Sexual Predators On The Internet: Their Traits And Manipulation Strategies
Between 1915 and 1919, a French man named Henri Désiré Landru murdered a minimum of eleven women, although police estimated that the actual number of his victims exceeded one hundred.
Taking advantage of the effects of war, He published advertisements in newspapers in which he presented himself as a well-positioned man who sought to meet a widow and, after meeting his victims, made them disappear, keeping their fortune.
Currently, this way of attracting victims through the media has been refined with the appearance of the Internet. The network of networks allows us to have a series of resources that make a trap seem like an opportunity in which the danger is surprisingly camouflaged.
But… What characteristics define predators? How do they act?
The people who set traps through the Internet to meet people and murder or abuse them are, for the most part, men between 18 and 60 years old. Beyond this physical description, however, There are a whole series of psychological characteristics and skills that explain how they act to set the trap. They are the following:
1. They are very skilled at detecting vulnerabilities
The masking offered by Internet anonymity makes it surprisingly easy to learn details about victims that can be used to intuit their vulnerabilities.
On the one hand, social networks offer the possibility of knowing a significant amount of information about a person: musical tastes, the most visited places, what their circle of friends is like, etc.
On the other hand, The fact of not having a face-to-face conversation with a person makes it easier to reveal intimate information among other things because the fear of seeing how the interlocutor reacts in an uncomfortable way is lost.
These two factors mean that the digital predator can exploit their abilities when it comes to offering a personal image that fully fits what the other person is looking for or wants to get to know. Being liked is easier if you have common tastes, if you pretend to have gone through similar experiences, etc.
In other words, these people are very good at reading between the lines and imagining what vulnerabilities are through which the other person can be made to act in predictable ways.
2. They act alone
The possibility of acting through the Internet means that sexual predators do not need anyone’s help to weave their plan; If they want, They can pretend to be two people at the same time to influence the victim more, through fake user profiles. When it comes to setting the trap, their efforts are fundamentally intellectual, and in that regard they are self-sufficient and very methodical.
3. They know how to use advertising resources
Digital predators are capable of designing advertisements that are especially attractive to the victim profile they want to attract. They use messages that They capture attention instantly and express a clear message and place them in forums, applications to meet people, specific virtual groups, etc.
Sometimes, they can go so far as to make the content of their message fit with what is known about a potential victim so that, once published in a group with a relatively small number of people, someone will notify whoever is interested. If this attempt fails, you can modify the ad and republish it.
This way of attracting victims lowers the other person’s defenses, since it enters a psychological framework in which it is the victim who must “seduce” the predator, which gives him a lot of room for maneuver.
4. The abuse of depersonalization
Depersonalization, which consists of perceiving others as if they were objects, is one of the characteristics of people with a high level of psychopathy or narcissism, and in the case of digital predators it is also very present.
The Internet only reinforces this degree of depersonalization, which makes the potential feeling of guilt, which is already very low in psychopaths, disappears Almost completely.
The digital media predator takes advantage of both the options of covering his identity with a false user profile and the advantages of not having to interact face to face with the other person until the trap is already set and “there is no way forward.” back”.
5. They set long-term goals
In cases where the trap does not consist of an advertisement, sexual predators who seek victims through the Internet are able to set long-term goals so that the moment of meeting seems a natural step with fewer implications.
Nowadays it is relatively normal to have constant contact with people you do not know in person, and this makes this type of traps hidden. At first it may be that there is hardly any conversation and that, after a few weeks, people begin to talk. This is done this way because by the time the dialogue has started, the victim has already begun to get used to the presence (virtual, for the moment) of the other.
Contrary to popular belief, sexual predators They do not have to be clearly impulsive, and in fact this is penalized ; In the case of those who act through the Internet, your plan needs to have a series of intermediate steps to work.
