Common Ground Common Sense > Alicia's Law Pennsylvania

Common Ground Common Sense > State & Local Information > Mid Atlantic Region > Pennsylvania

believe_it

Jun 28 2009, 01:23 AM

QUOTE

http://www.protect.org/Campaign/Pennsylvan...nnsylvania.html

Alicia's Law Pennsylvania

Bill Number: TBA

Brief Description:
Provides funds for the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Child Predator Unit and grants to local law enforcement to increase capacity to track child predators.

Update:
PROTECT is in the beginning stages of this long-term campaign, but will post updates as they develop.

Detailed Information: Alicia's Law – Virginia was a major 2008 victory, named for a brave PROTECT member and fighter Alicia Kozakiewicz, who at age 13 was rescued from an abductor in Virginia. Alicia's Law secured desperately needed resources for law enforcement teams that "go back through the Internet" to catch child pornography traffickers and rescue their victims, like Alicia.

Expanding on the success last spring of Virginia's Alicia's Law, PROTECT will be taking the fight to rescue children and interdict predators across the country, including the state of Pennsylvania.

Keep up to date here as we move on the Pennsylvania front, and if you live in Pennsylvania, please ask ten friends to sign-up and become members of PROTECT. We're going to need every voice we can get for this fight.

Click here for more Pennsylvania issues.

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believe_it

Jun 28 2009, 01:56 AM

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...st&p=866815
2008 Elections Archive excerpt (post 162)

QUOTE

http://www.house.gov/list/press/fl20_schul...Tmediapage.html

VIDEO

TESTIMONY - Alicia Kozakiewicz Testimony on Sex Predators online
Oct 17, 2007

TRANSCRIPT
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Hello, thank you for inviting me to speak today.

My name is Alicia Kozakiewicz, a Pittsburgh resident. I am 19 years old and a sophomore in college. And for the benefit of those of you who don't know, don't remember those headlines, I am that 13 year old girl lured by an internet predator, transported across state lines to Virginia, in fact, not so very far from here and enslaved by a sadistic pedophile monster.

The authorities told my parents that the odds were a million to one against my recovery, but I was the exception. I got the miracle. I was rescued.

So, why me? Because I was blessed by the simple fact that I live in Pittsburgh where one of the very best cyber task forces was created and because I was enslaved in Virginia where one of the best Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forcem, or ICACs, exists. Because they had the training, the knowledge, and the expertise to find that needle in the haystack that was a lost little girl that was me. Because they had the cooperation of another fine ICAC team here in Virginia. Because they were there, I am here. They are the only reason that I am here in front of you today, but I want you to know that I am not up here alone. Beside me there are so many young girls whose stories will never be heard because they are dead, possibly enslaved, or just too terrified to speak out. When I speak, what I say is for all of us who exist in pain and fear and sometimes even shame, and for those of us who have been silenced by the grave.

So, I guess you need to know how it happened and why I let it happen to me. I want you to stop thinking about that right now. As one young girl said, just because someone leaves without a struggle doesn't mean that they left willingly. It's been five years and I've just begun to answer that question myself. I know that many of you perceive that those of us who have been lured via the internet as being the stereotypical troubled wild child - drugs, broken families, searching for love you can't find at home. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of us were the shy children, wallflowers, not necessarily the geeks or the freaks, just not the partyers. And sometimes, as in my case, those that were very shy. The internet provides a type of anonymity that allows the timid child to miraculously transform themselves. They are suddenly able to act without the fears that have constricted their daily lives. Take myself, for example.

So, in an attempt to impart some clarity here, let me start at the beginning. Pick a teenage girl, any one of us, and we'll be suffering agonies over at least one, and probably more, of these situations. Imagine, your 13th birthday was last month and for some ridiculous reason, your parents still think you're a child. You're sitting home, bored and lonely, because your best friend just decided that you're not so cool anymore. And your other best friend has moved far, far away. That person you have an unbelievable crush on? They think you are the biggest geek. You have a D in algebra, despite your best efforts, and you won't be making the honor roll this semester. And nobody understands anything at all. Nobody ever will. You are alone in this world and you're so bored, so lonely, that you're online just chatting.

So, let me start closer to the beginning. I was thirteen, I was a good student, I had a few good friends. I had the most wonderful, loving, and supportive family a child could ever ask for. And yet at thirteen we change. We question everything, especially ourselves. I was that typically bored, shy, and lonely child just looking for something to do. In the beginning, I chatted with months with Christine, a beautiful fourteen year old redhead girl who just understood me all too well. We became the very best of friends and we shared all of our thoughts, all of our intimate girlhood secrets. There was nothing that she didn't know about me, and we traded our school pictures. Too bad that hers were fake. Yeah, Christine was really a middle aged pervert named John. And he had lots of practice at his little masquerade because he had it all down - the abbreviations, the music, the slang, the clothes. He knew it all. I never had a chance because these perverts, they congregate on the net, they pass their little girlfriends around to each other, and they share technique and they boast of their conquests. John slash Christine was to introduce me to a great friend of hers. This man was to be my abductor, my torturer, and he was my dearest friend.

My relationship online with Tyree grew slowly over a period of about six months. He was courteous and interesting and subtle. He was thoughtful and gentle and nice and, of course, entirely deceptive. And so we became friends. Slowly, imperceptibly, he led me into more intimate conversation. I never even realized that our chats had become more intimate. So we just talked about everything, not just about sex. He was interested in me as a person - my thoughts, my goals, my relationships with friends and family members. He gave me adult advice and always took my side. And that was just what I needed. School was, well, it was school - mean girls and nasty boys and everyone trying to be all that they're not. And my family and I were very close, but we didn't always see eye to eye about everything. Sometimes they just seemed to still think that I was still a child. But there was always my secret special friend and I could count on him to see things my way.

He was my confidante and I wanted to tell him personal things or parrot those things that he wanted to hear from me whatever gibberish they were. And so, I did - always online always ready to talk, always on my side. It was the most comforting thing imaginable. And soon I felt an obligation to return this time, to always be there for him to the exclusion of everything else. He became that someone I believed I needed, the only one I could depend on to understand the real me. He had separated me from my support structures - I was alone. Somehow in this process of grooming me, he had changed me, had destroyed my ability to reason. Was I crazy? No. Was I brainwashed? Entirely.

Today, I think how could it have happened, where was my reason, where was my sanity? That girl who walked out into the coldest, iciest night of the year to meet the madman, that wasn't me. And yet, somehow, it was. He took me apart and put me back together in bit by bit, day by day, bi(nary digi)t by bi(nary digi)t. I walked out the front door and found that the boogeyman is real and he lives on the web. I know. I met him on the evening of January 1, 2002. He came for a thirteen year old girl for a sex slave. He came for me.

Let me share these next words with you, I think they may be what you need to know to understand. Imagine it's below zero as you make your coatless way out the front door to meet this madman that you think is your friend. Maybe at this point you are afraid, maybe there's something wrong here, but you can't stop yourself. So maybe you'll think game's over when you get to the bottom of your driveway, and you'll stand shivering, cowering behind a bush in the lonely, dark night as the falling crystals sting your face just curious to see if he'll really show up. You're not really gonna leave with him. Probably, you won't even reveal yourself to him. But... he is your friend, your best friend. Maybe you'll just be polite and say hi. But then, somehow, wait a minute, you don't remember walking over to the car, do you? And yet, suddenly, you're in the car, terrified, and he's grabbing onto your hand, crushing it, and you cry out but there's no one to hear. And you know this is not your friend. It's some crazy, fat pervert who threatens to put you in the trunk if you make another noise, give him any trouble.

So you stay quiet, real quiet, and somehow you survive the long terrifying ride into the unknown each moment taking you further away from your home, from everyone who loves you, who might have saved you. You realize that you're about to die horribly and you know on some level that there's only you now. You are totally alone and you know that if you want to live, he has to believe that you'll do anything for him. And you decide that you will, that you're gonna survive this, no matter what it takes. So you try to memorize road signs but nothing registers. You can't concentrate past the blinding fear. The signs zip by unread, no hope there. Where am I you cry silently to yourself?

And then, hours later, eternities later you arrive. He opens the door warning you yet again. But somehow the words don't seem to make sense. They float into the air disappearing one by one and his fat, sweaty hand holds tightly, squeezing your arm as you stumble through his door, through the house, and down, down into his basement, his disgusting dungeon. Cold, dark walls filled with nasty sex toys and a cage. Over the next days, he will use many of them on you. In between the beatings and the rapings he will hang you by your arms while beating you, and he will share his prize pictures with his friends over the internet. He will attach clamps to your body and he will use them to send bolts of electricity through your body. He will beat and overpower you and crush you as he violates every inch of your ninety pound body. When he is finished with his fun, he will place a collar around your neck and attach a huge, heavy chain to prevent your escape, and you know he will kill you if he even thinks you want to leave. So you wait. And you pray. And in your fevered dreams you begin to see that cold shallow grave waiting for your little lifeless body, and you cry, 'Mommy, Daddy, I'm here, please find me.'

The last morning as he left for the office he grabbed my face and looking deep into my eyes he said, 'I think I'm getting to like you a little too much. When I come home, we're going for a ride.' This was the first day that he had fed me - my last meal I thought and I knew that I would die today. "Mommy, Daddy, please hurry I prayed. I lay there crying, holding his kitten, my tears wetting her fur, waiting for death when I suddenly heard the loudest crash and voices screaming, 'We have guns, we have guns,' and dragging my heavy chain behind me as I huddled beneath the bed terrified as the men swarmed the house.

And then I saw the most beautiful letters in the alphabet - FBI in bold yellow on the backs of their jackets - and I knew that I was safe and that my prayers had been answered. An agent covered my nakedness with a coat and then cut the collar from my neck and took me from that evil house. The FBI, the ICAC? They are my angels. I like to say that they can walk on water, but they don't need to. Angels have wings.

I spent a lifetime in that house. A year after my rescue the detective, Jim Moore, who had escorted the child that was me from that horror drove me back to the house. It sits on a friendly little street, quietly, cheerfully yellow. I walked up to the squeeky clean basement windows, the one that he had painted black so that no passerby could peer in and stop his little games, and I see toys, a playroom. And I stumble, I cry inside. I mourn for that child that was me, the child that was stolen from me, and make no mistake - that child was murdered. I know that some parts of me are there forever. The child I was is still chained in that room, still suffering, and I am still trying to set her free and others like me. This is why I am a psychology major and why my concentration is in forensics. My ultimate career goal is to become part of and work with the ICAC Task Forces to rescue the child and then hope to recover its soul because even though I have been rescued, I fear that I will never be recovered.

Please support Congressman Debbie Wasserman Schulz's bill and Senator Joseph Biden's Companion Bill 1738. Support the children. Save us from the pedophiles, the pornographers, the monsters. The Boogeyman is real and he lives on the net. He lived in my computer and he lives in yours. And while you are sitting here, he's at home with your children. ICAC Task Forces all over this county are poised to capture him, to put him in that prison cell, with the man who hurt me. They can do it. They want to do it. Don't YOU?

Thank you.

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http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/n...t/partfour.html
To catch a monster, using anti-terror law
Sunday, August 14, 2005
BY MARK MUELLER
Star-Ledger Staff

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