The story of a Canadian man who met a 14-year-old Australian girl online and sent nude images before flying to Perth to meet her in his hotel room is the stuff of nightmares for many parents.
Warning: The following article contains references to child sexual abuse.
Michelangelo Pereira Huezo, 36, was sentenced to four years' jail last week.
The crime, which took place in 2018, has led to warnings about the danger of text-and-video-chat services such as Discord, which is the platform that Huezo used to find and then groom his victim without the knowledge of her family.
These warnings are as old as the internet, but they have fresh urgency due to the popularity of a new generation of multiplayer games and chat services that blur the line between socialising and gaming, and make it harder for parents to shield their children from strangers online.
So is online predatory behaviour on the rise, or just in the news?
And what can parents actually do to mitigate the risk to their children, short of taking an axe to the internet?
Is online predatory behaviour more prevalent?
Just outside of Washington DC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) is the world's clearinghouse for reports of child abuse online material.
When a US or Canadian platform finds these kinds of images and videos on its service, it sends the material to the NCMEC, which then passes it on to the national policing agency that corresponds to the user's IP address.
If the IP address appears to be in Australia, it goes to the AFP.
In 2019, the NCMEC received 16.9 million reports of child abuse material.
In 2020, that figure was 21.7 million.
The figures for 2021 haven't been finalised yet, says the NCMEC's cyber tipline program manager Rebecca Sternburg.
"But I do know there's been a big increase comparative to last year."
An increase in reporting doesn't necessarily mean an increase in predatory behaviour online or more children being victimised.
Not every report is a new perpetrator and victim — most of the reports are recirculated old material with known perpetrators and victims. Some of the increase in reporting is also due to platforms being more proactive with searching for material.
But it's a worrying sign that reports increased with the pandemic, when many children were in lockdown, spending more time on the internet, and at increased risk of being victimised online.
"Early on in 2020, a lot more children were home ... and had access to the internet," Ms Sternburg says.
Reports to AFP up 50 per cent
The NCMEC sends the reports with Australian IP addresses to the AFP-led Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE).
In 2019, the ACCCE saw 14,000 reports.
In 2020, that increased to more than 21,000, and went up again last year.
"We are a bit concerned with what we're seeing," says Detective Superintendent Jayne Crossling, a member of the AFP's child exploitation unit.
"We can only speak anecdotally, but we do think there's probably a greater amount of victimisation."
She also thinks the pandemic lockdowns are partly responsible.
"We certainly had concerns about how vulnerable young people might be as a result of spending more time on their devices," she says.
The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has noticed a similar trend.
eSafety operates a scheme for reporting illegal and restricted content that's separate to the NCMEC referrals.
Reports (which cover a range of content but are mostly concerned with child abuse material) increased 115 per cent from 2019 to 2020.
"My investigators are seeing more and more of what we call coerced child sexual abuse material, where children are performing sexual acts," Ms Grant says.
"In the privacy of their bedrooms and bathrooms, they're being coerced remotely by predators. You can hear the parents' voices in the next room calling them in for dinner."
Why is this behaviour on the rise?
One reason may be a change in the ways we use the internet.
When social media caught on in the late 2000s, the amount of reports to NCMEC "really exploded", says Ms Sternburg, who has been with the not-for-profit since 2006, during the "MySpace era".
The reports back then related mostly to images of child abuse.
This change has been accompanied by another: The blurring distinction between gaming and social media, which is typified by the popularity of services like Discord and platforms like Roblox.
Discord is a voice, video and text group-chatting platform originally built for gamers, but now used by everything from schools to workplaces.
On Roblox, children can play games, exercise their imaginations by creating other games, hang out online with their friends, or interact with other users, who are represented as anonymous avatars.
Though it's mostly a safe and stimulating environment, it has its dark side.
There have been reports of paedophiles using the platform to find victims and solicit nude images and videos.
"Where kids are, these offenders are going to be — they kind of seek that out," Ms Sternburg says.
"Anything on phones that kids are using, that's where the predators are."
Children are meeting strangers online more often
The merging of gaming and general socialising makes it harder for parents to know what their children are doing online, and easier for predators to make contact, says the AFP's Superintendent Crossling.
Specific platforms are not to blame, she adds.
"It's more about functionalities and less about the platform itself."
The walled gardens of social media, to which access can be tightly controlled, are giving way to open worlds where friends and strangers mingle.
This change appears to be reflected in the results of a recent survey commissioned by eSafety.
The survey, conducted in 2021, asked a national sample of children aged 8-17 whether they had been in contact with someone they first met online.
Three in five children said they had — a marked increased since 2016, when it was one in five.
Among children aged eight to 10, the rate was lower than for older children, but still high, at about 43 per cent.
A quarter of children who had been in contact with a stranger said it was someone over 18.
And 12 per cent of children said they had met someone face to face after first getting to know them online.
'Parents have a lot more to think about'
Teenagers socialising online is a positive thing, but meeting strangers comes with a risk, Commissioner Grant says.
"Teenagers are going to take risks," she says.
"We do need to make sure that we're on top of who our kids are talking to and what they're doing when they're behind closed doors."
A 2020 survey commissioned by the ACCCE found half of parents did not know what they could do to keep children safe from online child sexual exploitation.
Only 3 per cent listed online grooming as a concern.
Parents need to be more involved in their children's online lives, Ms Grant says.
"We want parents to be aware, but not alarmed," she says.
The important thing is to not freak out, Superintendent Crossling says.
"Don't be tempted to instantly take the device away and blame the technology.
"We need parents to have open, ongoing conversations and a clear understanding of what a young person is doing online."
The AFP's THINK U KNOW website has resources and advice for parents, carers and educators about how to talk to children about their online activities and interactions, and how to take action and report abuse.
Parental controls are your friend
Most platforms also have parental controls and privacy settings that mitigate the risk of strangers contacting children.
Roblox, for instance, has parental controls that can limit or disable online chat and restrict access to age-appropriate games.
It's also possible for parents to monitor the child's online engagement by viewing chat and private message histories.
Discord also has parental controls that can block direct messages and friend requests.
The THINK U KNOW website has a range of guides for how to engage privacy settings on different social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, as well as on different types of phones and gaming consoles such as Xbox and PlayStation.
For a start, Superintendent Crossling recommends turning off geolocation in games, so that the gamer's whereabouts is not visible.
"More often than not, these settings are turned on by default," she says.
"Without knowing the controls for a platform, parents are flying blind as to what type of risk young people are exposed to."
