No loving caring mother and father would allow an adult male stranger into their home for a private and intimate visit with their teenage daughter, yet thousands of girls between the ages of 12 to 17 are engaged in daily sexually explicit conversations and raw offensive proposals with men old enough to be their fathers and grandfathers.

These clandestine meetings initiated in the privacy of cyberspace all-too-often lead to one-on-one live meetings that result in rape, sexual enslavement and even death.

ITEM White Plains, NY - A Roman Catholic priest is arrested after allegedly having explicit sexual conversations with an undercover agent posing as a 14-year old boy (AP 05/25/01).

ITEM Crafton Heights, PA - A 38-year-old Herndon, Virginia man abducts a 13-year-old  Pennsylvania girl he met in a chat room and keeps her tied up in his townhouse for four days (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 01/05/02).

ITEM Milwaukee, WI - A 36-year-old man abducts a 13-year-old girl he met on the Internet and transports her to California (Milwaukee Sentinel 02/06/01).

ITEM Fort Lauderdale, FL - A 52-year-old police detective is charged with four counts of promoting sexual performance by a minor and one count of soliciting a minor for sex through the Internet (Newsday 06/21/01).

ITEM Liberty, MO - A 23-year-old Michigan man is charged with felony statutory rape after meeting a 12-year-old girl on the Internet (Clay County Prosecutors Office Press Release 05/11/01).

ITEM Danbury, CT - A 13-year-old Connecticut girls is slain after meeting a 25-year-old man in a chat room and arranging an Internet date (NY Daily News 05/21/02).

ITEM -  White Plains, NY - A 40-year-old man offered a five-year-old girl on the Internet to a pedophile (NY Daily News 05/21/02).

ITEM Farmington Hills, MI - A 33-year old man is arraigned on rape charges after a meeting with a 15- year-old girl set up on the Internet is consummated (Detroit Free Press 03/22/01)

ITEM Astoria, NY - A 40-year-old Long Island man pleads guilty to raping a 15-year-old girl from   Massachusetts whom he received as a sex slave from the couple that kidnapped her following a meeting arranged in a chat room. (Newsday)

ITEM Farmingdale, NY - A Long Island couple kidnaps, enslaves and repeatedly sexually assaults a 15-year-old girl they met in a chat room (Newsday).

This writer can personally attest to the shark-like feeding frenzies most teen girls who enter adult sexually explicit chat rooms are subjected to.  Some of my young chat room correspondents had reported this activity so in June an alter-ego was invented to verify their stories.

My chat room handle was "trashygirl14", a troubled sexually inquisitive 14 year-old girl who was a disciplinary problem and who "hated" her parents.

The chat room I chose for trashygirl14s debut was Excites Older Men for Younger Girls, a user created room that has very ineffective monitoring by Excite.  It features sexually explicit Avitars, many which would be considered pornographic by most community standards.

Trashygirl14 was not in the chat room more than 10 seconds when the first of 18 rapid fire pm's (private messages) were hurled at her.

The youngest man to accost the teen was 23, the oldest 52.  Within 10 minutes, a half dozen of these adult men had already offered to come to Trashygirl14's home town to engage in sexual activities with her. 

Some of these men offered her money.  One asked if she had a little girlfriend who could join them.  Three men e-mailed pornographic pictures of themselves.  One 49-year old man offered to "take her anywhere" she wanted to go.  Transcripts of these chats were cut and pasted and are on file but are much too graphic for inclusion with this article.

Interestingly, the perverts who e-mailed pictures did so from addresses easily traceable back to them.  One man who e-mailed a picture of himself holding his erect member did nothing to hide his identity.  In fact, his real name was part of his chat room handle.

The vast majority of the adult males pming this 14-year-old girl initiated sexually explicit chat and expressed excitement at being with a young teen.  Only two men, in their early 20s did not try to talk dirty and warned trashygirl14 to be careful.

Many of the men who engage in this perverted pornographic behavior are actually chatting with law enforcement officers conducting sting operations.  These meetings often result in arrest, prosecution and conviction.

No one knows how many real teenage girls are contacted and lured to clandestine meetings with these desperate sexual predators.  No one knows how many missing children thought to be runaways have been abducted by these dangerous perverts.

Virtually all adult Internet predators approach their potential victims in chat rooms.  Often they begin by trying to foster a friendship or by being an understanding adult offering to help the teen with her problems.

The unsuspecting parents of these teens havent a clue that their little girls are engaging in these dangerous liaisons.  They dont even monitor the chat rooms their inquisitive children flock to day after day.

WHAT CAN BE DONE TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN?

Aside from monitoring their forays into these forbidden adult chat rooms where depraved predators lurk waiting to capture their next victims, Andrew Vachss, a lawyer who represents children and writes about their dangerous and all-too-often deadly encounters, has a solution.

Vachss's strategy for battling these enemies of our youth include:

·     Study and understand the predator.

·    Set up anti-pedophile police and prosecution

units to arrest and effectively prosecute pedophiles.

·     Provide therapists who treat the traumatized children and prepare them to testify in court.

·     Increase the penalties for all enticement crimes.

·     Deter enablers organizations, agencies and institutions that neglectfully expose children to predators.

·     Empty prisons of genuinely nonviolent offenders and fill vacancies with child sex predators.

Parents, if you do not know where your child is spending his or her time on the Internet, you are part of the problem. 

If you your child has his or her own computer and you have one as well, network them so you can monitor their Internet behavior,  Better to have a live teen who is upset by the invasion of her privacy than a dead one permanently residing in the cemetery.

If you do not know where your child is surfing on the Internet, its a good bet they will venture into dangerous troubled waters.  You must be their life preserver.  Teaching them of the dangerous of Internet predators is as important as teaching them about the birds and the bees.