Boozman summit covers protecting children online
Posted on Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Mary Kozakiewiez found out just how real online predators were in the time it took to serve dessert after a family dinner on New Year’s Day in 2002.
Kozakiewiez’s daughter, Alicia, who was 13 at the time, slipped out of her Pittsburgh house on a dark, cold night to see if the man she’d been communicating with over the Internet would actually show up at her house like he had told her earlier that week.
“ And that was nearly the last time I saw her, ” Kozakiewiez said.
Alicia was kidnapped by her “ online friend, ” Scott W. Tyree, 38 at the time. Kozakiewiez said Tyree took Ali- cia back to his house in Herndon, Va., and chained her in his bedroom, where he raped and tortured her.
“ She was chained up like an animal by a sadistic Internet predator, ” Kozakiewiez said.
Luckily for the Kozakiewiez family, Tyree showed an image of Alicia via a webcam to someone online, who recognized Alicia from the news. That person called the police, and Alicia was returned to her family four days later.
Kozakiewiez told that story to a group of local and national experts on Internet safety who gathered Monday at a Child Internet Safety Summit at Har-Ber High School in Springdale. The summit’s message to the community was to, “ Educate children on Internet safety as soon as they start clicking the mouse. ”
“ It does, and it can, happen to anyone, ” Kozakiewiez said. “ It happened in my family because a naive and vulnerable child was seduced by a sadistic adult. ”
The summit, hosted by U. S. Rep. John Boozman, included presentations from a panel of experts and a question-and-answer time. Topics such as how to monitor Internet use and how to protect children from online predators headlined the day.
“ The child predator problem is an epidemic problem, ” Boozman said. “ They come into your home unannounced and unwelcome. The Internet is a great tool, but it’s also a great danger. Our hope today is to come up with some proven solutions and some tools to give you. ”
Boozman said the idea of a summit came after Tori Bryan, a Fayetteville High School student, and Kelly Zega, a spokeswoman for Cox Communications, told him about a realization that Bryan had while attending an Internet safety summit in Washington, D. C.
“ They asked a group of 10 of us how many had taken an Internet course and all of us raised our hands, ” Br yan said. “ Then they asked us how many had taken an Internet safety course and only one of us raised our hand. ”
Bryan said that spurred her to take some action and to ask the congressman for help.
“ We went to his office in (Washington, D. C. ) and told him about the summit, ” Bryan said. “ Then he stood up from his chair and told us that there was something his office could do. ”
Boozman said he wanted to use the summit to raise awareness about child Internet safety.
Candace Taylor, assistant U. S. attorney for child exploitation, said child Internet safety is an issue that’s being “ addressed from the top office (the president ) all the way down. ” Taylor added that one of the biggest problems is that children do not know the do’s and don’ts of the Internet.
“ There’s an anonymity online that makes children feel comfortable posting personal information online, ” Taylor said.
Rachel Johnston, a training coordinator with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said that more and more teens are using social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Xanga and Friendster to communicate with people they know and some they don’t. She said the problem is teens don’t realize how accessible those sites are on a global scale and that teens often post personal information and photos that can be seen by more people than they realize.
Zega used a survey done in May by Cox Communications and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to show just how many children commit that “ stranger-danger no-no. ”
“ Sixty-four percent of teens readily post photos or videos of themselves online, and 58 percent of teens post information about where they live, ” she said.
Johnston said a big step in stopping teens and children from giving out personal information online is parents, educators and trusted adults getting involved and teaching the minors about Internet safety, what a predator is, and how to react when something online makes them uncomfortable.
“ We want to make sure they know what’s out there and what to do if they encounter (a predator ), and that if something makes them uncomfortable, they can report it to a trusted adult, ” Johnston said.
Bill Phelan, a detective with the Fayetteville Police Department’s sex crimes unit, told the group that children can become victims of online sexual predators even in Northwest Arkansas.
“ We were originally told that this would be a fad, but we found out quickly it was not a phase, ” he said. “ We see about four to six cases a month. ”
Phelan said the sex crimes unit currently has three full-time employees — two who are constantly chatting and posing as teenage girls attempting to lure online predators, and one forensic investigator who helps collect evidence and build cases against predators. He said he has enough work to keep at least two or three more people busy.
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