NZ police went to a lot of effort to work with Danish police in order to arrest a Danish man who embarrassed and threatened a 15yo NZ schoolgirl and ‘cyber attacked’ her school. She had sent him naked images of herself and when she then sought to stop the online relationship he spread her images around the internet including her school and did other harassing things.

The man deserves to be apprehended, punished and/or helped with his psychological problems. However, the article misrepresented this and other such situations by claiming the man misused “explicit images extorted during their online relationship”. The article later described a rise in similar ‘sexploitation’ cases in which “predators befriended users, extorted images from them and then blackmailed them for more…”. This is misleading because in most cases the people providing images do so voluntarily and there is no ‘extortion’. Subsequent demands for more images etc under threat of distributing the initial ones is extortion. However, the teenagers are initially keen to get sexual, this is a natural enough thing. Neither party can be sure of the actual identity and age of the other and for all we know the Danish man and others presented themselves as younger than the teenage ‘victims’ who in that case were acting in the role of ‘predator’ themselves.

Like the term ‘extorted’, the term ‘predator’ is pejorative and possibly misleading. The behaviour of the Danish man may have been a jealous reaction to being jilted by the teenager whom he had fallen in love with and believed this was reciprocated. That doesn’t excuse his abusive actions, but bad reactions are not unusual for men or women in fits of jealous rage. Of course, if this had been a woman doing exactly the same things to a 15yo boy it’s most unlikely the police in either country would have gone to the same trouble to apprehend her. The term ‘predator’ would also not be used; that’s reserved for when the older party is male. When it’s a female (like the female teachers in recent stories) it’s just the woman ‘having a relationship’ or ‘affair’.

The other interesting duplicity here is that NZ police would give such priority and devote such effort to stop a male in Denmark targeting a NZ teenage female and her school, when police seem to do little to stem the daily avalanche of cyber criminal activity targeting and damaging us through fraudulent schemes and false claims of lottery wins, bank security changes and so forth. If NZ police are able to arrest a man in Denmark for embarrassing one female, surely they could be organising the arrest of the criminals committing some of that huge amount of constant fraud and theft? And what about the honey-pot exploitation by women in other countries who pretend to develop relationships with NZ men simply to obtain money with false hard-luck tales? That’s not even against the law. The police appear to see their white-knight defence of one female’s honour as much more important than protecting most of the population against serious financial crime. Females are so much more important it seems.