Jay Frederick, an investigator with the Bartholomew County Prosecutor’s Office, leads a presentation about preventing internet crimes against children at the Beyond Screens youth workers cafe on Wednesday at Ivy Tech Columbus.
Reilly Gaunt | The Republic
Over 40 people who work for youth organizations gathered at Ivy Tech Columbus Wednesday morning to learn about ways to help prevent child sexual abuse in a “Beyond Screens” presentation by the Bartholomew County Internet Crimes Against Children (BCICAC) Task Force.
Led by Jay Frederick, an investigator at the Bartholomew County Prosecutor’s Office and Tony Kummer, a Columbus Police Department detective, the event covered information on how children are sexually exploited online and ways to try to catch and prevent that from happening.
To get the presentation started, Frederick said that to understand the topic, people need to get more comfortable with discussions about sex to understand sexual abuse. He said that part of the reason why abuse and exploitation go unreported is that people are too ashamed to bring up the topic, which in turn helps predators with their exploitation.
“If we as a society decide to tackle that right there, then we can do so much good. We can protect so many children. We can do so much better,” Frederick said.
They told the audience about the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), where people can report cyber tips for cases of child abduction and exploitation. People can also report instances of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) to the online tip site. Kummer said that in 2023, about 120 of Indiana’s 16,000 tips came from Bartholomew County.
The youth workers in the audience came from places like Turning Point, Foundation for Youth, CASA and other organizations that work directly with the county’s youth. Frederick said that he hopes this presentation can help educate people on what to spot when it comes to keeping the county’s young people safe from these types of crimes.
To understand how child exploitation happens, Frederick said that people need to understand child grooming as a precursor to child sexual abuse. The process begins with the predator selecting and targeting a victim, gaining trust and access to the child and their family, often playing a role in their life, then isolating and swearing to secrecy before initiating sexual contact.
“The whole point of grooming is to bring the walls down. … It’s not just sexual contact. It’s so much more than that — it’s control,” Frederick said.
There are three distinct types of grooming: physical, psychological and community grooming. Frederick said that something to teach kids is to trust their gut feelings when it comes to strangers getting close to them.
Frederick and Kummer emphasized that it is important for adults to believe children or teens when they disclose information. Neither could think of an instance in their years of police work in Bartholomew County that somebody had been falsely accused of this type of crime. More often than not, children will wait until years later to disclose that anything happened to them, which makes it harder to prosecute the offenders.
One of the main topics from the presentation was about sexual extortion, or sextortion, and how that can lead to dire consequences in the lives of young people. Sextortion usually occurs with teenage boys specifically, where they send a nude picture of themselves to a stranger and are then threatened that those images will be shared publicly if they do not respond with either money or more sexual images.
Frederick provided examples of young men who took their own lives out of embarrassment and fear while being sextorted.
“I can tell you firsthand that this is happening and it’s in Bartholomew County,” Kummer said.
As a way to inform students about the dangers of sextortion, the BCICAC has placed informative posters inside the bathrooms at Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. schools that include information on what students should do if this is happening to them and also provide a QR code to report the crime to NCMEC.
“I can tell you that there have been multiple self-reports since we’ve put these posters in the schools,” Kummer said.
Kummer also said the BCICAC Task Force has done something that is a bit new by bringing in School Resource Officers early on so the students have someone at school who they can tell about any illicit activity or trouble they find themselves in.
The biggest issue that Kummer and a representative from Turning Point both said that they have seen is that both kids and parents will hide what has happened because they are embarrassed or fear of community reaction. Kummer said that he knows of a case from a few years ago where a sixth-grade student did attempt suicide as her perceived only option in response to sextortion.
“I’ve seen kids literally quit school because of this,” the Turning Point representative said.
Meetings like the one on Wednesday inform adults on how to help children understand that they are not alone and that they have options when predators take advantage of them before going to the extreme route.
Children face more dangers than just sextortion when it comes to online predators.
“Understand that sextortion is just one of the tricks in the bag of sadistic online exploitation, or these extremists, they call nihilistic extremist groups, that go online and exploit our children. It’s just that simple,” Frederick said.
He said that these criminals will target the youth with low self-esteem and mental health issues and lure them into doing atrocious things online, like animal abuse and torture, or even dying by suicide on a recording. This is different from sextortion because instead of asking for money, these people do it for pure entertainment, Frederick said.
Kummer said that though this is not as common, he has still worked at least two cases in Bartholomew County involving this type of exploitation.
Both Frederick and Kummer recommend checking out the different apps where predators might use to communicate with kids, like Discord or Telegram, file-sharing platforms like Mega, or hidden folders where images or videos could be stored.
Should a child disclose any sort of abuse they might be suffering to an adult, or if an adult has reasonable belief that a child might be being abused, under Indiana law every individual is a mandatory reporter and should report any concerns to authorities immediately.
“So reasonable belief is the threshold. If it’s reasonable, then that report needs to be made. If it’s not, then you’re committing a misdemeanor, actually. The report has to be made to law enforcement or the Department of Child Services,” Frederick said.
The final part of the presentation came with a special guest appearance from the Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Office’s new Electronic Storage Detection (ESD) K-9 Rico and his handler, Detective Jarod Aspenson.
Aspenson discussed how Rico serves as a different type of K-9 by his ability to sniff out hidden electronic devices that could be containing CSAM. Rico also serves as a therapy dog and helps children open up during interviews after a traumatic event happens to them.
While people like Aspenson, Frederick and Kummer fight child exploitation, often they deal with the situation after the abuse has already occurred. They said that people like the youth workers have even more important roles in trying to prevent these situations from occurring in the first place.
“Your job is far more important than what we do,” Aspenson said. “The front line is the people who take care of kids. And that’s all there is to it. This kind of prevention work is probably the most important thing that we do.”
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