Internet sexual predators: their traits and strategies

Between 1915 and 1919, a French man named Henri Désiré Landru murdered at least eleven women, although the police estimated that the true number of his victims exceeded one hundred.

Taking advantage of the effects of war, he published advertisements in the newspapers in which he presented himself as a well-positioned man that he sought to meet a widow and, after meeting his victims, made them disappear while 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 makes it possible 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 profile of the digital predator

People who set up traps online to meet people and kill or abuse them are mostly men between the ages of 18 and 60. Beyond this physical description, however, there is a whole series of psychological characteristics and abilities

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 the anonymity of the Internet 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 the circle of friends is like, etc.

On the other hand, the fact of not being in dialogue face to face 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 its abilities when it comes to offer a personal image that fully matches what the other person is looking for or wants to achieve know. Getting liked is easier if there are tastes in common, 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 are the vulnerabilities that can cause the other person 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 primarily intellectual, and in that respect they are self-sufficient and very methodical.

3. They know how to use advertising resources

Digital predators are capable of designing ads that are especially attractive to the victim profile they want to attract. They use messages that capture attention at the moment and express a clear message, and place them in forums, applications to meet people, specific virtual groups, etc.

Sometimes they may go so far as to make the content of their message fit what is known about a potential victim so that, once posted in a group with a relatively small number of people, someone notifies whom she interests. If this attempt fails, the ad can be modified and republished.

This way of attracting victims makes the other person's defenses go down, since they enter a frame psychological in which it is the victim who must "seduce" the predator, which gives him a lot of room of 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 either narcissism, and in the case of digital predators it is also very present.

The Internet does nothing more than reinforce 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 to cover your identity with a fake user profile and of the advantages of not having to interact face to face with the other person until the trap is already set and "there is no march back".

5. Set long-term goals

In cases where the trap is not an advertisement, sexual predators seeking victims over the Internet They are able to set long-term goals so that meeting time seems like a natural step with fewer implications.

Currently it is relatively normal to have constant contact with people who do not know each other in person, and this makes this kind of cheating hidden. At first it may be that there is hardly any conversation and that, after a few weeks, they start to talk. This is done in this way because by the time the dialogue has begun 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, their plan needs to have a series of intermediate steps to work.

• Related article: "Profile of the psychological abuser: 21 traits in common"