By Mary Claire Morris

The birds may be “tweeting” outside, but teens on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, MySpace and other various social media websites seem to be making a lot more noise. Social media use, however, can come with stranger danger. As Beverly Knepper’s family learned this summer, communicating with someone online whom you have not met in real life can put you at great risk for foul play.

On July 12, Beverly Knepper, a 14 year-old girl living in Virginia Highlands, started communicating with a boy authorities call Jahil. The two met on Instagram, and soon after, Jahil sent her four pornographic videos. When her parents found out on July 15, they tried to curtail her communication with the boy. Knepper argued with her parents and then disappeared, running away from home.

Knepper’s parents soon learned she had made plans to meet up with Jahil in Piedmont Park. Jahil, however, was unable to make it and never showed up.

“The immediate cause [of her running away] was the social media connection that just led her to think that she was going to have a great encounter with this young man that didn’t even show up,” Susan Swanson, Knepper’s adopted mom said. “But the underlying [cause] was that Beverly has had a really challenging life. We adopted her about a year and a half ago and so she had been for years in a number of different placements before she came to us.”

The Virginia-Highland neighborhood soon became involved in the effort to find Knepper.

“I first became aware of this situation when I received a robo phone call from APD at about noon or so on July 16th, that there was a missing juvenile in the Piedmont Park area,” said John Wolfinger, coordinator of the Virginia-Highland Safety Team, the neighborhood watch system. “The details at this time were very sketchy.”

By July 16, after Knepper had been missing for a day, the Special Victim’s Unit of the Atlanta Police Department became involved. The local media, along with the Virginia-Highland neighborhood message boards, had begun to broadcast the disappearance. Friends of the Swansons began putting up posters with Knepper’s photo all throughout Piedmont Park.  

“We really were concerned that she might have been picked up by someone with really ill intent,” Swanson said. “Whether it was just someone that wanted to do her harm or wanted to use her in a way, something like the human trafficking field, that was probably our greatest fear.”

After Knepper had been missing for three nights, the morning of July 18, Wolfinger received permission to post an open letter on the Virginia-Highland’s Civic Association webpage that Knepper’s parents had written, publicly stating what had happened.

“I was stunned at how fast the message from the parents was circulated all over our eastside Atlanta messages,” Wolfinger said. “This was within minutes of the initial posting.”

The same day, Tim Taylor and Jim Bohan, investigators from the Georgia Center For Search and Investigation, joined the search to find Knepper after Swanson contacted the organization.

Within hours after Taylor and Bohan started their investigation, Knepper was found in the skate park in Old Fourth Ward.

“She was right by the skate park in Atlanta,” Taylor said. “She wasn’t the whole profile of being abducted or kidnapped, she left because she wanted to leave to be with the guy she had met.”

Knepper never met up with Jahil. When she was found, however, she was with another boy. 

“She ended up connecting with another young man that she did not know,” Swanson said. “But thankfully he was not someone who harmed her.” 

Knepper was released to her parents after she was located. The boy she was with when she was found was handcuffed and interviewed by the Atlanta Police Department. He was released later that same day. 

Wolfinger says the outcome was the best scenario he had hoped for. “She could have been killed, or sexually violated,” he said.

Knepper’s mother said, since she was found, she has been off social media and is attending counseling. 

“It’s not an immediate recovery,” Swanson said. “She is doing well but it’s been a slow process. Her emotions and her mental state were confused when she first came home. She started counseling within several days really intensely with her counselor and that has helped quite a bit. And lots of time together, time to relax and even just having fun helps.”

Although Knepper was found and returned safely home to her family, her story could have had a very different ending. As many as 400 girls a month in Georgia become victims of human sex trafficking.

According to a study conducted by the Schapiro Group, an Atlanta-based, data-driven consulting firm, an estimated 90 percent of runaway girls in Atlanta become part of the city’s sex trade. Many teens are lured in by perpetrators on social media posing as teens and are then kidnapped, sexually assaulted, raped, or sold into human sex trafficking. 

In the last four weeks Taylor alone has been investigating five different girls who have gone missing in Atlanta.

“Atlanta is a huge, huge trafficking ring for children these days,” Taylor said. “They mostly seem to hit around 14 to 15 years old and they use social media to grab them.”

Unaware teens are easy prey for perpetrators. Social media makes them even easier. On social media sites, perpetrators send teens friend requests and messages  then try to gain the child’s trust and arrange a meeting. The girls are then kidnapped, sexually assaulted, raped, or sold into human sex trafficking.

“100 percent [of my assignments] involve social media.” Taylor said. “It’s not like back in the day where a kid got kidnapped or abducted from a store. Nowadays they’re being abducted right from being online and meeting somebody online [who] they think is totally different from what they’re really meeting.”

Bought and sold like modern day slaves, once abducted into the human sex trafficking trade, children are given quotas that can be between 10 and 15 buyers a night, when there is higher demand this number can reach 45 buyers per night according to a report by Shared Hope International, a non-profit organization that helps women and children in crisis. According to the Schapiro Group, in the state of Georgia each night an average of 100 adolescent girls are sexually exploited for money. 8,000 men in Georgia pay for sex with underage females per year and 10,000 do it multiple times per year. 23% of the 3 million men in Georgia have purchased sex with females. According to the 2005 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Status Report, Atlanta is one of the top 14 cities in the US for sex trafficking.

Although human sex trafficking has been shown through multiple studies to be a substantial problem in Atlanta, local media coverage has been limited. Taylor said the media in many cities do not want to cover stories about sex trafficking because it could damage the city’s reputation.

“It’s reported as a missing person or runaway, not as being trafficked,” Taylor said. “Atlanta and a lot of theses cities don’t want that getting out. The reason they don’t want it getting out is because it hurts the business. You’re not going to go to one of these areas with your child knowing that it’s a hotspot for someone to get kidnapped or sexually exploited. They don’t want to expose that, do they need to? Yes.” 

Taylor believes there should be more media coverage, which he believes would make it harder for it to keep happening.

“If they know that every single time a child goes missing it hits the news, the TV program online, on every radio station, guess what’s going to happen? They’re not going to go there anymore.” he said.