DiGirolamo: The predator playbook every parent needs to know about

By John DiGirolamo | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

The Internet is a 24\7 how-to manual. Unfortunately, it’s also available for predators to gather advice to target and manipulate your child. All in a matter of seconds, simply by asking. Staca Shehan, Vice President at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children recently said, “We’re also seeing offenders enter questions asking for guides or tutorials on how to groom or recruit children and do it more efficiently.” The following summarizes the ways predators go after your kids:

Predator Grooming Tactics:

1. Victim Targeting: Constantly seek children and teens to interact with. It is quick and easy to find others online. Predators seek anyone who is vulnerable and willing to interact in a chat room, on social media or in online gaming.
2. Information Gathering: Begin with typically innocent questions to find common ground and identify vulnerabilities. Does your child listen to Taylor Swift? Guess what subject the predator will start talking to your teen about.
3. Gaining Trust: Use gathered information to show topics, experiences or interests they have in common with the victim. They’ll take advantage of emotional weaknesses. Should a teen be upset with her parents, an online stranger could connect through comparable experiences.
4. Filling Unmet Needs: This can be material, financial, emotional, or psychological needs of the potential victim. Predators will offer money for images. It may start out with something perfectly legal, like a picture of the kid’s feet, but as the dollar value increases, so does the explicit imagery. With emotional and psychological needs, it may include false assurances of love, affirmation, attention, acceptance, stability, or self-esteem building.
5. Isolation: Predators seek to isolate victims from friends, peers, and trusted adults such as parents, siblings, teachers, coaches and other family members. This tactic prolongs the criminal’s influence to convince the victim that their family and friends are untrustworthy.
6. Manipulation: As the predator becomes more embedded in the teen’s life, they’ll expose the minor to sexually related activities and topics, which will increase in intensity. They’ll then request explicit pictures, physical interaction or extort the minor for money. 
7. Shame: Once an explicit digital image is sent, the criminal is counting on your child’s embarrassment and desire to limit the image’s distribution. Your child may show signs of depression, outbursts, suicidal thoughts, and physically destructive traits because of the predator’s actions. 
8. Normalization of Sexual Activities: The predator will attempt to normalize sexual activities and pornographic videos to convince your teen to take part in behaviors they would not normally engage in. Because pornography is so prevalent in our society, it’s easy for the criminal to convince your child, “Everyone’s doing it.”
9. Maintaining Control: Predators will take all hope away from their victims to create a dependency. Often, they achieve this through threats against the victim, family members and friends. Threats will include exposing explicit pictures and videos to the victim’s family and friends, also known as sextortion.

Other Predator Tactics Weaved into the Playbook:

1. Offer money, drugs, alcohol, vaping devices or other items of value in exchange for explicit pictures.
2. Pretend to work for a modeling agency to obtain images.
3. Establish a phony friendship or a romantic relationship, also known as catfishing.
4. Secretly record sexually explicit videos during live chats.
5. Get the kid’s online passwords and access those accounts to steal sexual images or videos. The photos might show digital pictures of other people.
6. Threaten to create and post explicit images or videos using digital-editing tools or artificial intelligence. 
7. Threaten to commit suicide or harm himself if the teen does not provide explicit images or videos.
8. Threaten to post their sexually explicit conversations.
9. Purchase used or stolen phones to mine for explicit images.

Most parents underestimate the online risks to their children. Knowing these predator tactics help parents know what to watch for and topics to discuss with their child. The author recommends frequent conversations, checking their phone regularly and reviewing all apps installed on his or her phone.

John DiGirolamo is a speaker and critically acclaimed Christian author of four books, featuring stories of police officers, spiritual warfare, human trafficking advocates and survivors and a pro-life doctor. His third book, It’s Not About the Predator: A Parent’s Guide to Internet & Social Media Safety, is a practical 65-page booklet to help parents keep their kids safe online. The book details the predator’s playbook, grooming tactics, and specific proactive actions for parents. John is the Board President of Bringing our Valley Hope, whose objective is to end human trafficking in central Colorado through education and survivor support. He’s also on the parent’s council of Defend Young Minds, a nonprofit that equips parents to defend their children from the harm of pornography. John is a member of the Chaffee County Patriots, and his books sell on Amazon. More information can be found: https://itisnotabout.com/

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.