Arming the young against online predator exploitation

Since her abduction at 13, Alicia Kozakiewicz has been on a mission to a educate on internet safety.

Julie Inman-Grant and Alicia Kozakiewicz from the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

Alicia Kozakiewicz was 13 in 2002, living in Pennsylvania and spending her time on a desktop computer playing games and talking to friends online. One was a boy she hadn’t met. She believed he was about her age. For eight months they chatted before arranging to meet in secret on New Year’s Day. Then the horror started.

The boy was a 38-year-old man, a monster who abducted her, stripped her and shackled her with a dog collar to a bed in his basement. He raped, beat and tortured her for four days, broadcasting the horror online. She was fully ­expecting to die.

His last words to her were: “I’m beginning to like you too much. Tonight we’re going for a ride.”

Only a tip-off to the FBI by someone watching the broadcast, who identified Ms Kozakiewicz from a missing persons bulletin, set in train her eventual rescue.

Since her abduction, it has been the mission of Ms Kozakiewicz, now 31, to educate and advocate for better understanding of online predators and internet safety.

She said today’s 13-year-old had a great deal more to navigate online than she did in 2002. “There’s so much more online ­access now on both the child’s part and also the predator’s part,” she said at a cyber conference in Melbourne on Tuesday.

“Young people are not going to give up their technology. We need technology — it’s great — but we need to know how to use it safely,” she said. “The worldwide web means all the good and all the evil in the world is on the web.

“When it comes down to it, the kids are really on their own. When they’re holding that device, it is their decision. They have the power to make bad decisions.

“All we can do is help them be conscious of their option not to send that photo, to stop that conversation, not to walk out the door to meet a stranger,” said Ms Koza­kiewicz, now director of outreach and global impact at the Inter­national Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman-Grant, said smartphone technology and gaming were creating new pathways for grooming and “sexploitation … One big trend we are seeing on the pedophile sites on both the clear web and the dark web are forced self-produced child sex images. Young kids, six or seven years old, being tricked into engaging in sexual acts online, which are then shared. Sometimes you can hear the parents talking in the next room”.

Ms Inman-Grant said sextortion scams were the next iteration of the Nigerian scams. “This is where 12- or 13-year-olds might think they are the next Bollywood star or Justin Bieber, and after a few interactions … they’re asked for a sexy Skype or a nude image. Then the extortion begins.”

She said the scale of online child sexual exploitation was almost too large to fathom. Last fin­ancial year, her team investigated more than 12,000 individual items of illegal online content, including over 8000 depicting child sexual abuse. Approximately 35,000 images and videos were referred to authorities for take-down.

“Behind each of these numbers is a person, like Alicia, being exploited. This is very much about people, not numbers,” Ms Inman-Grant said.