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Rotary Club of Crowley President Tracy Young, left, thanks Georgiana Kibodeaux with Louisiana State Police for her presentation on online dangers for juveniles.

Kibodeaux stresses online safety

Jeannine LeJeune
Online Editor
Crowley Post-Signal

Though she needed to condense her typical hour long presentation down to less than half that time, Georgiana Kibodeaux knew she needed to stick with her opening video.
The video shows online star Coby Persin, in his 20s, joining up with several other entities to produce a sort of online social experiment where he would create a fake profile of a 15-year-old boy and friend three girls. These girls were chosen and the parents were given notice of the experiment, all three – a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old – accepted the friend request and began talking to the fake 15-year-old. Eventually, after only a few days, each of the young girls agreed to meet with Persin’s fake online persona. The parents of the girls would come to realize their child would indeed meet someone she didn’t know, lining themselves up for potential danger.
One would agree to meet at a park after her parents left, the other offered to let the fake boy into her house after her parents went to sleep and the third would agree to go for a ride with him at night. All three would follow through as well.
The shock on the parents face in the videos was only mirrored by those in the audience Tuesday as Kibodeaux showed the video to the Rotary Club of Crowley.
“This video really does give a look in to the world I live in everyday,” she said. “This is the reality we live in these days.”
Kibodeaux, who works with Louisiana State Police as an investigator into these type of crimes that involve children, says the girls’ actions happen more and more each day. Thus, it has become more and more important for a parent to know exactly what a child is doing online at all times.
“They tell them everything about their life because they look at it as a fake situation,” said Kibodeaux. “Children have this naive belief that when they post on the internet, they can’t be found.”
How naive is it to think they are safe? Kibodeaux explained that she went to school for criminal justice and, up to about three years ago, wasn’t sure what an IP (internet provider) address really was. Yet, with some basic computer knowledge she can find basic geolocation information from things like selfies and more. And with that information, anyone wanting to find someone can just look at the information hidden within a photo to do so.
Then there is social networking sites and apps like Snapchat which makes many feel safe with its vanishing photos. Kibodeaux explained that there was an arrest in Acadia Parish by state police for pornography charges that saw the man taking a screenshot of the Snapchats he was receiving from young girls.
“The day I solve a case, it’s a bittersweet trainwreck,” she said of solving cases. “We’ve discovered the abuse that’s been ongoing, but now we’re going to cease that abuse. So, there’s a good and bad that goes along with it.”
Still though, children of all ages and genders tend to put too much of their information online, according to Kibodeaux, including when and where they go to school, when their parents aren’t home and much more.
She stressed the importance of privacy settings to make sure children aren’t sharing everything to everyone.
As part of her job, Kibodeaux has a fake online persona as a juvenile. She says she has more than a thousand friends just by clicking and being accepted and while some questioned how they knew the girl, Kibodeaux’s answer, a lie, would generally be accepted and the children would continue to add her. She also stressed the importance of getting children to not friend everyone.
“I teach my children that not everyone is there to keep you safe,” she said. “There are predators out there and they will try to hurt you.”
She maintains a direct and open line of communication with her young children and explained that too was an important cog in the system to keep track of children’s online lives.
The other side of the online life, of course, is cyberbullying, a problem that continues to grow. The reasons for why a child partakes in cyberbullying vary, but things like they think it’s funny and that it’s not a big deal continue to be chief among them. But, whether they want to believe it or not, cyberbullying has caused very real consequences, whether it is those convicted of the misdemeanor or those who have bullied someone so much they commit suicide. In fact, Kibodeaux noted that the youngest victim of a cyberbullying attack that took his/her own life was 9 years old.
As numbers of teens using cell phones regularly continues to rise – latest estimates put the number at about 80 percent – and the cost of cell phone plans drops, the cases of cyberbullying are only expected to rise themselves. The latest rounds of statistics show that 52 percent of teens have reported themselves as targets of cyberbullying attack. One may assume that number is low considering 95 percent of teens also say they have witnessed cyberbullying but failed to report it.

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