But that very opportunism of predators is what makes me feel it's unlikely. A resort in which families routinely go out for meals with their kids with them - or else, use a babysitting service - would not be an ideal choice, for an opportunist as if they knew those things, they'd know there were highly unlikely to be opportunities...
Few, if any, environments are actually watertight to risk, and sexual predators are often found to have scoped out absolutely anywhere that they know potential targets will be - a behaviour not based on actual likelihood, but on outside chance. Another unfortunate factor in the whole process is that the hunt itself might be a source of kicks for them, which can make the individual more likely to broaden their range, and less likely to give up, despite a paucity of results.
An analogy. Anyone who has ever worked in a hotel will tell you that hotel thieves tend to be opportunistic. Despite knowing for a fact that the vast majority of hotel rooms will be locked, or occupied by guests or housekeeping staff, they will check out every door they can simply on the outside chance that they will find a room that is unlocked and unattended. Not because it's
likely to happen, but because
sometimes it does.
Although the two crimes are clearly vastly different, the feature of the trawl - and the inherently extremely low probability of a hit - is common to both (as well as many other types of crime).
I'm not saying that this is for sure what happened in this case, because - like everybody else (whatever they believe) - I really have no idea what actually happened. But I do believe it's a distinct possibility, and that no supposedly safe environment is impervious to such action.
The intrinsic problem with talking about things like 'odds' and 'likelihood' is the simple fact that things happen all the time that, prior to the actual event, have monumental odds stacked against them. And yet, still they happen.
(Not particularly relevant here - but by total coincidence I was rereading today about the French serial killer Francis Heaulme. One of his crimes involved him persuading a young man to join in the rape and murder of the latter's cousin. Heaulme had met this young man for the first time less than an hour before the killing. Now, the odds against a serial killer, and a not in the least charismatic or particularly persuasive looking individual - the opposite, in fact - managing to select a complete stranger from the crowd at a busy fairground who was so murderously impressionable that they could be persuaded without the use of force or threat to rape and kill their own kin, and within sixty minutes of meeting for the first time - the odds against that are probably staggering. And yet - it happened. I still find the unlikeliness of this whole incident makes it one of the spookiest and most unnerving in the annals of modern crime.)