One woman's stand against online predators
Friday, December 4, 2009
In our quest to help parents utilize our software program geared toward monitoring
the online activity of their children and teens, we’ve been looking at ways
predators attempt to reach our teens. We’ve also been highlighting those who
take an active roll in taking these terrible criminals off the street.
The popular fashion magazine, article this month,highlighting Detective Michele Deery. Deery spends her days hunting for Internet predators from her office, in Media, Pennsylvania.
Here is the beginning of the article:
Detective Michele Deery works in a cubicle in the basement of the Delaware
County courthouse, in Media, Pennsylvania. The only window is high on the wall,
over a tall filing cabinet, and opens into a well, below ground level. The space
feels like a cave, which has always struck Deery as about right, because her job
is to talk dirty online to strange men.
Deery seems altogether too wholesome for the work. She has athletic
good looks, with tawny skin, big brown eyes, and long straight brown hair that
falls over her shoulders. Her parents sent her to Catholic schools, and her
mother, a retired district judge, now jokes that she wants her money back. Her
daughter’s beat is in the vilest corners of cyberspace, in chat rooms indicating
“fetish” or various subgenres of flagrant peccancy. One of the many false
identities Deery has assumed online is something truly rare, even in this
polluted pond—that of a middle-aged mother of two pre-pubescent girls who is
offering them up for sex. Baiting her hook with this forbidden fruit, she would
cast the line and wait to see who bit.
It usually didn’t take long. Men began vying for her attention the minute
she logged on, night or day. Deery would begin a dialogue, dangling the illicit
possibility, gauging how serious her mark was. There were “players,” those who
were just horny and despicable, and there were doers, or at least potential
doers, the true bad guys. The goal was to identify the latter, hook them, and
then reel them in, turn them into “travelers.” Once a traveler took that
all-important step out of fantasy and into the real world, his behavior went
from the merely immoral to the overtly criminal. When they delivered themselves
for the promised rendezvous, instead of meeting a mother and her young daughters
they would find a team of well-armed, cheerfully disgusted Delaware County
police officers. As a fantasy, her come-on seemed overbaked—not one daughter,
but two! It is doubtful that such a woman exists anywhere, and yet men fell for
it. Her unit had a near-100-percent conviction rate. The bulletin board over her
desk displays mug shots of her catches, very ordinary-looking men, facing the
camera wide-eyed with shock, staring at the fresh ruin of their lives
.
Read the rest of the story by Mark Bowden here.
What Detective Deery does can’t be easy. To have to live in a dark cyber-world and converse with predators who want to hurt children is something not everyone could do. We’re thankful for people out there who do their part to put predators behind bars. Thank you, Detective Deery, and thank you, Vanity Fair, for putting out such a real story.
And thanks to products like McGruff SafeGuard so parents can keep their kids a
little safer.Labels: Internet predators, McGruff Safeguard, vanity fair
What Detective Deery does can’t be easy. To have to live
in a dark cyber-world and converse with predators who want to hurt children is
something not everyone could do. We’re thankful for people out there who do
their part to put predators behind bars. Thank you, Detective Deery, and thank
you, Vanity Fair, for putting out such a real story.
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posted by Lindsay Manfredi at 2:13 PM Link to this Article
Comments:
Your post here fails to mention that the "predator" that Det. Deery put behind bars was not really found to have done anything illegal.
"There is no evidence that J has ever made a sexual overture to a child. Deery told me that she couldn’t remember ever arresting a child-molester who did not have child porn on his computer. It is all too easy to obtain. J had no images that were obviously child porn. His appalled parents paid for a battery of psychosexual testing, the kind where involuntary responses to images are measured. The tests showed exactly what J claimed, that he had no sexual interest in children".
posted by newtonian101 : January 17, 2010 7:46 PM
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