I remember staying up into the early hours of the morning, waiting anxiously for my husband to come back from undercover work in Southeast Asia.

He was working with law enforcement as an informant investigating the sex trafficking of children. He spent hours identifying minors in brothels, talking with traffickers, and walking dangerous red-light districts where exploitation was thriving.

That was 15 years ago. Today, a predator doesn’t need a passport, a hotel room, or a red-light district to exploit a child. Instead, all they need is a device and a WiFi connection.

A decade ago, combating human trafficking crime required physical interaction and was limited by geographic constraints. It was boots on the ground work, with hours spent scouring physical streets for known indicators of trafficking exploitation. The work was overwhelming when we started, but the scalability of the problem had natural barriers. For the most part, traffickers relied onmanaging in-person relationships and had to take risks by opening their doors to customers face-to-face. This was true globally, and it was true right here in Colorado.

The COVID pandemic changed all of that. With the massive migration of our daily activities to the online world – especially for children – traffickers found more profit and less risk when exploiting victims through a phone screen or a social media platform. They no longer required an in-person connection to groom a vulnerable child. Now they could do so by bypassing our front doors and walking right into our children’s bedroom through a simple tap and swipe.

In 2024 alone, reports of online enticement surged 192% year-over-year, reaching over 546,000 cases nationally, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. The FBI calls sextortion (which occurs when a predator extorts money as a form of blackmail for a sexually explicit image) a “rapidly escalating threat.” The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) indicates that reports ofAI-generated child sexual abuse material (AI-CSAM) skyrocketed 1,325% between 2023 and 2024 alone, and reports of sadistic harm by violent online groups increased over 200% in the same timeframe.

Here in Colorado, the stats are just as bleak. Colorado’s Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce (ICAC) is operated by the Colorado Springs Police Department and coordinates 98 agencies statewide to combat online child exploitation. In 2024, they fielded 15,935 cybertips of online exploitation in our state, a staggering caseload for a concentrated but small team.

The physical barriers for predators fell, and unfortunately, many of us opened the door to them without even realizing it.

Two years ago, The Exodus Road launched a digital exploitation prevention education program, INFLUENCED, to address this urgent knowledge gap within our Colorado community. The program offers practical digital safety skills for adult caregivers, child professionals, educators, and young people themselves, around topics like sextortion, recognizing an online predator, protecting privacy, and preventing human trafficking.

We’ve brought this education to schools and community groups throughout Colorado, and we found two important realities about online exploitation as we talked to teens and adults.

First, we learned that teenagers are reporting much more digital predation than we assumed. In just one high school in Colorado Springs, for example, 75 students surveyed reported a total of105 past-experienced instances of online predation. In a recent survey of 418 Colorado students in grades 6 – 12, 56% reported having experienced at leastone dangerous online interaction. Of those, 31% identified the danger as “having been asked for or sent explicit content or asked to meet privately in person.

Second, we’ve found that parents and community leaders are woefully under-equipped to address online threats. Most adults simply don’t know basic online protection skills for the children and teens in their lives as this complex world changes. While caregivers would never allow their 15-year-old to walk the streets of Downtown Denver alone at night, they inadvertently let that same 15-year-old navigate equally (if not more) dangerous environments in private chat rooms. While parents teach children not to talk to strangers in-person, parents don’t know how to teach their kids about sextortion or the importance of safety online. In fact, among 172 Colorado parents and youth workers surveyed, only 37% reported confidence in their ability to protect their kids online.

Let us be compassionately clear: these findings have not demonstrated a rebellious generation of kids or a disengaged population of parents and youth workers. Instead, it’s an indicator that digital threats are rapidly outpacing our ability to protect our children.

When President Obama established Human Trafficking Prevention Month in 2010, preventing trafficking meant primarily teaching kids about physical safety at parks, malls, and within in-person relationships. Today, preventing human trafficking must emphasize online exploitation. We have to teach young people how to protect themselves, and we need adults who are realistic about the threats facing their kids on their phones and social media accounts.

While child trafficking and exploitation have shifted dramatically from street corners to screens, the responsibility we have as adults to protect kids remains the same. If we can teach them to look both ways before crossing a street, we can teach them how to recognize danger in their online interactions.

As the adults entrusted with guiding them in this rapidly evolving world, we may just have to learn right alongside them.

Laura Parker serves as the Co-Founder and CEO at The Exodus Road, an international anti-human trafficking organization headquartered in Colorado Springs.