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.”
I already don’t understand pedophilia, but I especially have a hard time wrapping my head around a person in their early 20s that’s into grooming and sexually assaulting people who are not that much younger than them to begin with.
For the same reason it’s illegal… while there might not be a huge difference in age between someone 22 and 14, there’s a vast difference in maturity, experience and vulnerability to manipulation. While I’m not a psychologist, it seems like for some people, it’s based on opportunity (easier to manipulate a younger person) and others it’s based on a psychological impairment regarding their own sexual development. For this lady perhaps it’s a combo.
I’m not trying to quarrel with the legality at all. There is no question in my mind that it deserves to be illegal. I just can’t wrap my head around the psychology of this. This wasn’t opportunity, this took effort.
I didn’t think you were questioning the illegality. I agree; you’d think it would be easier for her to find someone her age. Except for what I was saying earlier… some people go for minors because they can manipulate them more easily. And then, if she’s warped in the way that she’s particularly attracted to younger people, that explains why she’d seek one out.
The manipulation part does make sense to me. I just find the whole thing hard to keep in my head I guess.
It’s not a bad thing that you have a hard time empathizing with pedophiles, in case that helps.
Haha. Agreed there!
Weird I was just having a similar conversation with my daughter yesterday - not about pedophiles specifically, but the more general topic of adults hurting children- she had heard about the case several years ago of a guy randomly grabbing and throwing a 5 year old off a 3rd story walkway at a mall, and was trying to understand why someone would do such a thing…
IMHO, it’s pretty hard for people who find no joy in having power over others (maybe because they perceive power over others as a massive responsability rather than as a consequence free ego-boost) to understand the mindset of those who derive massive personal pleasure from having such power.
Personally the way I manage to intellectually understand it (or at least think I understand it) is to imagine how it is having zero Empathy, hence not caring at all for the impact on others of one’s action if said others cannot hurt you back if you hurt them. If one has such a mindset ,the power over others is never felt as a weight or a responsability, it is just a tool to at will make other provide you with some direct or indirect form of personal enjoyement - sexual pleasure being a pretty standard direct one, money being a pretty standard indirect one - hence it’s logical that a person like this would seek power over those others who can fullfill their wants and which cannot or will not reciprocate if and when they hurt them.
This explains not just this situation but, for example, things like people in management positions exploiting their power for personal pleasure or simply for personal upside maximization.
Of course even somebody with just a bit of empathy cannot “get” at an emotional level such a behaviour because for them hurting others means them feeling the hurt they caused to others, hence they would feel guilt (an highy unpleasant feeling) so they refrain from acting so. That said, when “normal” people find ways to isolate themselves from said empathy (rage, anonimity, prejudiced, etc) they’re still capable of horrible things exactly because no empathy = no guilt.
Anyways, that’s my theory!
It’s about power. It’s always about power.
Power over the victim, and the power to transgress.
If they can manipulate people and get away with heinous shit, in their mind they must have rich-person energy.
Just spitballing here, but a young attractive woman like her probably gets a lot of unwanted attention from men who have sought to control her. Maybe she wanted someone who didn’t pose a threat. Still illegal, and she still needs to go to jail. It doesn’t matter what turns one into a predator.
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It all just sounds so alien to me. It’s just such a way of thinking so wholly different from anything I ever think that I have trouble even comprehending it.
Thankfully, I was never preyed upon as a child myself so I’ve only heard accounts from others who had been, but I’m sure it’s hard for a lot of victims to wrap their heads around it too. I would probably spend the rest of my life trying to understand the mind of someone who did that to me. Not as some form of forgiveness, more of a probably hopeless search for a deeper motive even if it was purely a crime of opportunity.
Ugh. The world is so horrible.
Someone close to me was raped the first 5 years of his life by a relative, and has been in therapy (very successfully) ever since. When someone that young experiences ongoing trauma like that, it fucks all the developmental areas in life including the reward/feel good parts of the brain. There are things that the brain becomes wired for that can’t be undone, but with effective treatment can be managed.
Under the best circumstances recovery is incredibly hard, without therapy and proper support it’s not surprising someone could go off the rails like this. Not saying that this predator was abused because I don’t know, but it’s statistically likely.
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.
There’s a huge difference between 12 and 22. The power imbalance means there can’t be meaningful consent.
Well yeah, not to mention a 12 year old is just starting the whole birds and the bees aspect of their life and probably doesn’t even have the concept of consent on their radar, let alone what an adult coming at them like that even means.