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The case of an Edmonton teenager who went missing only to turn up in Oregon with a man now facing kidnapping charges has renewed more debate about how to protect children from online threats.

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The 13-year-old girl from Edmonton was found in Oregon on July 2 after disappearing on June 24. Law enforcement has since filed kidnapping, rape and sexual assault charges against a 40-year-old Oregon man accused of abducting the teenager. Back in Edmonton, police are preparing to lay tantalizing charges. The case of the Edmonton teenager has renewed the debate about how children and parents should safely navigate social media. The director of Canada’s online child sexual abuse and exploitation reporting hotline says there has been a 120 per cent increase in baiting reports in the past six months. Just this week, Fort Saskatchewan RCMP issued a warning about social media extortion after receiving six reports of online extortion since May. In this case, RCMP said the suspects are targeting men between the ages of 17 and 25 by starting fake online relationships, convincing the young men to send intimate images and then threatening to distribute the images unless they make money.

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Stephen Sauer, director of Cybertip.ca, said the agency previously received between 60 and 70 baiting reports from the public and now averages 155 reports per month. “What we’re seeing is a subset of enticement that would be extortion or ‘blackmail.’ We have had a 150 percent increase in these types of reports in the last six months,” he said. “In June alone, we had 100 reports that were just blackmail.” Typically, cases involve someone contacting a person, getting them to engage in sexual activity via live streaming, or forcing them to send sexual photos or videos. Once the perpetrators have the intimate content, the victim is threatened with money.

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Seventy-seven percent of those cases, in the last few months, were on Instagram and Snapchat. About 60 percent of extortion victims are young people between the ages of 15 and 17, and about 75 percent of victims are male. Perpetrators can create multiple accounts using a photo of a young woman similar in age to those being targeted. “We seem to have normalized online sexual image sharing in society, and that message has been normalized for young men as well,” Sauer said. “They are very quick to engage in this, not that we blame the victims, because also these people who do this to them are very aggressive and persistent.” He said that even if an intimate photo is not shared, sometimes the perpetrator will take a photo from a victim’s profile and edit it to create a sexual image of the young person. This is then used to try to force them to comply.

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“You can imagine how quickly kids conform when they’re in that crisis situation,” Sauer said. One of the things parents can do early on is to talk to their kids about technology, ask about the apps they use or how a toy works, and make it a habit, like asking about their day at school or for friends. “Learning a little bit as a parent about this technology is a really important part,” Sauer said. “It also helps in terms of your ability to help a kid set up their profile and set up their privacy settings on that particular app and understand exactly how it works.” Parents can also talk to their kids about online sexual violence, making sure kids know if someone makes them feel uncomfortable, or if there are offers of money or gifts in exchange for something, that they don’t need to get involved.

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“You’re there to help them if someone connects with them and that they don’t have to comply with those kinds of requests or unwanted sexual attention,” Sauer said. If children become more withdrawn, angry or secretive about what they do online, or there is a significant increase in online activity, this may be a sign to parents that something is up. “The parent should trust their instincts and if they feel like something isn’t right, they should get more involved and connect with the youth to try to dig a little deeper into what’s going on,” Sauer said. But Sauer added that tech companies need to step up to ensure children aren’t being exploited on their platforms. “From our agency’s perspective, we think there’s a greater responsibility here for companies in this space to identify when child sexual exploitation is happening on their platform and make sure they’re able to prevent it from happening in the future,” he said. . . [email protected]

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