Erin Cash has 12 years experience on the Queensland Police force, including as a detective in paedophile and child abuse task forces. She also runs Sweat Depot in Brisbane.
Warning: This post may be triggering to someone who experienced sexual abuse.
Your child or teen could be a poster child for a paedophile ring – and you may never know.
Australia made world news in 2016 with a website trading explicit photos of local school girls. The site even had pages dedicated to local Brisbane and Gold Coast high schools and fan pages – offering money to men who could find more explicit photos of their favourites.
Attempts to close down the site have been thwarted in a brazen disregard of the law. And these girls, whose images have been used without consent, could be to this day, oblivious.
Listen: Roxy Jacenko discusses her daughter Pixie’s images being tampered with on No Filter.
Police cannot always locate you if photos of your children have been found to be used in connection with paedophile rings. Due to the ability to mask IP addresses and identities with overseas servers and false identities it is not always possible to link an identity to these photos. There are even sites dedicated to teaching online predators how to cover their tracks.
A photo of your child could be part of a paedophilia ring that has been uncovered by police, and you won’t even know about it.
The Task Force I worked for busts paedophile rings – and makes arrests of paedophiles in our neighbourhood. This article is an insight into what they do, and how close to your home they come to arrest offenders.
Top Comments
What really sucks is that the parents who need to read this article the most... are the ones who won't.
Another thing for parents to think about - check your social media security settings, especially what content is visible to who. If you must share, make sure that you completely trust the people who can see it.
Several times I have had photographs of children pop up on my feed, simply because their parents are friends of my friends. I don't even know these people! If I (a stranger, who isn't even trying) am able to see them, who else can?
Worse still, many of these photos provide further identifying information about the child (such as their name, and the school they attend, plus anything else their parents might have posted over the years) which could be very dangerous in the wrong hands!