Unveiling Sextortion's Impact on Youth

This week, we hear from Kathryn Rifenbark, the Director for CyberTipline, Public Reports, in the Exploited Children Division (ECD) at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). In this talk from the 2024 CESE Summit, she shares about the impact of Sextortion on today’s young people and talks about a powerful new service that can be used to help.

Self-generated content is a normative behavior of today’s youth. But it can have a destructive impact when it’s non-consensually shared or when they have been blackmailed or coerced into producing it. Take It Down is a new, anonymous, and free service that can help prevent the spread of online sharing of nude, partially nude, or sexually explicit images or videos of those under the age of 18. This session will provide an overview of Take it Down, operated by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). Launched in December of 2022, participants will learn the amazing impact of this global program, how it works and how you can share this resource with children, victims, and families in your community.

Kathryn has worked at NCMEC for over 14 years, and in her current position, Kathryn is responsible for enhancing NCMEC’s efforts to improve resources for survivors of child sexual abuse material by liaising with law enforcement, victim service providers, and child serving professionals as well as managing the team who processes public CyberTipline reports. She received a Master of Arts in Forensic Psychology and a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology.

NCMEC’s Take It Down service: https://takeitdown.ncmec.org/
Learn more about NCMEC: https://www.missingkids.org/
Read the article “Sextortion: The Largest Blackmail Operation In Human History” https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/sextortion-the-largest-blackmail-operation-in-human-history/