It couldn’t have been more obvious that Jessica Walker was a vulnerable 13-year-old.
The anorexic teen was a religious follower of the unfathomably thin YouTuber Eugenia Cooney and regularly posted on Discord servers dedicated to her fandom.
That’s where the Strasburg, Virginia, teen was contacted by a 29-year-old man, who she now realizes worked out her vulnerabilities and set out to sexually groom her.
“When we first started talking, he was totally normal, and we were just friends. I would tell him about my life and some secrets,” Walker, now a 21-year-old senior at Kutztown University, told The Post.
But gradually, things took a dark turn: “He would just slowly switch topics to talk about sex, and at first what I thought were innocent jokes.” When she was fourteen, they started sharing explicit photos and messages.
“By that time I felt trapped … By the time you feel endangered by a groomer, you feel like they already have too much on you,” Walker said.
The predator threatened to show up at her home if she ever went to the police so, out of fear, she kept her mouth shut and was kept up at night, terrorized by a stranger her parents had no idea even existed.
“I was too ashamed to tell my parents about it,” Walker said. “Groomers just prey on that shame and lack of knowledge, and they make the children feel like it’s their fault that adults are attracted to them.”
After a year of torment, she finally built up the courage to block her abuser, but the memory of the manipulation still haunts her.
“They’re nicer than people in school or your parental figures, but then they end up taking a position of power … and then they start very slowly making it all sexual.”
Grooming — the process by which a predator gradually builds a relationship with a minor in order to sexually manipulate them — is becoming ever more common as people use the internet from an ever younger age.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline experienced a 300% increase in tips about online enticement from 44,155 to 186,819 between 2021 and 2023.
Meanwhile, the United Kingdom recorded 6,350 Sexual Communication with a Child offences in 2023, a number which has increased 82% from five years ago.
Michael Aterburn worked as a detective investigating internet crimes against children in Jefferson County, Kentucky, from 2008 to 2014. He encountered a new case of internet grooming at least once a week.
The perpetrators were always men, ranging from teenagers to senior citizens, but typically between twenty and forty years of age.
“Most of the time the child is at risk to begin with, and they have some kind of need to be filled, and now somebody is telling them all the things that they want to hear: ‘You’re smart, you’re pretty,’” Aterburn told The Post.
Most often, he says teens will be contacted on social media or through video games like Roblox, then the predator will move the child over to a private messaging app, like Kik, WhatsApp, or Signal.
Kayla Bryant was lured into sexual relationships with men in their 20s after they found her on YouTube, also when she was 13. Bryant started making videos in 8th grade and sometimes talked about struggling with her home life in them.
“Older people would [reach out online and] say that they wanted to provide that security for me, and so I would pursue it,” Bryant, now a 22-year-old college senior from Cincinnati, Ohio, told The Post. “[That led to] extreme codependency issues.”
By age 14, she started to meet up with men a decade older than her, who claimed to offer shelter from her turbulent home situation.
“It would be real adult men … I would stay at their houses, be treated with gifts, but then the sexual abuse became regular to where it no longer [seemed like] abuse but something that I was used to.”
Often, Aterburn would be deployed on the internet to pose as a 13-year-old girl to entrap pedophiles and get them off the streets.
“The prosecutors wanted me to get the guys to physically meet so they can rule out whether this was an online fantasy, but I’ve only had a handful that didn’t want to meet,” he recalled. “I’ve had the perpetrators show up with handcuffs and rope and tape and Valium and sex toys.”
Aterburn says grooming red flags parents should look out for include gifts in the mail or a child who is hesitant to hand over their phone: “If they turn off their game or they minimize their window on the computer when you walk in the room, that’s a huge red flag.”
He also recommends parents use the parental control platform Bark to monitor cell phone activity and ban electronics behind closed doors.
“Never punish your child if they come forward and tell you about something, because if you take that electronic [device] away, which is almost every parent’s knee jerk reaction, all you’ve taught them is not to come to you,” Aterburn advised.
Alicia Kozak, another grooming victim and anti-exploitation advocate agrees: “What is probably most important is that your child knows they can come to you with absolutely anything at all, and that you’ll remain calm and you’ll solve the problem together.”
Kozak was thirteen when she became the first known victim of internet child abduction in 2002, when a 38-year-old man coaxed her from a Yahoo chat room into his car and ultimately held her captive and sexually abused her on livestream for four days before being busted by authorities.
Kozak, now 37 and author of “The Internet Safety Guidebook: Protecting Kids in the Digital Age,” often speaks about her experience, and says without fail she has young women approach her after every talk to say they’ve been groomed online.
“People say, ‘Well, my kid’s a good kid. My kid doesn’t do those things. My kid isn’t curious.’ But anybody can be a victim, including the kid that you think is the most well behaved and trustworthy,” she said.
Naomi, a now 22-year-old nurse from Wales, UK, was contacted by a 26-year-old predator on Snapchat when she was 15.
“It seemed quite normal at that age for someone to just add you, and you’d add them back,” she said.
Naomi, who asked to withhold her last name out of fear of retribution, says her predator keyed in on her turbulent relationship with her parents, who alienated her after she rejected their Jehovah’s Witness faith.
“I was just searching anywhere else I could find a close adult connection, and when he came along, it was like two pieces of a puzzle that fit together,” she recalled.
Several months into talking, he proposed she run away with him — and booked a hotel and a train. However, after a week, money ran out and her predator, who claimed to be a lawyer, took Naomi to live on the streets with him.
“It turned violent quite quickly, but at that point I was so engrossed, and I just thought that was my only opportunity to have a different life than what I had before,” Naomi, who recalled having a knife held to her neck during sex, said.
Three weeks in, the cops discovered them on the street and threw the man in jail for child abduction.
Though she says her decision to run away was “extreme,” she warns grooming is not and she knows many people who were groomed to some extent online.
“There were a lot of other girls at school who were groomed at some point, whether it was being talked into sending nude pictures or having flirty conversations online with people they don’t know. It was so normalized,” Naomi recalled.
