Preventing Cyber Luring and Child Victimization

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Children can be victimized over the cyber world from hundreds or thousands of miles away. Cyber luring and victimization have been significant issues from the beginning of the internet. As technology and the internet advance, it becomes easier for more people to access the cyber world. Unsupervised children can quickly fell victim to cyber luring and bullying.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) provides valuable resources related to missing and exploited children. A quick look at the website, we see many missing children in their teens. Often missing teens are runaway children. Runaways rarely go on their own. They usually have accomplices. Often those accomplices are nothing but adult predators. Children would not run away with other children. Adults provide them with the needed resources required to stay away from home. Adult predators can lure children in person, but it is unlikely that children will contact long enough with strange adults to plan a runaway. The Internet and cyber communications through phones and all the new communication apps make it easy for children to fall victims to adults who help them run away.

Here we see how cyber luring and missing children are connected and how law enforcement should work harder on the issue of internet victimization to protect children from being kidnapped and physically abused. The Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program (ICAC) can have a tremendous impact on preventing children from accessing some apps often used for children’s victimization. Usually, children are found through apps and social media where they list their data and share pics and other private information that helps predators reach them or even see where they live and go to school.

The NCMEC can also benefit parents and children by providing preventive strategies based on their data and statistics. Parents would not let their children go out at night, but they would not mind allowing their children to spend the whole evening in the cyber world connected with complete strangers, whether adults or other children. Internet relationships can last months, or even years, which build blind trust in the children and full faith in who they are communicating with. Some children are aware they are talking with adults and might get manipulated into thinking the adult would provide them with freedom or illegal things such as alcohol and drugs. Other children might be deceived to believe they are in a relationship with someone their age, whether a friendly relationship or cyber romance.