• In harm's way

  Greenlee faculty member is putting online sexual predators in Harms' way.

• As a national collegiate boxing champion, Chad Harms knew his foe, often an arm's length away.
  
  His current, insidious opponent is anonymous, easily reaches many potential victims and can hide anywhere.
  
  The assistant professor in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication is part of a growing effort to stop online sexual predators of children and teens. Harms calls it an epidemic, saying one in seven children online is sexually solicited. So he's using the perpetrators' own words to put them in harm's way.
  
  Harms' research uses actual transcripts of conversations between online sexual predators and targeted victims. The results are helping law enforcement officials better understand the "grooming" process - the "affinity-seeking" strategies predators use to convince youthful victims to like and trust them.
  
  "Grooming has gone on for millennia, but we never knew exactly how it was done," explained Harms. Previously police and researchers learned retroactively about these interactions from perpetrators in custody or from the victims. With the Internet, "We now have transcripts," Harms said.
  
  "For the first time, we actually can see what is being said and how that communication is going back and forth," added Harms, a communications researcher and member of ISU's Human-Computer Interaction program.
  
  Harms' work has shed light on how sexual perpetrators target certain potential victims, gather information on them, disguise conversations and "test the limits" of how explicit the conversation will go.
  
  Organizations dedicated to stopping online sexual predators have posted actual transcripts on their websites.
  
  That led Harms to ask, "How can we take this communication and better understand this crime? How can we assist law enforcement to combat this?"
  
  Online sexual predation "is a big problem, and nobody out there was doing this kind of research," said Harms, who has a website: www.stopandhelp.org. S.T.O.P is the Study for the Termination of Online Predators.
  
  Harms wrote a two-part series on his research for the law enforcement newsletter "Sex Offender Law Report." Grooming strategies, he wrote, often include the predator sharing and seeking personal characteristics, determining the victim's willingness for a relationship, using controlling or manipulating language and building toward a possible meeting.
  
  Another important perpetrator technique is sexual desensitization - using images and words to convince victims that adult-child sex is acceptable.
  
  Harms also looked at social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, and other forms of interactive communication like chat rooms. All are opportunities for predators to reach children, he said.
  
  Not surprisingly, Harms' work is garnering attention. He presented on the topic at an international conference, and law enforcement personnel, the news media and others are contacting him. He's even received some unsolicited perpetrator-victim transcripts for use in his research.
  
  Harms has developed a method that codes the communication between online sexual solicitors and targeted victims. A prototype computer model searches for cues to the affinity-seeking, information-gathering and sexual desensitization interactions. The method has shown to be reliable.
  
  The next step is to further refine the model, and a protocol for collecting, storing and using data from the interactions must be created. Harms and others are seeking grant funds to advance the fight against online perpetrators, which will never be easy.
  
  Yet it's his hope his efforts will someday effectively identify more offenders, leading to their capture and arrest.
  
  And that would be a knock-out punch.

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September 17-30, 2007

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