It is called a new kind of sexual assault. Online sextortion. The victims are young vulnerable and exposed. I am old and did not have the click of the mouse to lead me anywhere in the world and to just anyone. If I needed photos for a school project I had to search through piles of old Life Magazines. If I needed information I had the old encyclopedia in the house or I went to the library where then porn wasn’t allowed on computers that also didn’t exist then. And I am better off for not being exposed to all that young teens have at their fingertips on their all so precious phones that seem to be attached to their hands at all times. This is not about me it is about them.

Young teens can have a stalker before they even know it. Miss Teen 2013, Cassidy Wolf got an anonymous e-mail from someone who demanded that she follow his instructions and if she didn’t he would release nude pictures he had of her on the internet. He wanted money or wanted more sexual content. She was shocked that the photo’s even existed since she never posed nude or for anything explicit anywhere before. A hacker was able to get into the web cam camera on her computer and took videos of her getting dressed in the morning or coming out of her shower. Her computer was always left open on her desk table that happened to be facing her bed. He secretly recorded her for a year watching her every move. Eventually, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

It is sad when unknown suspects gain the trust from young girls. It is a significant and GLOBAL THREAT to all especially to young children.  78% are young children. The victims are in their young teens. The offender takes advantage of their innocence. In one particular heinous example a 26 year old Lucas Michael Chancellor terrorized   more than 350 girls on the internet in social media and chat sites. He had various different names and posed as a teenage boy. Eventually the girls were captive to him. He acquired more than 80,000 images that he used to threaten the young girls. Chancellor was finally prosecuted in 2014 and sentenced to 105 years in prison. Sometimes no prosecuting can  be made when  the predicators is in a foreign country.

The FBI says that only about 1/3 of his victims have been identified. This experience leaves the young girls changed forever. Some become suicidal and blame themselves for being victimized. They live with anxiety and can’t walk down the street not knowing if they are being stalked or if a stranger already saw them on the internet. Sextortion is a new crime that this country should be more focused upon. The FBI has a video on their website to council teens on how to deal with this sensitive subject.