I am exposed as a parent to the different scenarios in which my own children could become potential victims.

My 16-year-old daughter takes her “behind-the–wheel” at DMV this week. She has had a driving instructor coming to the house and taking her to practice driving for the past month or so. There have been a couple of occasions where the instructor has picked her directly up from school, so he has needed access to her cell phone to ensure they find each other. This would be the perfect job for a predator. With most kids having their own cell phones, I imagine a lot of the time these driving instructors do most of their scheduling and communicating directly with the kids. These instructors spend two hours at a time alone in a car with these kids they are teaching to drive. This would be the perfect opportunity to start the “grooming” process on an unsuspecting child.

After one of my daughters driving sessions, she came home with a Starbucks coffee. Most parents probably would have thought nothing of this. But with what I do for a living, it raised a concern with me. It is subtle, but something this small could be part of how a skilled predator starts to groom his potential victim. Someone preying on teenagers would treat them “adult-like” and try to relate to them at their level, they would befriend them as an equal. Going out for coffee might be the perfect ice-breaker to start to make a teen-ager feel like an adult.

I ask my daughter a lot of questions each time she returns from her driving sessions and I key in on every little detail, just to make sure everything this man does and says while alone with my daughter is appropriate. To my daughter I sound like I am just making “small-talk,” but in reality I am scrutinizing how this man behaves around my daughter, what he says and how he says it.

Communication is the key factor in keeping our children safe. The older our kids get, the more freedom they obtain by design; i.e. school, jobs, etc. Just because our children start to look and feel like adults does not mean they are not just as vulnerable at times as a small child. Even at sixteen on up, it is still up to us as parents to stay involved in our children’s lives and ask lots of questions to stay ahead of any potential predator.

Investigator Jeff Brown