No one likes to have others checking up on their stuff, including children. But for one dad in Michigan, he saved his daughter’s life after he found out what she was getting up to by looking through her iPad.
In October 2017, Scott Jenkins, of Portage, wrote on his blog about how he saved his oldest daughter’s life five years ago by checking on her iPad when she started behaving secretive and sneaky.
All this started happening after she met a 15-year-old boy named Bruce on Instagram
“I would grab her tablet after she went to sleep and begin to dig into her messages, her pictures and to see if things looked appropriate,” Jenkins recounted.
When he noticed “an unusual time gap in some messages and images,” he didn’t give much thought to it until two weeks later.
“I had a funny feeling one night and grabbed her tablet to do what I thought would be just another normal check … What I found to this day haunts my mind and makes my heart sink,” he wrote
Jenkins found a scandalous photo, which made him check everything that was in his daughter’s social media accounts.
Jenkins started searching for some of the friends who were in Bruce’s network of friends, and was enraged to discover that they were actually adult men
He decided to call the police for help. After seven months of checking through all of the family’s technology devices, detectives from the Cyber Task Force of Portage Police department told Jenkins to get his whole family to the police station “as soon as possible.”
At the station, Jenkins was informed that he had saved his daughter from abduction
To be more exact, it was human sex trafficking, and Bruce was being used by the men “as a scout” to lure “young girls into his circle as prey for the men to pick and choose from.”
Jenkins also learned how close he was to losing his daughter after she told him that she was about to meet up with her “friends.”
Jenkins hoped that by using his personal story, other parents would start to be more wary of what their children are doing.
“I hope this triggers fear in the hearts of every one of you,” he wrote. “Dig in your children’s accounts, ask them question, and tell them not to have “friends” that they don’t actually know. I had no idea just how close it came to never seeing my daughter again, it’s worth the little upset hurt feelings of your child to keep them safe.”
It just goes to show—educating your child about the dangers of the internet is an absolute must for every parent. Share this story with your network now!
Credit: NTD
