crime
Cybergrooming – Ayleen case reveals dangers on the internet
In the fight against sexual violence on the Internet, new police online strategies are necessary from the point of view of experts. photo
© Mohssen Assanimoghaddam/dpa
Children and young people spend a lot of time online. Experts warn of the growing dangers of sexual violence and lament the lack of protective mechanisms.
They often act anonymously and from a distance, but can come dangerously close to children and young people: Dodgy internet users use social networks like Tiktok, Snapchat and Instagram as well as online games for sexual harassment and abuse of minors.
The case of 14-year-old Ayleen from Baden-Württemberg, who was presumably killed by a 30-year-old man in Hesse in July last year after months of sexualized chats, vividly illustrates how children and young people become the target of so-called cybergrooming. After a break of around three weeks, the murder trial against the man before the Gießen district court will continue on Monday (July 10).
The term cybergrooming stands for the targeted addressing of minors on the Internet to initiate sexual contacts – criminologists are concerned and expect a significant increase in cases. In such cases, perpetrators cleverly exploit the inexperience of young people. With a perfidious mixture of initially supposedly harmless messages, compliments and promises and later pressure and threats, they harass their victims and make them, for example, send nude photos and sexualized videos, such as warns Jugenschutz.net, a federal and state competence center for the Protection of children and young people on the Internet.
Statistics only partially meaningful
The problem: Also because of the blurred borders to child pornography, the police crime statistics (PKS) are only partially informative when it comes to cybergrooming, as the renowned cybercriminologist Thomas-Gabriel Rüdiger from the Police University of the State of Brandenburg says. For 2022, 2878 cases of sexual abuse of children with “acting on children without physical contact” were recorded in the PKS. However, the number of unreported cases is likely to be much larger – if only because younger children already have smartphones and children and young people spend a lot of time online. Among other things, he calls for a “children’s online watch” as a contact point for affected minors and “virtual police patrols”, also to deter potential perpetrators.
Julia von Weiler, head of the international child protection organization Innocence in Danger, describes the dangers in drastic terms: the Internet acts like a “gigantic accelerator” for sexual violence, she says. Perpetrators could contact minors unobserved at any time of the day or night, there were no longer any breaks in communication, they were literally sitting “at the bedside” of children using tablets and smartphones and unscrupulously exploited this strategic advantage.
The graduate psychologist from Weiler sees the legislator as primarily responsible. Criminal prosecutors should be able to access data, and opportunities should be created to delete depictions of abuse from the Internet. For von Weiler, the proposals by EU Interior Commissioner Ylva Johansson, with which she wants to curb the spread of depictions of abuse on the Internet, go in the right direction. Critics discuss the proposals under the keyword “chat control” – they see it as an attempt to scan communication on the Internet and fear mass surveillance.
Problem of lack of media competence
The Central Office for Combating Internet Crime (ZIT) at the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office has repeatedly dealt with the phenomenon of cybergrooming in investigations into child pornography, as prosecutor Julia Bussweiler reports. The fact that the victims agree at all to sharing very personal pictures of themselves, for example, also has a lot to do with a lack of media skills, says the lawyer. “We see again and again that children have an online and an offline identity.” This virtual personality is then as the victims believed they had to be in order to be liked or as portrayed by influencers. “They think they have to act a little bit sexy and naughty – but in real life they find the thought of kissing a boy totally gross.”
Bussweiler also assumes that only relatively few actions will be reported. This is also due to the fact that many victims are ashamed to talk to their parents, for example. There is legal protection against cyber grooming for children. From the age of 14 it is more complicated. For example, if a 20-year-old takes pictures with a 15-year-old, that’s fine as long as it’s voluntary and for personal use only. On the other hand, if intimate pictures are disseminated and shared by young people without their knowledge, this is a punishable offense.
Before her death, 14-year-old Ayleen was also said to have been cornered by the accused with an “overwhelming number of messages”, promises of money and threats until she saw no way of breaking out of this “vicious circle”, as it was Senior Public Prosecutor Thomas Hauburger had formulated. He assumes a sexual motive for the act – the accused, on the other hand, stated in a statement that he had killed the girl in an argument. On the fourth day of the trial, the Gießen district court wants to continue viewing a police interrogation video of the accused.