By Natalie James
Toronto - With sexual predators prowling the Internet - often digitally disguised as friendly teenagers or modelling agents - it may no longer be enough to admonish children not to talk to strangers.
Paedophiles, who once lurked on street corners or near schoolyards, have taken their sinister hunt into cyberspace, a world that is tought to police where candy and tales of lost kittens have given way to more sophisticated temptations.
In response, Canada's national police turned for help to a small Vancouver-based multimedia company called LiveWires Design, asking it to develop a computer game to teach children how not to fall prey to sexual exploitation on the Internet.
"We thought there was not enough awareness out there in terms of the risk of online use by kids and especially in terms of unsupervised use," said Tom Pownall, computer crime analyst with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "There's really no better way to educate them to the risk than to do it in a fun environment."
Billed as the first of its kind, the game - called Missing - mimics an actual investigation of the kidnapping of a 13-year-old Canadian boy by an adult he met over the Internet.
With cryptograms, puzzles and video, police ask young players to help find the boy, named Zack, who has become ensnared in a predator's web of deceit.
A study released on June 9 by Grunwald Associates, a United States consulting research firm, found that 25 million children in the United States under the age of 17 logged into cyberspace last year, up from eight million in 1997.
Analysts said similar trends can be found in Canada. Marketing research firm ACNielsen said two million Canadian teenagers from 12 to 17 - about 87 percent - are on the Internet, logging an average of nine hours a week.
Questionnaires distributed to schools by LiveWires during the research phase of the Missing project found 90 percent of children between eight and 14 who were polled either use chat rooms, own a personal website or have an email account.
Because children and teenagers are among the most active Internet users, concerns for their safety are very real.
Last week in Ontario, a 45-year-old teacher was sentenced to a year in jail for having sex several times with a 13-year-old girl he met over the Internet. He posed as a 17-year-old high school student during their initial chatroom encounters, police said.
With the help of the Mounted Police Foundation, the federal government and private sponsors, LiveWires is in the process of distributing 20 000 games to schools and public libraries across Canada on an at-cost basis, LiveWires president Drew Ann Wake said.
She said the game, launched in February, should be in every province except Nova Scotia by September.
Wake said the company is in negotiations to introduce the game in the United States, where the number of predator incidents is growing rapidly.
"Whereas in the past (paedophiles) would go to schools and playgrounds to sit and watch children, they now have more of a vehicle to communicate with them on a regular basis," FBI spokesperson Angela Bell said.
The FBI announced in June that it had 1 497 cases on record of adults who have attempted to contact or lure children from their homes. This is a phenomenal increase from the 113 cases in 1996, when statistics were first compiled, Bell said.
Because of a lack of comparable crime statistics in Canada, Wake had to conduct her own research to create the game. Polling police stations across the country, she uncovered at least 31 such crimes in Canada in 1997.
She said young boys are the most vulnerable because their blossoming sexual curiosity leads them to cybersex chat rooms and into the clutches of predators.
"(Predators) do lurk there and wait for young kids to bring up issues around sexuality and they strike up a conversation with them, often offering them pornography," Wake said.
"And once they've sent a child a lot of pornography they are able to threaten to tell the parents and that puts the child under their control," she added.
Once a child "becomes persuaded someone is their friend over the Internet, they have a very fixed belief", Wake said.
With the Internet, predators do not have to contact children close to home but can cast a wide net, even across national borders, law enforcement officials say.
Because of legal red tape involved in any cross-border prosecutions, paedophiles realise how much easier it is to get away with their crimes if they target children in other countries.
"Traditionally, when predators reach out, it's in their own communities, but with the Internet police are making arrests built out of relationships with large numbers of children, especially from Canada and Mexico," Wake said.
She has won international recognition with the Missing game's positive feedback and in April was one of five Canadians - along with John Roth, chief executive of Nortel Networks - to receive the prestigious Information Highway Award.
On the same day, LiveWires was told they would be receiving a medal from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Still glowing from the praise from industry peers, Wake said feedback from students and educators was just as gratifying.
"We're very pleased at the response we've received," she said. "If you can reach children early in the game, before this crime really, really takes off, the better chance you have in making a dramatic change in the number of people touched by this type of crime." - Reuters