https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWB4-NwCceE
This topic hits home and scares that heck out of me. Parents need to educate their children on the dangers of social media, sexual predators are utilizing various social media outlets to prey on our children. The internet has dramatically reshaped how we buy and sell everything – including each other. Social media has been used by traffickers to recruit victims, to proliferate their trafficking operations, and to control victims through restricting their social media access, impersonating the victim, or spreading lies and rumors online.
This is so important to discuss, and to try and appreciate the unbelievable amount of courage it takes for victims to come forward. Our justice system puts so much weight on their testimony and their lived experiences, causing the level of re-victimization to be very high. As a female, I can not imagine the difficulty these females face in publicly discussing such personal and painful experiences ... and more specifically, as a female police officer, I have experienced first hand the vulnerability of these victims as they often feel more comfortable speaking to a female officer. I can tell you that it is heartbreaking to hear their stories and even more difficult to then present them with the long road ahead to deal with it. We definitely need to address how we can better support victims, and we need to ensure that they are protected and respected on every level.