Reporting of online child predators went up during Australia's long periods of COVID lockdown in Australia but equally, more offenders were also active.
While parents were working online in one room, their children were online schooling in another, prompting the methods of predation to become even more devious.
From the perspective of acting federal police Assistant Commissioner Hilda Sirec, moving out of COVID into relative normality again means parents have to be even more vigilant because the online child predators have become more cunning in their methods to both avoid detection and manipulate their victims.
Over 33,600 reports of child predators operating online were received across Australia last year. Awareness of the issue is regarded as one of the most effective proactive tools.
However, recent research found that only 52 per cent of parents and carers are having the important conversation with their children.
Police are constantly seeking new tools and methods to ensure that conversation occurs, the latest being a collaboration with children's author Tess Rowley to produce a picture book which reveals how a predator with the overtly innocuous screen name of Footy Boy manages to enviegle himself into a children's online game space.
The grooming starts with the predator winning the child's trust, then becomes nastier and more insidious.
''I didn't think it was wrong. I thought he was my friend," the young victim says in the book.
"He asked about school and stuff. Now he says rude things and asks me rude questions."
A fear that many kids have is that if they report to their parents that a suspicious person has entered an online game or chat room, their device may be taken away.
"We know the tactics these predators use," Commander Sirec said.
"They are using fear and shame to coerce children and we want to take that fear and shame and put it back on the offenders."
The irony of using an old-fashioned picture book in the war against online predation isn't lost on Commander Sirec, so the material is also available, together with a host of other useful materials, as an e-book on the ThinkUKnow website.
"We know that parents and carers and educators are trying to find that balance between giving children screen time, and learning in traditional ways," Commander Sirec said.
"So we thought a children's picture book, particularly for parents who like to read to their children before they go to sleep in the evenings, is the best way and not using the stimulus of another digital device as a way to educate."
Children's author Rowley, best known for Everyone's Got a Bottom and When Mum Went to Prison, Lots of Things Changed, collaborated with the federal police Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE) on the development of the book. Ms Rowley has been working in the child protection space for over two decades.
Alex Bunton, the co-captain of the UC Capital's women's basketball team and mum to two-year-old Opal, helped launch the book and says she will be having that conversation with her daughter when she is ready.
"She [Opal] is already starting to pick up and look at digital devices so I want to be sure she understands that this is also what is out there," she said.
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