Sergeant Tracks
Xbox ​“Kidnapping”

Johnny sat at his Xbox chatting with his new friend, Max, through his Xbox Live Internet connection. As they played together, Max, who’s 12, asked Johnny questions.

“How old are you, Johnny?” he inquired. ​“Where do you live? What school do you go to?”

Out of earshot of his mother in the other room, Johnny answered his friend as they both cooperated to shoot the bad guys in the video game.

Johnny had no idea that his new friend had lied: He was actually an older man pretending to be a middle-schooler so that he could lure him in trusting kids. The next day, Johnny disappeared.

Fortunately, like the video game they were playing, this abduciton story was fictional. Sgt. Robin Higgins role-played it for ten parents and grandparents gathered at the at the Dwight police substation on Tuesday night. She was there to teach the crowd about online dangers and how to address them.

Over the course of an hour and a half, Higgins, who as a detective cracked real-life predatory crime, walked attendees through the new threats posed to children by their gadgets. The event, which was cosponsored by the Dwight Management Team and the Greater Dwight Development Corporation, made the men and women in the crowd wince, call out, and vow to spread the word about what they had learned. It comes at the same time as many families in the area are trying to close the digital divide for more positive reasons.

Higgins began with the example of Johnny and Max to illustrate the generational gap in parenting knowledge. To most parents now, she said, Johnny would seem perfectly safe as he chatted away to his friend online. ​“To you, it’s not a problem,” said Higgins. ​“It’s only a game! … What harm could it do?”

Yet those conversations are also evidence of how predators ​“groom” their victims by acting as if they are the same age to gain their trust, Higgins said. ​“A lot of the predators are using computers the way we are.” They play games or send messages on Facebook.

And it’s not just predators who misuse new technology. Bullies often take their fights to online social networks. Higgins spoke of a new trend that brings phones into the equation: ​“sexting.” Kids under the age of 18 send naked photos of themselves to one another.

When she brought that up, some parents and grandparents exclaimed in dismay, but others nodded their heads in recognition. Higgins told the crowd that sexting has recently become punishable by law in Connecticut with misdemeanor charges going to minors who engage in either the sending or the receiving of those texts.

“How are they getting this information out to the kids?” asked Linda Townsend-Maier, executive director of the the Greater Dwight Development Corporation.

“I don’t know,” replied Higgins. ​“And that’s the problem.” That’s why she wanted to share the information with parents and community leaders. She hoped that they could pass along the warnings.

Dwight Management Team Chair Florita Gillespie, for one, promised to announce the information during future meetings. ​“If we continue to do this, we continue to educate. We were very shocked about some of the things [heard tonight],” she said.

As the meeting drew to a close, attendees pressed Higgins for more tips about how to protect the children in the community. She told them not to use the computer as a babysitter and to work extra hard to block access to sites that might threaten a child’s safety. She also advised monitoring kids’ activity on both their phones and their computers, and, if a kid ever goes missing, to head straight for their digital footprints to find out what might have happened. As with any other part of parenting, she emphasized, ​“Any time you have a gut feeling about something, go with it.”

One of the woman in the audience listened to digital surveillance techniques with a wry smile. Teens these days are far more savvy with the Internet than their parents, she observed.

“You will block it,” she said, ​“and your child will unblock it.”