מהי הדרך הטובה ביותר להגן על הילדים שלנו? | דעה

One billion children globally experience physical, sexual, or emotional violence each year, according to the World Health Organization. Here in the U.S., the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says online child exploitation cases jumped 3,500 percent in the last decade. And just last year, the organization received more than 27,800 reports of possible child sex trafficking. But there are people and organizations out there making a difference. Our next guest has an extraordinary story and mission and important insights to share with us. Paul Hutchinson has led over 70 covert rescue missions in 15 countries, liberating more than 5,000 children through his Child Liberation Foundation. One of those missions is portrayed in the heart-rending film Sound of Freedom, which earned over $100 million in box office sales within the first two weeks in 2023. Paul, good to have you with us. What are the latest threats children are facing online, and how are traffickers operating these days? Thank you, Stefania. Well, so many times parents will leave the movie Sound of Freedom, and they'll say, I want to do something. I want to fix trafficking. Well, the worst thing you can do is go to Mexico and go try to rescue kids. You're going to get shot. You're going to get arrested. The best thing you can do is go home and hug your children. And people say, well, how does that help? Well, the majority of children who are being trafficked don't happen. The things that you saw in the movie, those do happen. I've served all over the world undercover. But the majority of children don't get taken into a connex and taken to another country and sold that way. Most of those kids come from broken homes or runaways or a broken foster care program. So the best thing you can do is actually go home and hug your children and have a relationship with them where they can very comfortably come to you and say when something's off. The biggest thing that kids are being targeted with today is something called sextortion on the internet, wherein your 13-year-old thinking that she is communicating with another 13-year-old online, sadly is not. She's communicating with a predator who sends pictures of a 13-year-old boy that are kind of sexy pictures and encourages her to do the same and send back to him. And all of a sudden, this predator has pictures of your child. And your child is so scared of saying anything to you that they said anything because now this predator is saying, hey, can you send more? Can you send more? And pretty soon when the child says no more, then they say, well, this is going to go all over your school. Is that something you want? And so that's the control things. Kids are committing suicide because of it. Kids are being brought into horrific situations where they feel like there's no way out. So having a healthy relationship with your children where they can say, hey, I don't like it when I go to this friend's house because her brother's taking pictures of us when we're changing. And now he says he's going to show them on the internet if we don't do other things. These are things that are happening all the time. And we need to have a healthy relationship with our kids where they can say when something's off.