12-Year-Olds Shouldn't Have MySpace Pages

Published: Jan 26, 2008

A month ago, a family was celebrating the holidays, enjoying the accoutrements of a successful life in one of this community's tonier subdivisions.

Less than 30 days later, a daughter has been subjected to repeated sexual assaults, a family has been torn apart, a marriage teeters on the brink and an accused offender's dubious mug shot has become a global punch-line.

And all this occurred in the time it takes to click a laptop's mouse. Click.

You should know this. You need to know this. MySpace is not your space. It can get real crowded, real dangerous, real quick.

To protect the identity of a 12-year-old sexual assault victim, we'll call the father John Woe for the purposes of this tale.

This had always been a sore point of disagreement between John and his wife - to allow their then 10-year-old daughter to have her own cell phone.

But little girls can be disproportionately persuasive, and the cell phone was followed by pleas two years later for the child to have her own MySpace page. All her friends at school had their MySpace page. It's the way things are today. It's the way things are.

Not Good Enough

What would be the harm?

"I was not as knowledgeable on MySpace as I should have been," John said, letting the tragic understatement of it all hang in the air. "I tried my best to monitor the use of the computer."

But it wasn't good enough.

Unbeknownst to John and his wife, it hadn't taken long before their child, their daughter - a 12-year-old girl - was being solicited and seduced on her MySpace page by adults.

On the evening of Jan. 3, John's daughter and another girl, who was supposed to be spending the night at the house, slipped out into the darkness to meet a man who had claimed to be 29 years old. The night got even darker.

After luring the girls into his Jeep, which was equipped with childproof locks preventing their escape, the man drove to a secluded area, where he proceeded to sexually abuse them.

The girls were returned home before John awoke, and although his daughter eventually told her mother what happened, John was not informed that a sexual predator had preyed upon his daughter until days later.

The Sting

After John contacted the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, Detective Lee Raschke set up a sting, which required John's daughter to engage in rather frank sexual cell phone discussions with her alleged assailant in order to lure him to what he thought was a meeting with his victim.

It worked.

On Jan. 11, Edward Oberwise, 37, was arrested when he arrived at an agreed-upon location to meet John's daughter.

Law enforcement officials said they also have recordings of Oberwise's alleged X-rated conversations with John's daughter, as well as DNA evidence recovered from the girl's clothing.

Oberwise, who was charged with 10 counts of lewd or lascivious battery on the two girls, has been released on $50,000 bail.

Since Oberwise's arrest, John's daughter has entered counseling, and the couple themselves have struggled. "It's driven a wedge between us," John sighed. Alas, they are not alone in having to come to terms with this sort of crime.

"What's happening now, is a good chunk of our [sexual assault] cases are happening on the Internet," noted Hillsborough Assistant State Attorney Rita Peters, who estimated sex crimes that have their origin in cyberspace have increased about 20 percent over just a year ago.

"The biggest trend is what's going on between juveniles," Peters added.

Indeed, at one point in the investigation, Raschke discovered an image of a penis, which had been text-messaged to John's daughter's cell phone. It wasn't Oberwise, but rather a middle school classmate of the child.

"It happens more than you'd realize," Raschke said.

On Feb. 5 from 6:30 to 9 p.m., a seminar to deal with cyberpredators - sponsored by Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan, the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library System and the Tampa Advertising Federation - will be held at the Museum of Science & Industry.

If you think you have nothing to worry about, you're wrong.

If you think your bouncing bundle of joy could never be victimized by some twisted waste of flesh on MySpace, you're wrong.

If you think your pride and joy would never engage in naughtiness on MySpace, well, good luck, but there's a good chance you're wrong.

And if you need to be pushed into being scared, well, simply check out Oberwise's mug shot, which has ricocheted around the World Wide Web. Pay special attention to his T-shirt, which reads "Real Men Of Genius." Irony abounds.

Is it too late to also charge him with violating any remote semblance of - truth in advertising?

Keyword: Book of Ruth, to read and comment on Daniel Ruth's blog.