“No Escape Room” interactive experience teaches families about sextortion
(NATIONAL) — With “No Escape Room” parents can better understand an increasingly common threat their teens may be facing. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has created the interactive experience to show parents and caregivers exactly what it’s like to be a teen trapped in a financial sextortion situation.
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The interactive film experience is based on dozens of real CyberTipline reports and follows the story of a 15-year-old boy who is exploited online. The person going through the simulation is prompted to engage in a conversation with a teenager whose friendly, flirty chat soon turns ugly when the teenager is revealed to be a bad actor who starts blackmailing the user.
“Despite the increasing occurrence of sextortion, few parents actually know what it looks like when a child is exploited online,” said Gavin Portnoy, Vice President of Communications & Brand at NCMEC. “We created ‘No Escape Room’ to allow parents to see how quickly and easily their own child could fall victim to online exploitation, even if they are just down the hall in your own home.”
The idea of “No Escape Room” is to show parents and caregivers that these scenarios are very dangerous and not as easy to avoid as they might think. The financial sextortion of teens has grown at an alarming rate over the last few years. From 2021 to 2023, NCMEC saw a 300% increase in online enticement and financial sextortion. NCMEC is committed to fighting this threat.
“We hope that parents and caregivers will take the time to really pay attention to what a child going through online enticement is experiencing and feeling,” Portnoy said. “Then, they can use that knowledge to better inform conversations with the kids in their lives.”
NCMEC has resources to help parents and kids with real-life sextortion situations, including Take It Down, a service that helps remove nude, or sexually explicit photos and videos by assigning a unique digital fingerprint, called a hash value, to the shared content.
“When we took on this brief, our eyes were opened to just how serious and widespread child sextortion is online — and how little parents know about it,” said Drew Ungvarsky, Grow’s Founder and CEO. “In creating ‘No Escape Room,’ we wanted to go beyond education and bring parents directly into the experience of an unsuspecting child.”
For more resources, or tips on how to talk to your kids about sextortion online, visit NCMEC’s website at www.missingkids.org/sextortion.
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