to IBM PC Based Desktop Publishing, with a specialty in Ventura Publisher from 1983 until 1993 and saw these developments personally.
While 1995 is widely seen as the beginning of the Internet in Popular use, its pre-cursors, UseNet, FidoNet and MetroNet were going strong in the mid 1980's. 1. The Dial-Your-Match (DYM) System met with greeat success and allowed the sexual predator easy pickings. This was followed up by Compuserve, the Source, and later American On Line. This piece is the logical child of those early days. While technology has vastly improved, the law is just starting to catch up, and still has a long way to go.
Ease of use, the likelihood of getting away with the crime, and relative anonymity are just a few of the reasons that continue to plague criminal justice enforcement. The Internet, here typified by Facebook, and to a lesser extent MySpace and Twitter has been the Wild, Wild West since it's inception in the mid eighties. The Author ran a Bulletin Board System, Publisher Information Service, dedicated to IBM PC Based Desktop Publishing, with a specialty in Ventura Publisher from 1983 until 1993 and saw these developments personally.
While 1995 is widely seen as the beginning of the Internet in Popular use, its pre-cursors, UseNet, FidoNet and MetroNet were going strong in the mid 1980's. 1. The Dial-Your-Match (DYM) System met with greeat success and allowed the sexual predator easy pickings. This was followed up by Compuserve, the Source, and later American On Line. This piece is the logical child of those early days. While technology has vastly improved, the law is just starting to catch up, and still has a long way to go.
This is a evolving area of the law and the decisions continue to appear daily. We are writing history as it happens and we shall endeavor to report and comment on this area of law right here at Illinois Social Media Law.
1.) History of the Intetnet, http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet
