Open Letter to John Stossel and 20/20

Generally, I enjoy John Stossel's down-to-earth reporting. By taking the common sense approach to most situations, he finds himself on the opposite side of most news reporting. In general, news reporting does sensationalize events in order to make them more news-worthy.

However, Stossel dropped the ball on last week's 20/20 episode about worry (Feb. 23, 2007.)

He bashed the Dateline NBC series "To Catch a Predator" for creating news, for "making it seem like" there are lots of internet kidnappers out there. Then he said that, in reality, kidnappings from internet contacts are very rare, so people should stop worrying about internet predators.

Stossel committed a logical fallacy. He equated internet predators with kidnappers. It is true that very few internet predators turn out to be kidnappers. You don't have to worry much about internet predators who want to kidnap your child.

Most men who contact your child on the internet don't want to kidnap your child. They just want to have sex with a young child. They're pedophiles, not kidnappers.

In the three latest "To Catch A Predator" stings (Long Beach, CA; Murphy, TX; and Flagler Beach, FL,) eighty men showed up, believing that they could have sex with a young child. 80. Recently, 27 men showed up in New Jersey for the same thing. That's 107 men in the last couple months.

Those men were internet predators, pedophiles, who could have shown up at your house to have sex with your child.

And that's just the guys who could fit the meeting into their schedules. Hundreds more wanted to.

Here's how you can prove it to yourself:

Create a Yahoo! account. In this account, make up a name and say that you're eighteen years old or so, which means make your birth date in 1988 or earlier when you sign up. The reason you want to list your birthday in 1988 or earlier is that Yahoo! no longer allows kids who admit they are minors into chat rooms.

And kids and teens have no idea how to get around that. Yeah. Sure.

Then, download Yahoo! Messenger and go to the chat feature. Enter a chat room, but don't say anything. Just sit there and wait.

Within a few minutes, you should get your first instant message. The most common question after salutations is "asl?" in which the other person is asking for your age, sex, and location.

Type back "13 f XX," and for XX put in a state abbreviation. NJ. FL. TX. CA. Whatever. You might want to pick a different state than the one you live in for privacy and security.

Sometimes, the person on the other end will type back, "25 m XX, too young, bye," and sign off.

Often, however, the person will type back "32 m XX," or some other age from 18 to 50, which may or may not be their real age, and then start chatting with you.

Pretty soon after that, the guy will ask if you're all alone, what time your parents get home from work, if they go out at night and leave you alone, etc. Then, he'll want to come over and see you. Just to kiss and cuddle. Of course, if you ask, "What else?" He'll say something like, "And anything else you'll let me do." And then he'll very graphically discuss what else he'd like to do to a thirteen-year-old girl.

After that, the talk gets dirty. Really dirty. Disgustingly dirty.

John Stossel said that very few internet predators are kidnappers, and this is true. It is also true that a great number of them are pedophiles. They don't want to kidnap your kids. They just want naked pictures of your kids, and they want to sexually abuse your kids.

Before you think your kids are too smart for that, realize this: these men (and they are almost always invariably men) will tell your kid anything they want to hear.

He'll tell your kids that he'll buy them things that you won't.

He'll tell your kids that you (the parents) don't understand them, but he does.

He'll tell your kids that he's in love with them, that he has never met anyone so wonderful, that they're soul mates. He will say that ages don't matter. (Which is a lie. Your kid's age matters to him. He wanted to rape a child.)

He will tell your kids these things in order to convince your child to send him naked pictures of themselves that he will send to all his pedophile buddies on their pedophile websites, and then he'll have sex with your kids.

Cyber sex. Oral sex. Sexual intercourse. Anal sex. Anything and everything.

Right now, you think your kids are too smart to be taken in by pedophiles.

You're wrong.

Twenty percent of the kids who set up a meeting with a pedophile that they met online had chatting with the man online for less than two hours.

The other 80% of the kids chatted online a little longer before they agreed to meet the pedophile.

Imagine what a pedophile can do in a few weeks of telling a kid that they love them, that they understand their angst, and that his or her parents are mean because you won't buy the kid a car or designer clothes or a $500 purse.

Now, back to the chat room experiment. Just for kicks, answer the "asl?" query with "11 f XX," or "13 m XX," and watch the pedophiles line up, trying to seduce you because they think you're a really little girl or a boy.

Here's an article on pedophiles' political and social agenda.