Child predators are targeting parents on dating apps, and it’s leading some Australian parents to think twice about what they share with their online matches.
One in eight Australians on dating apps have received a request to facilitate child sexual exploitation or abuse, according to a survey of 10,000 people.
The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) has released a report showing that a staggering 12.4 per cent of respondents had received at least one of these five requests:
- A request for photos of their children or other children they had access to
- Pressure to provide sexual images of those children
- A request to meet those children before it was “appropriate”
- Requests for information of a sexual nature about those children (eg. breast size, whether they had their period)
- An offer of payment for photos, videos or live streams of those children
While a request for photos may sound “quite innocuous”, researchers found the majority of cases were in fact of a sinister nature.
AIC Deputy Director Rick Brown said the “results were quite disturbing”.
“We found that about half (48.5 per cent) of those that had been asked for an image, reported being pressured to provide sexual images of children,” he said.
“Sixty-nine per cent reported being asked questions of a sexual nature about the children, and in about 63 per cent of cases, the individual was offered payment for photos, videos or live streams of the children.”
Dr Brown said the high prevalence of these tactics indicates they’re working at least some of the time.
“It would be reasonable to assume that at least some of those [people] would have followed through, just by the very numbers,” he said.
“One would suspect that it’s successful for some [predators]”.
Predators target some parents more
The survey uncovered five factors that made a person more likely to receive requests from child predators.
Younger people, First Nations people, people whose first language was not English, and people with a disability or long-term illness were all at higher risk, according to Dr Brown.
People who’d chosen to link their social media accounts to the dating app profiles were also at a higher risk.
“[Perpetrators] may be scanning social media, looking for individuals who have got photos of their children,” Dr Brown said.
Surprisingly, Dr Brown said men were as likely as women to be targeted.
Additionally, men receiving those requests were as likely to be getting them from women as from men.
The absence of a gender skew is a counterintuitive finding at first, given extensive research showing that perpetrators are far more likely to be men, but researchers have a theory.
“It may well be that it’s other men that are pretending to be women to draw [heterosexual men] into providing images,” Dr Brown said.
“We just don’t know whether that’s the case, but I think it’s a useful working hypothesis,” he says.
Posing as someone else entirely on dating platforms isn’t hard.
“There’s no identity resolution on most of these apps … you can go on there with any identity,” Dr Brown said.
“It’s a double-edged sword … as a user [you can feel] safe through that anonymity, but it’s the same for the person that’s contacting you.”
How parents manage the predator risk on dating apps
Parents who use dating apps were mostly surprised by the high rate of predatory behaviour on dating apps, targeting children via their carers.
Chelsea, a Tasmanian mum in her 30s, has a hard rule about no photos on social media featuring her son’s face, but plenty of parents she knows are much more relaxed.
“Unfortunately, I have friends that, you know, [put] photos of their children naked online,” she said.
In the past, Chelsea has mentioned the fact that she has kids in her dating app profile, but she’s now considering removing that information, based on the survey results.
“It does almost make me want to question whether I even have that as public knowledge,” she said.
Kate, a 33-year-old mother from the ACT, admitted “it’s a difficult balance” knowing whether or not to mention you’re a parent.
“I liked to be up front about having children as I felt it was setting an expectation around my availability,” she said.
But she learnt the hard way about the dangers of linking her dating app profile to her social media account, after some of her matches decided to do their own research,
“[That] made me feel very violated as there are photos of my family included which were intentionally not on my dating profile,” she said.
“Also things like work and surname … I have since kept the socials private and locked down.”
How dating apps are changing
Since the survey took place in 2021, some of the biggest dating apps have made efforts to improve safety.
Match Group — which owns Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid and Plenty of Fish — introduced a “law enforcement portal” in late 2021, and optional ID verification in late 2023.
There’s also an in-app safety centre and reporting mechanisms that can lead to a profile being banned.
As for whether those changes are enough, Dr Brown said “it’s early days”.
“Dating apps are on a journey in terms of improving the safety of the services that they offer.”
He said there was still more work to do in raising awareness among the most at-risk groups, prevention, and making it easier for app users to report predatory behaviour, both within the apps and to police.
“I think the general advice would be wherever possible, don’t put pictures of your children online because you don’t know who’s viewing those photos.”
As for whether to say you’re a parent at all, it’s case by case, but “raising from the outset the kind of information that makes you vulnerable … that’s one you really do need to be careful with,” he said.
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