Thousands of children of all ages are exploited online every day. The tools that traffickers and predators use are in the hands of our children every day, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking.
During the pandemic, the rate of online enticement of our children increased to 98.7 percent between 2019 and 2020, with a reported 29.3 million images, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 18,000 kids send a naked photo and 9,000 kids per day are sextorted. Sextortion is the practice or extorting money or sexual favors from someone by threatening to reveal evidence of their sexual activity. According to a University of Florida study, 58 percent of children meet up with a predator – someone who they have met through social media and video games.
To stop the hidden pandemic of sextortion, we must equip ourselves with the knowledge to have conversations with our children and make them aware of the grooming tactics that child predators use to manipulate them into sending photos and videos and eventually meeting up with these perpetrators.
“It’s impossible to protect all girls from guys like I was because that’s what we do. We eat, drink, and sleep, thinking of ways to trick young girls into doing what we want them to do,” Ex-Pimp.
We need to arm ourselves with the knowledge so we may have a fighting chance against traffickers. It’s important to note that boys are at risk and not just girls. Listen to Russell’s story about his experience being trafficked as a child (http://ow.ly/CcpI30sbtkE). One landmark case involves two 13-year-old boys in Central Florida who sent illicit photos to someone, who they thought was a girl at their school. This led them to being trafficked and sexually explicit videos posted on Twitter, who initially refused to take them down. We must educate teens that the way out of a blackmail prison is to never send that photo.
Another case involved an 11-year-old girl who was playing Minecraft online with a stranger, but her parents thought it was o.k. because he supposedly lived out of state. During the night, she snuck out to meet him and instead of sleeping safely in her bed, when her parents went to wake her for church the next morning, a 24-year-old man was raping her at a local motel.
To schedule a presentation at your school or church, please contact the Diocese of Orlando Human Trafficking Task Force at 407-658-1818, ext. 1122 or email [email protected]. For more information about the task force and how to get involved, visit cflcc.org. Join me on my Linked In here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/education-key-prevention-childrens-exploitation-christine-commerce