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By Aaron Allen, The Seattle Medium
There are an estimated 500,000 online predators active each day in the U.S., and children and teens are especially susceptible to being groomed or manipulated by opportunistic adults that they meet online. According to the F.B.I., over 50 percent of the victims of online sexual exploitation are between the ages of 12 and 15, with an estimated 89 percent of sexual advances directed at children taking place in internet chat rooms or through instant messaging.
Established in 1998, The Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program (ICAC) aids local and state law enforcement in developing an operational response to child sexual exploitation facilitated through technology and the internet. This initiative has responded to the increasing numbers of children and teenagers using the internet, the growing number of internet images depicting child sexual abuse, and an increasing amount of internet activity by individuals looking to connect with and exploit children and teens. According to officials, the ICAC has reviewed 7 million reports of online child exploitation, resulting in the arrest of more than 134,000 people, and the organization has conducted nearly 194,000 presentations on Internet safety.
Locally, the ICAC, based out of The Seattle Police Department, is made up of 120 federal and state law enforcement agencies across the state. According to Laura Harmon, Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, ICAC receives about 100 cyber texts a day in the State of Washington that they follow up on as leads to possible online crimes committed against children.
“A cyber text is a lead that we get from online resources,” says Harmon. “So, that can be a civilian reporting a case directly to the cyber text line, or it can be as large as a company reporting that they found child sexual abuse material or evidence of abuse of children on their platform, and they are letting law enforcement in their particular area know.”
“Another could be a witness report via 911,” Harmon continues. “Maybe it’s a family member, maybe it’s Geek Squad doing an analysis on a computer, and they find evidence on a device. Third, we have peer to peer. Others can be undercover chatting, and that is where an undercover officer who is specifically trained can pose either as a child or an adult with access to children and try to figure out if there is a sexualized interest in children on that particular platform.”
There are a variety of dangers lurking online that affect minors in different ways. The internet has expanded the way that young people communicate and interact with their peers, as many use popular social media sites to stay in touch with their friends and meet new people. Even on websites geared towards children and young adults, there are often adult online predators who look to interact with children. In the most serious cases, this can lead to real-life encounters.
In addition, 58 percent of parents report being concerned about the threats that strangers pose online. However, many of them are fighting an uphill battle to protect their children as it is reported that forty percent of children remove privacy settings in order to attract more friends or followers while using social media.
According to the ICAC, their investigations uncover different types of abuse and the many ways in which offenders exploit children. One such tactic involves using explicit photos of the minor that the online predator uses for what ICAC calls “sextortion” or blackmail. In over a quarter of all reported exploitation incidents, the online predator will ask a child for sexually explicit photos of themselves. Four percent of children receive aggressive solicitations from adults online, including attempts to contact the children in person or over the phone.
“Sometimes we get these cases on a hands-on investigation, meaning we get a report about an abuse of a child in our community, and we later find out about depictions of that child or other children from the internet that were found on that particular offender’s devices,” says Harmon. “And then unfortunately, and this is becoming very common, sextortion. This is when people are obtaining sexually explicit images of other people online, usually children in our area, and then attempting to blackmail them into sending more images, or money, or they will release those images to all of their contacts on their social media platform.”
A core battle in ICAC’s efforts to combat online abuse is the desensitization of the crimes through propaganda and word usage. Terms such as “child pornography,” according to experts, trivialize the “dramatic impact” of predators and exploitation of images.
“It (word terms) can desensitize the content,” says Harmon. “Meaning that, and this is one reason why we are combating the term ‘child pornography,’ because that trivializes the real dramatic impact of these images.”
This exploitation can possess lasting traumatic effects on children and their families. These crimes can inflict future traumas on victims. These crimes can impact a victim’s employment, ongoing harm on interpersonal and social skills. Although a victim’s incident may have occurred as a small child, the ramifications can be felt well into one’s adulthood, particularly if there is a possibility that the images may still be out in the ether.
“The impact of ICAC crimes cannot be understated,” Harmon emphasizes. “It is a very high level of trauma to these victims. I had the unique opportunity to speak with and hear from some of these victims, and they are traumatized day in and day out, not just because of what the offender did to them when they were small, but also because they know that their images continue to be distributed online and people continue to seek out their specific images and maybe even obsess over them specifically.”
“These victims experience ongoing harm, they have trouble getting jobs, they are afraid that every person they meet has an agenda. This affects them emotionally, and the trauma can be lasting if help is not available to them. These crimes are not victimless; not ‘just pictures.’ The depicted victims continue to suffer trauma as a result of their abuse being widely spread and used for illicit purposes,” Harmon concludes.
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