A Florida woman is facing felony charges for allegedly posing online as a homeschooler to sexually assault an underage boy.
22-year-old Alyssa Ann Zinger was arrested in Tampa on Nov. 24 and taken to jail; she faces two counts of lewd or lascivious battery and five counts of lewd or lascivious molestation. The police do not believe this was an isolated incident.
“It is disturbing and unsettling to see an adult take advantage of a child and prey on them,” Chief Lee Bercaw said in a statement. “Anyone who may have been a victim of Zinger’s, we encourage you to come forward. The Tampa Police Department will support you and ensure a predator like Zinger doesn’t cause you or others additional harm.”
Police say they were tipped off that Zinger allegedly had a relationship with a child between the ages of 12 and 15, and that following an investigation, they learned that she “communicated with the victim primarily through an online social media platform.”
From what I understand for some it’s just the tools they have at their disposal to get affection or sex in a very low effort or ego flattering way. To a teen, having a car, a place where there’s no parents calling the shots and any kind of income is a huge and enviable power gap. The person’s experience with other relationships means that they don’t tend to go all in on the younger partner either the way a person experiencing love for the first time does. So you have someone who remembers that all consuming need to hold onto that first sacred relationship enough to mechanically exploit it so they can either shift all the work onto their younger partner and keep them on the back foot by threatening to end things or push their younger partner to do exactly what they want because to them the relationship is just one of a potential many. That disposition towards relationship fungibility means you have solid leverage.
Youngsters also don’t have any real experience with autonomy. A kid is used to being told what to do and accepting inequity in power balances as normal. Rebelling in the face of adult authority structures also means there’s a lack of seeing adults as peers to whom they can seek advice and benefit and trust their experience and more as just unfair weilders of social power that need be avoided so to transgress means you ditch the social structures that are the most able to spot the red flags.
Shit, this comment deserves to be Best Of’d. An incredible breakdown of the exact problem with this kind of abuse, and absolutely destroys the “hurr teenage boy horny tho” idiots.
Why thank you! I had some acquaintances and friends who fell victim to these power dynamics and I noticed often it seemed to stem from them essentially being used to thinking of adults only really in terms of authority and obstacle… but my folks were awesome and always treated us as “adults in training” where our concerns were valued and our circumstances negotiable. We could argue our points and expect that if they were good, well thought through points that passed all the safety concerns our parents would conceed. It made us view parents, teachers, older friends and relatives and so on as essentially just our more experienced peers…and we were very VERY aware of the advantages we had when navigating sketchy shit.
I did get to see this dynamic play out in real time to disastrous effect with people I knew. I realized my home circumstances were unusual and sometimes my parents ended up basically becoming friends with my friends who I think benefited as well by an adult just treating them as another adult who was non-judgemental about the hazards they encountered. There are people from my highschool days who still show up to my parent’s place at Christmas. It’s made me regard myself as a bit of a self case study as to what happens when at all ages you are treated as a being who is worthy of and expected to practice mutual respect.