Former cop details sex abuse signs parents should look out for

A former WA police woman who worked in child sex abuse has revealed the “terrifying” warning sign parents need to look out for.

A former detective and specialist child interviewer who worked in the child abuse unit has revealed her most controversial opinion when it comes to keeping your children safe.

Kristi McVee, based in Western Australia, joined the state’s police force in 2010 after seeing an advertisement encouraging women to join.

Kristi’s daughter was just nine months old at the time and her birth had made her need to protect children grow tenfold.

She spent the next 11 months getting fit enough to join and, after her daughter turned 2, Kristi was a fully fledged member of the Western Australian Police force working in the Pilbara region.

Kristi McVee joined the police force when her daughter was two years old. Picture: Supplied

A year into the job, an opportunity came up for her to be trained as a specialist child interviewer, meaning she would be able help gather information from children about a crime they had witnessed or when they had been the victim of an attack before passing the information to detectives.

Within four years of joining the force she became a detective herself and began to work on the child sex abuse squad looking into historical cases.

“It was after the Royal Commission into institutionalised child sex abuse in Western Australia,” Kristi told news.com.au.

“I was talking to people who had lived a lifetime with this trauma. I realised how devastating child sex abuse is to families, to people, to their lives, and how we just don’t put, as a community, more legislation in regards to sentencing and how little value we put on the trauma that’s left behind, and how little help is out there for victims of abuse.”

Kristi worked as a police officer for a decade, in various roles and locations, but for the final two years of her employment she was investigating 80 to 90 per cent of child sex abuse in a small region.

Kristi now shares helpful videos online, with some shocking parents. Picture: TikTok

“It was intense, because I was interviewing kids, investigating the cases, arresting the perpetrators and the offenders so I went from start to finish on a lot of files,” she said.

“It made me realise just how little parents know about child sexual abuse offender behaviour.”

She was also dealing with a lot of convicted sex offenders and had knowledge of their patterns of behaviour.

After 10 years and one day, Kristi resigned from the Western Australia Police Force – she’d started to develop anxiety and have panic attacks before work.

But it was her last child specialist interview, and the pleas of her family, that pushed Kristi over the edge to resign.

Between talking to a young girl about what had happened to her, Kristi would take breaks to talk to a colleague and ask advice on how next to proceed.
“I went to my partner that was there that day and I was like ‘this is going to f**k me up,’” Kristi said.

“I was already teetering on the edge and not being able to sleep and having flashbacks. I’m very visual persons so when someone tells me something, I’m already imagining it.

“Then this young girl told me this really horrendous thing that had happened to her and I was picturing it. My brain was having a real hard time.”

Kristi said after a year on the job she became a specialist child interviewer. Picture: Supplied.

Kristi started to have nightmares and flashbacks from all the jobs she had been to and,

eventually her undiagnosed anxiety became post traumatic stress disorder.

After her diagnosis, she walked into her superior’s office and resigned, taking some time to heal herself mentally after being strong for so many in their hardest time.

It was during this time that Kristi sat at her computer and began to write her new book, Operation KidSafe. She felt that during her time on the force there was so many red flags that parents weren’t aware of and her desire to help children hadn’t dimmed after she hung up her badge.

“I just felt like if parents had everything I knew about child sex offending and child abuse in their hands, if they had a resource that they could refer to then maybe some children out there won’t go through it or some parents out there would be able to help stop it,” she said.

“We can’t stop all types of abuse, unfortunately, but we can reduce the amount of time it takes to come forward.”

Kristi has released a book filled with advice for parents. Picture: Supplied

There are several parts to the book – including sex and consent, peer pressure, predators and protective behaviours.

Kristi said she also thinks that simply opening up the floor to having dialogue with your children about what is and isn’t appropriate could help immensely.

‘Terrifying’ warning signs

It was in this vein that she started her TikTok account – tiktokcop81 – where she answers people’s questions and shares red flags to look out for.

Her most polarising video to date has been on the topic of whether adults should be friends with kids online.

In the video, she recounted circumstances she had come across where it went terribly wrong.

“I don’t think adults should be friends with kids,” she explains in the viral video.

“I had a case where a mother of a teenage boy had befriended his friendship group and had them on Snapchat and Instagram.

“During that time she was talking to these young men and became sexually involved with not one, not two, but three of them.”

The shocking revelation left many users reeling, with some stating: “This is why kids shouldn’t have the internet.”

Others called it “terrifying” and “worrying”.

Kristi also shares statistics and busts myths about predators on her social media account in a bid to help other parents.

Originally published as Former cop details sex abuse signs parents should look out for