STARKVILLE — Starkville police officer Chris Jackson recalls seeing a story that went viral last month about a child kidnapped at a Dallas Mavericks game and trafficked.
Instances like that aren’t relegated to far away places or even big cities, Jackson told an audience of about 40 parents and guardians in the Starkville Academy gymnasium on Thursday. He pointed to a case earlier this month when a Starkville man was arrested for trying to meet an 11-year-old girl in Columbus for sexual purposes.
Luckily, in that case, the child’s mother saw correspondence between the suspect and her daughter and alerted the police. Other cases, such as that in Dallas, don’t have such fortunate endings.
“It’s very real. It happens in our community,” Jackson said. “… We’ve seen a 97 percent increase in child exploitation cases in the United States throughout the last year. That’s almost 100 percent. It’s a growing epidemic.” Jackson said.
Jackson spoke to parents as part of an event called “Let’s Talk About It” focused on keeping children safe from trafficking and sexual exploitation. He focused on threats that predators pose and how best to keep their children safe, especially with respect to how their kids use the internet and social media, hitting on four main points: internet safety awareness, grooming, online enticements and using parental controls to keep children safe.
“I can’t give you details of cases, and I really don’t want to, but I’ll let you know that Starkville has been investigating more and more of these cases throughout time,” he said.
Jackson guided parents through a variety of topics, including recognizing grooming, the importance of monitoring a child’s activity on gaming consoles and social media and how having difficult and awkward conversations with your child is important to keeping them safe.
Grooming, a process by which predators create an emotional connection with children with the intent of sexually abusing them, can start online but can evolve into adults outside of the family spending an inordinate amount of time with the child, gifts and attention, becoming a “provider” to the child or isolating them physically or emotionally.
Parents can monitor their children’s social media looking through their electronic devices. Alternatively, there are apps and software that allow parents to see the contents of a child’s phone or tablet from their own personal devices. Chat rooms on gaming consoles and instant messaging services like Discord are frequently used by children to talk to strangers and sometimes go unmonitored by parents. This makes them the perfect place for predators to get close to children, Jackson said.
After Jackson’s presentation concluded, he offered numerous resources and programs to help parents keep their kids safe, like RAINN, the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization and apps like Bark and Canopy, which allow parents to keep closer tabs on how their children are using technology and the internet. Afterwards, he and others from the Starkville Police Department took a number of questions from the parents.
The event was sponsored by What’s for Dinner?, ALFA Insurance and Jason Bailey Agency and hosted by Starkville Academy.
Cindy Brown, owner of frozen casserole company What’s for Dinner?, explained that the idea to host the event came from a conversation she had with the police department at Coffee with a Cop.
“I felt like if we could save a life, then we’ve done something good today. That’s why I wanted to do this. Because we could save someone’s life by sharing this information,” she said.
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