Teen Accused of Sex Assaults Using Facebook to Find Victims

Oh Facebook. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

Recently, an eighteen-year-old young male was accused of posing as a girl on Facebook (named either Emily or Kayla) and convincing at least 31 male classmates into sending him naked photos or videos of themselves and then blackmailing some of them for sex acts.

Eighteen year old Anthony Stancl, of New Berlin WI, was charged in early February with five counts of child enticement, two counts of second-degree sexual assault of a child, two counts of third-degree sexual assault, possession of child pornography, repeated sexual assault of the same child, and making a bomb threat.

The incidents allegedly happened from spring 2007 through November, 2007.  Thirty-one victims were identified and more than half said the girl they thought they were talking to tried to get them to meet with a "male friend" to let him perform sex acts on him, or he on them. If the boys didn’t cooperate, they were convinced that "she" would send the videos and photos to their friends and post them on public sites on the web, according to a report by the Associated Press.

This is just one of the reasons that seventeen social networking sites in Europe, including Facebook, signed a pact on Tuesday, aimed at protecting the privacy of underage users and curtailing "cyber-bullying".

There’s been so many incidents of pure cyber-bulling – from the teen who committed suicide in the US after a woman posed as a teenage boy harassed her, which is at one end of the spectrum, to threatening text messages sent by people I’ve personally met on Twitter, but who won’t tell me who they are, and an incident of pure aggressive abuse aimed at several in the Vancouver social media scene one evening, both of which are far from anything at the level of suicide or sexual assault, but can still have an impact.

The European Commission (the 27-nation EU’s executive arm) said the agreement will cut the risks of children harassing peers online and curb "grooming" — the practice of adults befriending children online with the intention of committing sexual abuse, according to a report from Reuters.

The British Home Office took similar steps to improve online safety last April, while 49 State Attorneys General in the United Sates have signed similar separate agreements with Myspace and Facebook.

Here’s hoping that these agreements and the steps that the individual sites themselves are taking will have a positive impact on cases like the one in Wisconsin.