KENNETH RAGLAND
From 2021 to 2023, the number of reports of online child enticement received by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children rose more than 300%.
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We marked Safer Internet Day earlier this month, a worldwide campaign to make cyberspace a safer and more responsible place and raise awareness of the threats for young people online to be lured into dangerous, criminal and potentially life-threatening activities. It’s a timely topic here — Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares recently hosted a discussion about the need to protect children from online threats.
“There’s a lot of danger out there, but probably the most danger for our kids is online,” Miyares was quoted as saying. “Your child is not going to meet a child predator in the neighborhood, a parking lot or playground. They’re going to meet him online.”
Today, bad guys lurk in the amorphous world of cyberspace, which for so many kids has displaced the safer meeting spaces — the basketball courts and ballfields, the youth clubs and fast-food joints — that I recall from my youth.
Today’s predators use readily available information and images, like shared milestones or photos, to target and exploit youth. They conduct phishing expeditions on popular social media platforms. Armed with even a little information about someone, predators worm their way into young lives, those who by their nature are innocent, vulnerable and unsuspecting, especially when the predator is posing as a fellow child or teen.
There are cases where kids were lured to meet and then were kidnapped, a leading method for pulling youth into the web of human trafficking. Older boys and girls may think they are invincible, but in fact most abductions involve teenage victims. Other crimes involve sextortion, where youth are persuaded to provide graphic images of themselves and are then extorted by the predator. Soliciting young people to buy drugs, forcing kids to become mules in the localized drug trade, engaging them in theft schemes — all of these occur in cyberspace’s dark corners.
What’s more, as our attorney general noted, constantly developing AI technology provides predators with the dangerous capability to use photos unwittingly shared by children to create fake, disturbing, exploitative images.
The numbers stagger the mind. From 2021 to 2023, the number of reports of online child enticement received by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children rose more than 300%, from 44,155 to 186,819. And they continue to rise. Last year alone, just through early October, the center had received more than 456,000 reports.
Cyber platforms where predators may lurk are everywhere around us, and new sites that appeal to young audiences emerge every day. As has always been true with kids, an activity that becomes popular with others is hard to resist, and not all these platforms have robust protections or safeguards to screen potential predators. Even Smart TVs, gaming consoles and virtual assistant devices connect young people to cyberspace. Esports players often don’t know who they’re competing against and may unintentionally share personal information, opening a virtual window for a predator to climb through.
Growing up in Philadelphia, I never imagined something called cyberspace, let alone how a person whose face I couldn’t see and whose voice I couldn’t hear could hurt me. In my day, the bad guys were known players, and we were all too familiar with the ways they would bully, threaten or do other bad things.
I had the great fortune to participate in our local Police Athletic League (PAL) where I played sports, took field trips to places I would never have otherwise seen, and received wise counsel and support from adult mentors and coaches, including police officers who volunteered their time.
Just as I had a safe place growing up, and people to steer me away from the bad guys, I want today’s kids to know the same safety, protection and guidance in the place where they most often hang out — cyberspace.
As president of the Board of National Police Athletic and Activities Leagues (National PAL), with 200 chapters nationwide serving 2 million youth, I’m leading an effort to raise awareness about how young people can protect themselves from online danger. One way we’re doing that is through our collaboration with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Know2Protect, a comprehensive cyber safety campaign.
Discussing this topic with young people can be challenging. Yet the ubiquity of cyber activity provides opportunities throughout any given day to remind them that not everyone they meet online has good intentions, and that it’s not safe to share information or images with people they don’t know and trust.
If you’re a child’s parent, guardian, caregiver, mentor, relative, teacher or friend, please take a moment to discuss online safety with them. It’s our duty to protect them from what lurks in the internet’s dark shadows.