By Jheri Hardaway
Staff Writer
In August, a 12-year-old girl was taken during an overnight sleepover at a friend's house by 38-year-old Daniel Francis Gear, the uncle of her friend. Harnett County Sheriff Wayne Coats stated that automated Flock cameras along U.S. Highway 421 helped investigators track Gear's truck to a wooded area near Erwin. North Carolina Senate Candidate Michael Whatley has been widely criticized for his political associations with convicted sex offenders, resulting in a major campaign controversy. Just this past week in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, a local pastor faced a crowd of angry parents to answer questions about how a 70-year-old registered sex offender was allowed to volunteer at the church’s school. Headlines warning of child exploitation and sex crimes seem more prevalent than ever. Between congressional hearings with social media executives and daily alerts about digital predators, a pressing question echoes across living rooms and church pews alike: Are our communities facing an unprecedented epidemic, or are we simply waking up to a horror that was always there?
The answer is not simple, but it is slightly sobering. Criminologists, child advocates, and public health researchers emphasize that while physical, contact abuse is an ancient trauma finally being addressed after centuries of silence, the internet has created an entirely new, industrialized crisis that targets our youth where youth live: online.
For generations, society operated under a convenient illusion: that predatory harm was a rare anomaly confined to dark alleys and strangers. In reality, historical records and retrospective adult insights reveal that in-person abuse was widespread throughout human history.
It was largely sustained not by lack of frequency, but by silence and institutional cover-ups in schools, families, religious bodies, legal frameworks that ignored domestic violence, and a culture that placed the burden of shame on the victim rather than the perpetrator. Social media has given folks an outlet to share their experiences, old and new, causing darkness to be brought to light and the public having to reckon with painful and disturbing information that has plagued some people for years.
The apparent "explosion" of reported sexual assaults beginning in the late 20th century was not a sudden surge in abusive behavior, but the result of a cultural awakening. During the era of chattel slavery, there was no such thing as sexual abuse of African Americans. Since Blacks were considered property, abuse was as normal to the perpetrators as the sunrise. Times have changed. During the “Me Too” era, the passage of mandatory reporting laws, the rise of specialized trauma care, mental health services, and investigative journalism dismantled the wall of denial and shame.
Decades of public health data, including studies from the Crimes Against Children Research Center and the CDC, suggest that in-person sexual victimization in the United States has actually plateaued or slightly declined from peak reporting eras in the 1990s. Greater community vigilance, background checks, and youth education have begun to work as meaningful defenses.
While community awareness has strengthened protections in physical spaces, technology has unlocked an unmonitored back door into our children’s bedrooms. Experts agree we face an unprecedented crisis is in online child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSAE). In the early 2010s, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) processed approximately one million reports annually through its CyberTipline. Today, that number has surged into tens of millions. While improved automated detection flags more material, the raw volume circulating globally represents a genuine, compounding crisis.
The dangers have rapidly outpaced traditional safety advice. For example, Organized Sextortion where coordinated cyber syndicates deliberately targeting adolescents, frequently teenage boys, using fake profiles on popular social platforms, coercing them into sending compromising images, and then demanding money under threat of exposure. Physical borders once offered a measure of geographical protection. Today, bad actors can groom minors from across the street or across the globe via direct messaging, gaming platforms, and encrypted chat apps. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence tools that generate deepfakes and non-consensual imagery creates modern vulnerabilities that existing statutes were never written to govern. Understanding the distinction between historical abuse and modern digital exploitation is essential for effective prevention.
Physical abuse remains an intimate, interpersonal trauma that demands transparent institutions, open family communication, and communities that believe children and victims when they speak. Digital exploitation, by contrast, requires systemic accountability, holding tech corporations responsible for platform design, equipping law enforcement with modern forensic tools, and teaching young people digital literacy and boundary-setting.
We are not witnessing a sudden breakdown in human nature; rather, the age-old impulse to exploit the vulnerable has been handed high-speed broadband and pocket computers. Protecting the next generation requires recognizing the hard truths of the past while confronting the digital realities of the present.
