National Post (National Edition)
TEEN GIRLS BATTLE VIRTUAL MONSTERS
Finding safety in digital life
Carol Todd has flown halfway across the world to sit in The Bunker, the Amsterdam courthouse where the Netherlands’ most notorious criminals are tried, and stares at the back of Aydin Coban’s head.
Coban, 38, trim, bespectacled and with shoulderlength thinning grey-black hair, is accused of sexually extorting Todd’s then-13year-old daughter, Amanda, and 33 other children and five gay men. According to prosecutors, Coban would pose as a young girl or boy and befriend or groom his victims before encouraging them to strip before his webcam. He would then threaten to distribute the webcam pictures unless his victims wired him money.
In Amanda’s case — prosecutors allege there is another young female Canadian victim of Coban, but her identity and case details have not been made public — her refusal to comply with Coban’s further demands led to the release of her topless picture on Facebook.
That led to relentless online and offline bullying, which led to depression and cutting herself. On Sept. 7, 2012, she released a moving nine-minute video on YouTube about her ordeal. On Oct. 10, 2012, she took her own life at her mother’s home in Port Coquitlam, B.C. The video went viral the next day.
For her mother, who has become a cyberbullying activist, this is her first time seeing Coban in the flesh. Until now, he had been a virtual monster.
At one point in the trial, he turned to whisper to his attorney just as Todd stared into his eyes. “I’m sure he caught a glance of me, and it brought me satisfaction … knowing that I was real — that Amanda was real.”
A verdict is expected on March 16 for the 39 victims in Amsterdam. Dutch prosecutors have asked for the maximum sentence according to Netherland law: 10 years, eight months. Coban’s defence maintains the tools police used to trace his computer were error-prone and illegal, that his rights were infringed, and that the case should be dismissed.
A Dutch judge has approved that Coban be extradited to Canada to be tried for Amanda Todd and the other alleged Canadian victim. If found guilty, any jail time would be added to the time he’d serve in the Netherlands. Coban’s lawyers have appealed the extradition ruling and the Dutch Supreme Court is expected to render that verdict on April 4.
The tragic death of Amanda Todd and soon after, Nova Scotia teen Rehtaeh Parsons, brought global attention to the dangers facing teenage girls in the cyberworld. Seventeen-year-old Parsons was allegedly photographed being gangraped by friends of a new friend, the picture widely circulated via text messages. She hanged herself, and was eventually taken off life support on April 7, 2013.
Ever since photo sharing transformed modern communication, Internet predators and confused teens have become an explosive combination. Laws, the police, parents and schools have struggled to keep up.
In the past two years, the National Child Exploitation Co-ordination Centre operated by the RCMP has experienced a more-than-200-per-cent increase in the number of reported incidents concerning online child sexual exploitation. In 2014, there were 8,500 reported incidents, which jumped to 27,300 in 2016. A RCMP spokesperson attributed this spike to heightened awareness on the part of the public, and mandatory Internet child pornography reporting laws.
And yet, despite the numbers, Carol Todd doesn’t believe that today’s teen girls are much safer than her daughter was five or so years ago.
“Parents still say, ‘It will never happen to my kid,’ but there are so many stories like what happened to Amanda that still happen today in the exact same way.”
The police are modernizing their approach to investigating cybercrime. Laurie McCann is a 19-year veteran with the Toronto police force who teaches officers about teenage social media use at police college. She has befriended Carol Todd and spoke with her recently at a conference in Dublin.
She agrees with Todd: “I don’t think Amanda or Rehtaeh affected the behaviour of today’s teenagers,” she said.
“But a lot of crimes are posted on social media, so our message is for teenagers to tell someone — the teenagers see the crimes much earlier than the adults do.”
McCann’s comments echo the experience of Leah Parsons in Dartmouth, N.S. The photograph of her daughter, Rehtaeh, circulated from teenager to teenager as a text message.
“When we went to the police, nothing was done,” said Parsons, because they hadn’t been able to obtain the picture. Within an hour, Leah was able to get the picture and show it to them.
“Today, if that happens and you go to the police, it’s completely different — they don’t even need a warrant to go take the phones,” said Parsons, who, like Todd, has spoken in Canadian schools about mental health, cyberbullying and violence against women.
“The school principal can even take the phone when a photo appears — they always could — but now it’s going to be stopped immediately and the investigation starts and the photosharing stops, which is important. I tell people, because people forget, Rehtaeh was just like you,” she said.
“If you tell someone my age that you should be careful, someone’s going to say, ‘Oh, who are you? My mom?’ ” said Daria L. (a pseudonym), 13, a student at West Vancouver Secondary School. “And it seems like almost everyone’s parents don’t know or they don’t care about what happens online.”
Daria is in Grade 8 and tells the story of her 13-year-old friend who met a boy on Snapchat, where they began to “date.” The relationship was solely virtual and continued until he asked her to come meet him in Washington state, across the border. In this instance, that was a red flag and the girl ended the relationship — no pictures were shared and whomever it was online she was dating, disappeared.
Things could have had a different outcome, Daria admitted. “If he even asked for it, she would have definitely sent nudes. People make jokes about it, about sharing nude pics, that maybe they’d say ‘yes,’ that kind of thing,” she said.
Daria’s mother is a teacher, she has an older teenaged sister, and she says she hasn’t sent nude photographs of herself to anyone. At 13, she understands how young girls can be susceptible to online bullying by strangers and “friends.”
“What happened to Amanda Todd could definitely happen to anyone,” Daria said, but she added that girls her age don’t need much persuasion to post revealing photos on social media. “The more skin you show, the more likes you get,” the 13-year-old said.
Carol Todd knows all about the pressures on teenaged girls and realizes that some, like her daughter, will always be proud, secretive and rebellious — and become targets.
During the Netherlands trial, she’s had time to reflect on how young girls are victimized, how they become embarrassed and then ashamed — when much of their world is about trying to fit in. Teen girls, she believes, can make perfect foils.
“Amanda loved to sing and posted videos on YouTube and someone found her account, pretended he was close to her age, paid her a compliment, and kids being kids, girls — she fell for it,” says Todd, who has now returned from Amsterdam to Port Coquitlam.
She believes that the upcoming verdict will bring some closure in Amanda’s case, but said parents must increase their vigilance, and not wait for a crisis to have a difficult talk.
“Three years ago I received some backlash when I wanted to go into schools and talk to Grade 7s. Today I say, ‘what about your Grade 4s?’ ”
Coban was mostly silent throughout his trial. He said he felt bad for the girls, but maintains his innocence. He is not one of a kind.
AMANDA MADE A MISTAKE THAT COULD’VE HAPPENED TO ANYBODY, BUT BECAUSE OF WHAT HAPPENED TO HER, I KNOW — AND HOPEFULLY MANY OTHERS KNOW — THAT WHAT HAPPENED TO AMANDA COULD HAPPEN TO ANY OF US. — ANDREA, 15-YEAR-OLD TORONTO STUDENT THE MORE SKIN YOU SHOW, THE MORE LIKES YOU GET