Sheriff Dave Gomez, a deputy with the Boise County Sheriff’s Office, recently gave numerous presentations to different groups in Dillon on the hidden dangers to children of social media, a hunting ground for sexual predators.
It’s long been recognized and decried as a source of distraction for children. But social media also ranks as a leading gateway to a gangland full of other, far more dramatic dangers for teens and younger kids, according to a law enforcement expert on the topic who recently spoke in Dillon.
“When I started getting to know the students and I started seeing the problems,” said Sheriff Dave Gomez, a deputy with the Boise County Sheriff’s Office who became aware of the great dangers presented by social media use after he began serving as a school resource officer at a middle school in Idaho about a decade ago.
“I started seeing that almost all the problems at the middle school revolved around social media—whether it was bullying, fighting, drugs, suicidal thoughts, all kinds of things—everything had to do with social media,” asserted Gomez less than a minute into his hour-plus talk “Hidden Dangers: Internet and Social Media” at the Pioneer Event Center in Dillon.
And that wasn’t it as far as problems related to social media use for his approximately 1200 middle students—far from it.
He found that kids using seemingly harmless and popular social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, SnapChat, Facebook and Roblox could face blackmail, prostitution, pornography, illegal drug use, and more, according to Gomez, who went on to work as a resource officer at a high school with around twice as many students as the middle school, and then to a K-12 school district with around just 300 students. “So, I went from big middle school, to giant high school, to little tiny school. What I noticed was that across the board, they have the same problems,” said Gomez, whose local presentation was sponsored by the 406 Be the Change Coalition.
A former engineer who went into law enforcement in his mid-30s, Gomez began uncovering many of the more serious problems after he set up a fake Facebook account, under the persona of a hip teenage girl who invited the most popular students at the school to ‘friend’ her.
Within three or four months, that fake account netted over 400 friends from students at the middle school, some of them bringing thousands of their own Facebook friends. “As that account grew and I started paying more attention,” recalled Gomez. “I started seeing we had sexual predators in the neighborhoods where our school was. When we
would have a sexual predator arrested, I would run their name through my friends list—my fake friends list. And what started happening was I started seeing that a lot of the kids had mutual friends with the sex offenders, which meant that the sex offenders had my kids at the middle school kids as friends on their social media,” added Gomez.
Some of those predators got children to send them sexually charged photos of themselves, often under false pretenses presented to them as just fun and games, like sharing foot photos or engaging in plank challenges.
“I personally have probably taken reports from six year-old boys and girls who have sent out naked photos of themselves. They’re basically home all day long, on Roblox, on whatever social media. They get a mentor coach. That mentor coach is somebody online who’s coaching that kid how to send their naked pictures. And in return, they get Robux,” said Gomez of a form of social media currency.
“They get little widget for games that they want. They get all kinds of things. And what parents don’t understand is that a kid that’s that age, if you tell them you’re going to give them something for taking off their shirt, they’re like ‘Cool, I took off my shirt for bath time last night for free, now I’m getting something cool out of it,’” said Gomez, himself a parent.
“These people, when they get these pictures they use them for three things: no. 1, they use them for personal pleasure; no. 2, they use them for sextortion,” said Gomez of a criminal practice that involves extortionists threatening children that their parents, friends and classmates will be shown the illicit photos unless they send money or debit cards or engage in sexual acts with the sextortionist.
“The sextortion is usually $400 or $500,” said Gomez of what also be an adult. “As soon as you pay that $500, they say, ‘Hey, thanks for the $500. In two weeks, you’ll have another payment of $500 until we reach $5,000.’ As soon as you reach $5,000, we’re going on up and they will bilk that person for everything they have,” said Gomez, who added that the third thing predators use those photos for is to stock child pornography sites.
Teens and younger kids often also get convinced to share illicit photos of themselves with classmates for kicks, or with adults in exchange for money, drugs and alcohol—all of which have become easier for young people to acquire since the rise of social media, according to Gomez.
“Not much changes in the consumption of alcohol,” said Gomez, who has also worked for the Idaho City Police Department and Meridian Police Department. “What has changed is the availability. You can go onto Snapchat anytime, anyplace and get alcohol.”
“And now kids, especially girls,” continued Gomez, “they can trade pictures for alcohol. They can trade pictures for drugs. They can trade pictures for money. And that is happening more and more,” said Gomez, who noted that boys often get tricked into sending photos of themselves to male pederasts posing online as lonely young girls. “They are basically showing kids how to sell their bodies for money,” said Gomez of online criminals who can take the problems a few steps further by using the photos to lure victims into sex trafficking.
“A lot of people when they hear ‘sex trafficking’ they think we are kidnapping somebody from a foreign country and we’re keeping them at the bottom of a hotel for sex work. But it happens a lot more commonly than that,” insisted the veteran law enforcement officer.
“An eighth grader who takes one topless picture of herself— she can share that over and over and over and over again, week after week after week after week, that one picture. And she’s getting $30 to $80 each time she shares that picture, to the tune of I get parents whose kids have $1000 in their #Venmo accounts, in their #Paypal accounts. They’re like, ‘Officer Gomez, somebody put money in my daughter’s account.’ ‘Well, I say, ‘She is selling pictures,’” said Gomez of a difficult conversation he’s been forced to have with numerous parents.
“Now that they’ve made all this easy money, it’s going to be super hard for them to go and work at McDonalds. It’s going to be super hard for them to go be a waitress or do any kind of work because ‘Hey, I can make $200 if I click and share a few times, or I can go all week and work at McDonalds for $200. So, so they start getting groomed into sex trafficking. Then pretty soon they can make a video,” continued Gomez of an escalation of the crisis that can keep getting worse for the victim even as it seems to be getting more and more profitable.
“I get parents who call me, ‘Officer Gomez, my 18 year-old daughter is at the Boise Airport; she’s flying to Florida, she’s flying to California to make a pornography film.’ Those will pay $5,000 to $10,000, the first film. And what they will do,” continued Gomez, outlining the fate of some victims who travel a long way from home to earn what they believe will be a big, quick, easy payday,
“They’ll pay them a little bit of cash, enough to survive, and then pay them in drugs. And what that does is it makes them dependent on the people who flew them to California or flew them to Florida. Now, they’re in sex trafficking.”
A state authority on sex trafficking said social media is not the only way victims get pulled into the sex trafficking, but that it is a popular hunting ground for predators.
“What you see is a lot of grooming,” Grace Zitzer told the Dillon Tribune of the use of social media by criminals to get young victims ensnared in sex trafficking.
“They spend a lot of time building that relationship and building trust, alienating victims from their families,” added Zitzer, of how social media gets leveraged to propel victims into sex trafficking.
“They say they will take care and provide for them. Often times what we see is that person will buy them a bus or plane ticket,” added Zitzer, a Beaverhead County High School graduate who has been a member of the Missoula County Sex Trafficking Task Force since 2016.
“Perpetrators do a very good job of making teen believe it will be best thing that ever happened to them. They have no idea how scary it will be. And it is very challenging to get out of it,” said Zitzer, who suggested anyone who himself or herself caught in sex trafficking immediately call 911 or alert law enforcement in some way.
“Once a kid gets into it—it’s really, really hard for us to get them out,” said Gomez of the quicksand effect that sex trafficking can exert on the lives of young people drawn to it by the lure of money—and then pulled further and further down into it by drug addiction and further from family members.
“So, the trick is stopping them before they get into it. But again that’s super hard,” said Gomez, noting that many children are far more sophisticated than their parents are at using computers and social media, allowing them to hide evidence and warning signs that they could be straying into dangerous relationships from the very persons who could pull them back to safety.
“They spend 10, 12, 15, 20 hours a day on their phone. How good are they going to be? Very good. Plus, they have a team, they have coaches, they have 24-hour-a-day support from all their friends on how to learn and how to get around parental controls,” said Gomez, who emphasized parents could still limit their child’s exposure to social media dangers in a number of ways, starting by limiting the number of friends their children have on Facebook.
“I started educating parents as well. When the parents would call, I would say, ‘Hey, do you know how many #Facebook friends your kid has? They have 3,000 Facebook friends.’ And the parents were like, ‘Well, I don’t see why that’s a problem,’” recounted Gomez of an all-too-typical conversation he’s had with many parents over their children’s social media use.
“There are a lot of reasons that’s a problem,” asserted Gomez.
“So, I came up with one of my first rules of social media for kids, and it was my ‘200 rule’—have less than 200 friends on any given platform, and have touched them on their shoulder. That way, if a parent called and said, ‘Hey, my kid is being bullied, I looked, ‘Hey they have 3000 friends, why don’t you get rid of some friends?’ Let’s start there. And they’d say, ‘You’re asking me to punish my kids by getting rid of friends?’ ‘No, I’m asking you to protect them’” continued Gomez.
“And the other thing is that once somebody has so many friends, people become anonymous. And once you become anonymous, you start saying things that you wouldn’t say in real life, that people wouldn’t say in person. So I like to keep ’em under 200. That keeps it nice and friendly with people you know, and it’s a lot safer than anything else,” said Gomez, before outlining a three-part plan to mitigate the impacts of social media relationships that turn ugly and degenerate into bullying.
“Number one: you stop talking with the person you are having a problem with…. stop communicating with them. Number two: Block and delete,” said Gomez of a feature every device should be equipped with. “The ultimate block and delete is to turn off the device and throw it in the drawer.
“Number three: This is the most important step, the step that gets missed—tell all your friends not to send you screenshots of whatever the person is saying,” said Gomez of a practice that can allow a bullying relationship to perpetuate through people outside the relationship.
“These three steps will solve it almost every time.”
Gomez also suggested some more general measures parents can take to help try to keep you child safe from social media and Internet dangers, such as:
*Prohibiting your child from getting his or her own smart phone until the age of 15 or 16.
*Enforcing rules related to age limits on use of social media applications, even if it means deleting them from devices. “Get them off social media. Wait as long as you can for this to happen—as long as you possibly can,” emphasized Gomez, who offered a particular warning in relation to the popular Net application Snapchat.
“Kids start getting de-sensitized all the time as soon as they have SnapChat. If it were up to me, you’d be 18 before you got SnapChat at all,” said Gomez of the application he said offers a link to the world’s most visited pornography site. “It’s that dangerous, that de-sensitizing, and it puts that many things in your kid’s lives that they don’t need.”
*Keep your guard up and audit all the applications your children use, even ones that seem designed just for children. “What parents have done by giving their kids Roblox is they’ve put their kids into a nice little neat package for predators to hunt them. Predators don’t go to adult places looking for kids, they go to kid’s places. And predators know, Minecraft, Roblox, Mario Games, those things are all going to be filled with little kids, and that’s what they’re after,” warned Gomez.
*Don’t allow cellphones or other devices that your child can use to access the Net in their bedrooms or behind a closed door in any room.
*Work hard to connect with your children and engage in activities with them to deepen and sustain the connection.
“The kids that can resist sending pictures out, they know what they’re worth. They know what their family values are. They know what their family stands for, and they’re solid on it. So that when somebody from outside their family comes in and tries to give them new values, they can say, ‘No.’ When somebody offers them drugs, they can say, ‘No,’ because they know what their family values are worth. They know that it’s super important to their family that they make decisions that represent the family correctly,” advised Gomez.
“And that’s what parents should strive for—to build that respect, to build those family values, and that makes a huge difference,” said Gomez, citing family activities like hiking, motorbiking, skiing, art.
“Something you do as a family where you spend time showing your kids what your values are, not just telling them, showing them.
“Because I see many parents who spend just as much time with their phones as their kids if not more.”
Source: The Dillon Tribune | https://www.dillontribune.com/
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