Redondo Beach police last week arrested a 40-year-old man and a 15-year-old boy in an alleged sex solicitation incident that began on Craigslist.org, the popular online bulletin board site.
According to police reports, the teen’s mother had been monitoring her son’s computer activity with “spyware” – specifically, software that allows observation of a user’s web usage – when she learned that he had made arrangements to meet the man through Craigslist. On April 10, she followed her son to the meeting, watched him get into a vehicle with the man, and called the Redondo Beach Police Department.
Police officers responded and immediately arrested the man under suspicion of soliciting sex with a minor. Further investigation revealed that the teen had solicited the contact and had told the man that he was of legal age.
“He was listing himself as a male prostitute, but he was not putting his real age – pretending to be a real adult,” said RBPD Sgt. Shawn Freeman. “At first glance it appeared the man had solicited a minor for sex. The guy is arrested and he’s with a 15-year-old. But digging deeper, the kid had gone online representing himself as an adult and gave every indication he was an adult.”
Both the teen and the man will still face sex solicitation charges. But Freeman said that the teen will unlikely face incarceration but instead will receive treatment.
“Basically, now he gets into the juvenile justice system, and it’s more about rehabilitation than it is about locking somebody up,” Freeman said. “So definitely the opportunity for counseling is huge for this kid – he’s 15 years old, and obviously this is counseling he needs. So hopefully he will be able to get that with the adjudication of this case.”
Freeman said teenagers’ ready access to such online classified services may facilitate this type of crime, but he wasn’t ascribing blame on the internet itself for increasing such behavior.
“Who knows? It’s a research project,” Freeman said. “How would he have acted out on this impulse 20 years ago? Think about 20 years ago – there were still teenage prostitutes. So 20 years ago he might have run away and been on the streets, and now he acts out via the internet.” ER
