Bad Love

Alan Schaefer, 43, was a middle school music teacher in Long Island. He got busted last summer for some really sleazy chatting about masturbation with an undercover cop pretending to be a 13 year-old girl, and arranging to meet up with her in Manhattan. Now his lawyers are arguing that because he didn't send any dirty pictures to her, he didn't actually break the law.

The law forbids dissemination of material depicting sexual acts to a minor, and lawyers are hoping a judge will agree that "depicting" refers only to photographs. A Westchester lawyer charged with the same thing last year had the charges against him thrown out by a Manhattan judge, but he got convicted for the crime in Westchester. A Brooklyn Appellate court is deciding on the case now. Their decision could essentially make it legal to engage in this kind of sexual talk with minors online, and even to arrange meetings with them. Creepy.

This case unfortunately doesn't have any bearing on Charles Taranow, 45, a Brooklyn sanitation worker who has been charged with chatting with and soliciting undercover cops, who he thought were 14 and 15 year-old girls, for sex. When his computer was searched, cops found dirty pictures he had sent and received, which I guess is the standard definition of "depictions" of sexual material.

Taranow was busted through Nassau County's impressive Operation Teensaver program, which specifically targets online sexual predators. Nice work. Now we just have to make sure that inappropriate words are just as illegal as pictures in such cases.

Posted by Amy at 11:58 AM | Permalink

NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the Nebraska Attorney General have reached an agreement with Yahoo! regarding its chat rooms. From now on, Yahoo! says it will remove any user-created chat rooms that promote sex between adults and minors, and it will require all chat room users to be 18 or older. It's not really possible to keep underage kids from saying they are 18 to use chat rooms (and come on, is there anyone over 18 using chat rooms these days who isn't trying to have illicit sex?) but at least they're trying.

You might wonder how Yahoo! will be able to tell which user-created chat rooms promote sex between adults and minors. Well, some of the sample chat rooms that the Attorneys General took issue with have names like "girls 13 & up for much older men," "8-12 yo girls for older men," and my personal favorite, "teen girls for older fat men." Many of these were located within the "Schools and Education" and "Teen" chat categories.

In their investigation of these chat room, an undercover investigator posed as a 14-year-old and got 35 personal messages of a sexual nature over a single 25-minute period.

Posted by Amy at 01:34 PM | Permalink