News : Internet crimes officer warns parents in Vinton of dangers of on-line predators

Claudia (not her real name) could not wait for the pointless middle school assembly to get over. She had plans to meet her boyfriend.

Not knowing what the assembly was about, she sat there, annoyed at first, at the man who talked about the “dangers” of meeting strangers. She rolled her eyes. She knew that her boyfriend was not at all like that. The speaker, Mike Ferjak, continued talking. Pretty soon he was using the same lines that Claudia’s boyfriend had been writing to her. She started listening. By the time that Ferjak was done talking, Claudia, age 14, a middle school student in a small town in northern Iowa, was in tears. She realized that she had nearly become the victim of an Internet sex predator. The age of the man she had planned to meet the day of the assembly: 39. Ferjak, a lead investigator for the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, told an audience in Vinton on Thursday night that middle school aged children are most easily targeted because “they have not yet learned to become suspicious.” “They do not understand the threat. “You do," he told the audience at Blessed Hope Church, which sponsored the event. And, Ferjak warned, there are millions of American children at risk at every moment of every day. “We are not going to arrest ourselves out of this problem,” Ferjak told an audience of about 25 people. “There are too many of them and not enough of us.” The key, said Ferjak, is education of students and parents. Also, he said, parents have to let their children know that they will handle a report of someone trying to entice them without over reacting. “Kids fear that if they tell their parents about an adult wanting to see nude photos of them, that their parents will say, ‘You are never using the computer again!’” he said. That fear prevents children from reporting something to an adult that can do something about the problem. Ferjak presented the audience with some statistics about children, the Internet, and on-line predators. “At any given moment there are 40 million children – probably more – on line,” he said. During a child’s first year on the Internet, one in five are solicited for sex. Seventy percent are female; 97 percent of victims of predators met them on line. One in 11 children under age 17 were harassed or threatened on-line in the past year. One in 33 children were actively pursued by someone they met on line in the past year. The real danger, said Ferjak, is not porn web sites – it is the web sites where children go for innocent reasons. That’s because the predators know to go where the kids are. On-line gaming communities and other sites for children are often considered “target-rich environments” by those who are looking for children to exploit. One Iowa teenage girl was even targeted by someone in an on-line support group that was recommended to her by a therapist. Ferjak also told the audience that every bit of information on their computer can be retrieved quickly unless they physically destroy the hard drive. He suggested that those who get rid of their computers take out the hard drive first. For more information about the Iowa Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task force, and how to protect your child, click HERE.