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Wednesday, May 2, 2007 Worcester T&G

Surfing the beat

Auburn detective works to protect kids on the Internet


Auburn Police Detective James R. Lyman Jr. uses the Internet to track child predators. He also talks to students about safe online practices. (T&G Staff/DAN GOULD)

Anybody could be anybody on the Internet. It’s whatever they type.

On the street, no one would ever mistake Auburn Police Detective James R. Lyman Jr. for Sarah Underwood, an Auburn High School student who has a fondness for field hockey and “American Idol.”

However, on the information highway, someone did think Detective Lyman was Sarah. It turned out to be a child predator.

To adopt the guise of Sarah, Detective Lyman delved deep into the psyche of a realistic but make-believe schoolgirl, so much so that he adopted her daily routine and vernacular, all in an effort to catch a predator. It worked. On Jan. 26, an account executive and father of two from Uxbridge was arrested for luring someone he believed was the aforementioned underage student for sex.

Thankfully, Detective Lyman is one of the good guys. But there are plenty of bad guys — sex offenders and child predators, usually with harmless-sounding screen names — surfing the Web and pretending to be something they are not.

“Anybody could be anybody on the Internet. It’s whatever they type,” Detective Lyman said.

The Internet has become a tangled web indeed, especially when it comes to predators, who are very devious and very, very smart. And, like good students, they have done their homework, Detective Lyman said.

“They know the language. They buy their magazines. They play their games. They know what the new trends are. They watch ‘American Idol.’ They do everything that they do,” he said. “So they are doing their homework to relate to these kids.”

After a recent presentation called “How to Make the Internet a Great and Safe Place for Students” at the Julia Bancroft School in Auburn, a cavalcade of rambunctious fifth-graders flocked around Detective Lyman, impatiently waiting to talk with him.

It wasn’t because the detective opened their eyes to the dangers that hide on the Internet, but because he confessed his addiction to a popular PlayStation game, Need for Speed: Carbon, during his presentation. The boys’ eyes lit up as they talked about the game, so much so that they gave the detective their screen names, indirectly proving the point he had been making for 45 minutes.

While sex offenders have to register, there are no safeguards to determine if they are sex offenders online. If the would-be child predator pretends to be an adolescent playing games with other adolescents, what is there to tell or warn a child?

“Say that I’m a predator. I’m going to play games with these guys. I’m going to gain their trust,” Detective Lyman said. “That’s what the scary thing is. They’re at that age when they’re looking for friends. They’re looking to explore where their parents don’t know where they’re at.”

According to January 2006 information from NBC’s “Dateline,” law enforcement officials estimated 50,000 sexual predators are online at any given moment. The statistic is one Detective Lyman cites in his presentation. He also said 87 percent of youths ages 12 to 17 use the Internet, according to a Pew Internet Project survey from July 2005.

Other statistics describe children’s Internet habits.

I-SAFE America’s National Assessment Center conducted a nationwide survey in 2005 that showed 54 percent of children prefer to be alone when surfing the Internet, while 41 percent do not share with their parents what they do and where they go on the Internet. An earlier survey by the same organization revealed that about a quarter of young people polled see nothing wrong with chatting with strangers on the Internet; 10 percent have been asked by a stranger on the Internet to meet face-to-face; and 10 percent have actually met face-to-face with a stranger from the Internet.

Detective Lyman said it is easy for a child to meet someone who is potentially dangerous on the Internet, especially in the false security of the child’s home.

“When kids are in their home, they put their guards down. You don’t feel that you can be a victim in your house, but you can be because you’re basically exposing yourself outside of your house through the cyberworld,” he said. “You can’t just feel safe just because you’re in your home. There could be a predator that’s in the same town looking to abduct a child.”

Kerry LeBlanc of Worcester has special Internet safety safeguards for her three children, Kelly, 16, Michael, 11, and Lindsey, 6.

“The first issue is the computer has to stay in a common room. There is no computer in their bedrooms. So the screen is visible to everybody going into the room,” said Ms. LeBlanc. “No. 2, the kids are told they’re not allowed on any chat rooms where they are talking to people that they don’t know. That is just not allowed. There’s no reason for them to get on a chat room and talk to people they don’t know.”

Ms. LeBlanc said her oldest child, Kelly, has 281 friends on AOL Instant Messenger and a profile on MySpace.com. Kelly said she abides by the house rules and while she has never been approached by a stranger on the Internet, Kelly would tell her mother if the exchange was “really out there.”

“You should not talk to people you don’t know,” Kelly said. “If you’re on AIM, you can just block people, and you can block people on MySpace too.”

Although Ms. Leblanc has never read her daughter’s profile, mother and daughter went over what could and could not be posted, and that included no phone number, no address and no high school.

“It was a trust issue,” Ms. LeBlanc said. “As long as she was promising me that there were only appropriate things on the Web site that was OK.”

Detective Lyman said cyberspace is like a virtual playground. At a real playground, responsible parents would not leave their children unattended, he said.

“Why would you let your 12-year-old be online without knowing where … they’re going?” he said. “If you’re a predator, you’re going to go where the fish are.”

Detective Lyman said the Internet has virtually become one-stop shopping for the potential child predator. An unsuspecting child who is naïve and trustworthy might inadvertently give a predator his or her name, age, address, school, hobbies, activities, even a photo.

He told the children that “what you write on your profile is what they will see.” He said children should never write their real name, post a photo or a daily schedule, or specify where they live or go to school. Instead, they should be vague and say, “somewhere in Massachusetts.”

Detective Lyman said there are many good sites on the Web, but the lack of supervision and safeguards for children worry him.

In some homes parents do the right thing, he said, by putting the computers in the living room, facing out, so they can monitor what their children are doing.

Detective Lyman urges parents to know where their children are on the Internet and to interact with them more about it.

“I say this to my kids,” said the father of four. “ ‘I can teach you where to go. I can’t be there 100 percent of the time, but I just hope you do the right things.’ That is all we can do as parents and in law enforcement.”

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