Saving children from
online predators

Twenty years ago, Alicia "Kozak" Kozakiewicz was abducted and raped by a man she’d met in an online chatroom. She was only 13 at the time. Her ordeal lasted four days, which was the time it took for the FBI to track down her kidnapper.

Since her rescue, Kozak has devoted her life to fighting child predators. She lobbied to enact Alicia's Law, which provides funding and resources to Internet Crimes Against Children task forces across the United States. She has testified before Congress, advises the FBI, and has provided training to help airlines spot human trafficking. Today, Kozak, who gives presentations to schools, parents, corporations and law enforcement among others, is a recognised motivational speaker, advocate and internet safety expert.

Kozak’s was one of the first widely-publicized cases of grooming and abduction of children on the internet. Since then, there has unfortunately been an explosion in this kind of crime. Today, child predators are no longer just standing at the gates to elementary schools, offering kids bags of candy on their way home. They can be in your living room, reaching out to children and adolescents through popular social networks and online games, lending a sympathetic adult ear, or hiding behind the anonymity of the web, pretending to be a fellow teen or a potential romantic interest.

In the US, more than 300,000 children are reported missing each year. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a non-for-profit child protection organization, estimates one in six missing children are likely victims of sex trafficking. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of child sexual abuse. The internet has allowed pedophiles to share child pornography online, and behind each image is a victim of sexual abuse. The NCMEC received 82m reports of suspicious online material in 2021. After reviewing 322m images, more than 19,100 victims were identified by law enforcement. “Sextortion” is also on the rise. This is where the predator blackmails a child on social media to collect intimate photos or extort money from them.

Ed Gavin, an investigator with the Westchester County Division of Child Services based New York state, has helped to locate over 500 children in the past 16 years. He says his best tools are shoe-leather detective work and the ability to use databases such as LexisNexis Risk Solutions, where publicly available information can be analyzed and compared with physical and digital clues to help track child abductors.

Working with photos and messages from a missing child’s social media sites, and phone numbers from cellphone records, he geo-locates the photos and uses data from LexisNexis Risk Solutions to narrow his search and reach out to collateral contacts. That often gets him to the child’s location within hours.

Online predators also leave digital traces that can be used by law enforcement agencies, fed into databases, and used to track them and locate colleagues, employers or second homes where the predators may be hiding or operating.

“The recovery rate in highest-risk cases for missing children rose to 97 percent in 2011 from 62 percent in 1990,” says Paul Eckloff of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, part of RELX, and a former supervisory Special Agent with the US Secret Service. “Today, more than 99 percent of missing children return home alive. The game-changer is information and analytics.”

Real-time detection

Stacia Hylton, a former director of the US Marshall Service, now on the board of directors of LexisNexis Special Services, says information and analysis can work in real time to allow law enforcement to apprehend child predators and rescue kids.

When a child is kidnapped or goes missing, almost all law enforcement and joint task forces are mobilized to prioritize all available resources to further the investigation of the missing child’s case. Investigators share and deconflict information about people or vehicles seen in the area, along with the schools, information about the child’s parents, friends or any other adults who may have had contact with the child. Information garnered from this is entered into various databases of publicly available information like motor-vehicle registrations and home addresses, and even court records. The goal is to identify people who may have known the child or their family, to narrow down the list of persons of interest or further the investigation with new leads.

“Any identifier we get we run through public records,” says Hylton. “We’ll have investigators on computers, making phone calls, interviewing individuals. Each lead takes you to the next one, not unlike like what is seen on TV crime shows where they get the ‘storyboard’ up.” Only instead of a whiteboard or a bulletin board with pictures and red connecting lines of information, it’s all going through a LexisNexis Risk Solutions database. “The tool assists the investigator, enabling him to pull the data together more quickly. Time is everything when saving a child’s life. For example, if we have information that shows that a vehicle was in this location within this time frame, that vehicle is associated with this person, who is connected to this phone number, we are able to mobilize investigators and prioritize the leads to have a greater success rate in finding the child and bring them to safety. It is far quicker than going round on foot knocking on doors. ” Hylton explains.

Gavin, who works on missing children cases mostly in Westchester County, a wealthy suburb north of New York City, says it’s the social media feeds that help him track down missing children and catch their abductors.

Social media photos, even when they are faked or stolen, are the bait used by predators to lure minors. Media images and usernames that predators use online can be fed into the LexisNexis system, which looks for matches and associations in publicly available information to identify people. “Once we start honing in on people, we’ll get a court order to look at their phones, and to get there we use LexisNexis, but more often than not, what makes the case is social media,” Gavin says.

The challenge of combating child sexual abuse is far harder when it occurs online only. But that does not mean that the trauma suffered by its victims is any less real.

In a recent survey by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, 67 percent of survivors of child sexual abuse said the distribution of their images impacts them differently than physical abuse because the distribution never ends, and the images are permanent. When these images are shared across the internet, child victims suffer re-victimization each time the image of their sexual abuse is viewed. The shame has driven some child victims to suicide.

The biggest obstacle to fighting this kind of crime is the enormity of the problem.

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US has emerged as the leading host of online child sexual exploitation material. The Internet Watch Foundation recently reported that the US hosts 69 percent of online child sexual exploitation material – more than any other country – a 228 percent increase from 2021.

For example, in the first nine months of 2021, Facebook flagged an incredible 55.6m pieces of content under “child nudity and sexual exploitation”– 20m more than the 12-month total for 2020. And Facebook isn’t alone; during the same period, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, and Snapchat removed millions of posts and images that fall foul of community guidelines regarding child abuse.

US companies are required by law to report child sexual abuse material to the NCMEC. In 2021, the organization’s CyberTipline received 29.4m reports, up from 21.7m in 2020. But crimes on the internet are not limited by national borders. Child sexual abuse material produced in one country can be downloaded in countries across the globe instantly. Reports to NCMEC’s CyberTipline can be traced to nearly every country in the world.

Every photo sent over the internet carries with it metadata that can show where and when it was taken, and has unique identifying data. With sophisticated software, one can trace the paths that a photo follows, and locate the people who have the material. Relational databases like LexisNexis Risk Solutions can show the links between people who have a particular photo and enable investigators to zero in on the person who first circulated the image.

And while the scale of criminal activity can appear insurmountable, law enforcement agencies are getting better at collaborating across jurisdictions and borders. They have come together to form INHOPE, a global network of 50 hotlines in 46 countries that provide the public with a way to anonymously report illegal content online with a focus on child sexual abuse material. Reports are reviewed by content analysts who classify the material and then share it with national law enforcement agencies.