Troubled teens deserve genuine adult friends

The name of the Web site strikes me as especially poignant: AdultFriendFinder.com.

Perhaps the title alone lured the 16-year-old girl we read about in the news pages last week. What troubled teen doesn’t yearn for a genuine grownup — older, wiser and infinitely kind — to help her find her way?

Instead, this Spokane girl found former firefighter Daniel W. Ross, a man whose ruthlessness astounded a city already reeling from sex scandals surrounding the Catholic church and former mayor Jim West. Once again, a girl who desperately needed a real adult friend discovered a man eager to exploit her.

For days, the outrage in the city grew. On International Women’s Day Wednesday, a coalition of Spokane women’s groups spoke out about their anger. They rightly demanded that Ross be fired. That very day, Ross announced his resignation.

This anger generated power and energy. It was entirely justified. Yet today, I’m intrigued by the emotions that lie beneath.

In this story, once the fury cools, I’m betting we find a deep pool of sadness and fear. There’s a girl here whose pain likely began long before she discovered the Internet. There’s the sadness of her family and that of Ross’ wife and their families. This pool sends ripples all through the city.

We hope never to learn exactly the nature of the girl’s private sorrows. With luck, she’ll find some true adult friends, a school counselor, a therapist or a youth minister, perhaps, to guide her through that dark water.

But the rest of us are left with a communal sadness, born of too many sex scandals, and too many encounters with wounded kids we just can’t seem to reach.

Last week I talked with Dr. Kim Mitchell of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. She participated in a national study on ways to prevent Internet-based sex crimes against minors.

Her group surveyed law enforcement investigators across the country. They found that the victims of these crimes were primarily ages 13 to 15. (The age of consent varies widely from state to state. It’s 16 in Washington.)

Seventy-five percent of the victims were girls. They primarily met adult offenders in Internet chat rooms. Most of the adults did not deceive the teens about their age or their desire for sex. Half of the victims described themselves as being in love or having a close bond with the offender. And in only 5 percent of cases did the adult offender use violence.

The picture this study paints contrasts with cultural stereotypes. As parents, we warn our children about sexually violent pedophiles, monsters likely to deceive children in order to abduct and assault them. But the reality often involves the arrogance of deeply flawed men whose very ordinariness strikes kids as harmless.

Lured by phone conversations and teddy bears, online chats and jewelry, these teens think of the men not as evil strangers, but as friends and potential romantic partners. The men manipulate and exploit these kids’ natural interest in sexuality.

Other studies show that these crimes involve a variety of victims, including kids who lead normal lives. But the most vulnerable, certainly, are teen girls who have poor relationships with their parents or who suffer from loneliness and depression. A quarter of the victims in this study were boys who were gay or questioning their sexuality.

Not surprisingly, 99 percent of the offenders were men.

As the ripples of sadness spread throughout Spokane this week, I wished we could find more ways to reach these hurting kids.

Mitchell hopes parents, teachers and counselors will speak clearly with teens about the dangers of sex with older men. Teens seldom realize it may be a crime or that it can lead to public embarrassment and shame. They need to hear this strong warning: No adult who truly cares about you would ever pursue you for sex.

Parents and teachers sometimes spot the dark glint of pain in a teenager’s eye and quickly move away. But if we can’t learn to be the wise adult friend a 16-year-old needs, we shouldn’t be surprised when one day a truly bad one shows up.