Clayton Cranford joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they discuss how children need trusted adults who explicitly tell them that if something goes wrong online, it’s going to be okay—because what predators exploit most is a child’s fear of reaching out for help.

https://youtu.be/1t42r59-nIE

Clayton Cranford

Clayton Cranford is a former Orange County Sheriff’s Department Sergeant, school resource officer, and juvenile investigator with specialized expertise in behavioral threat assessment and online safety. He is the founder of Cyber Safety Cop, a program dedicated to educating parents, schools, and communities about how digital platforms can expose children to exploitation, grooming, and trafficking risks. With over 20 years in law enforcement and years working directly with youth and families, Cranford has trained tens of thousands of parents and educators nationwide on digital parenting strategies, social media risks, and emerging threats such as sextortion, encrypted apps, and AI-generated content. He is the author of Parenting in a Digital World and a recognized speaker at major school safety and cybersecurity conferences. His work aligns closely with prevention-first strategies and community collaboration, making him a valuable voice in the intersection of technology, youth safety, and anti-trafficking efforts.

Key Points

• Boys are disproportionately targeted for financial sextortion schemes where predators impersonate young girls, quickly establish relationships through unsolicited images, and then extort victims for thousands of dollars, sometimes leading to tragic outcomes within hours.


• Online predators use sophisticated grooming tactics on girls over weeks and months, often employing multiple fake personas to build trust before exploiting victims through threats of exposing images to friends and family, creating a cycle of exploitation that can last for years.


• Parents must explicitly tell their children that no matter how embarrassed they are or how serious the situation seems, nothing will stop their love and support—because what children know intellectually about online safety often doesn’t align with their emotional responses in the moment.


• AI companion apps have become widely adopted by teens, with nearly three-quarters having tried them and half using them regularly, yet these apps lack regulation, age verification, and safeguards against encouraging self-harm or creating unhealthy parasocial relationships.


• School resource officers serve as crucial intervention points not for enforcement but for building trusted relationships where students feel comfortable reporting concerns about peers or seeking help before situations escalate to emergencies.


• The rapid adoption of smartphones from less than 20% to over 80% of teens in just three years created a gap where parents handed their children powerful devices without understanding the risks of platforms like Snapchat and Discord that facilitate anonymous contact and exploitation.


• Prevention requires parents to understand how apps work, implement age-appropriate monitoring tools, ensure notification requirements for app downloads, and have concrete plans with their children about who to contact if something goes wrong online.


• Legislative action is urgently needed to require age verification, transparency about AI safeguards, and regulation of technologies being rapidly deployed to children without adequate study of downstream mental health and safety impacts.

Resources

• Cyber Safety Cop website and resources

Transcript

[00:00:00 ] Clayton Cranford: parents had no idea what they were, what they were kind of getting themselves into when they handed their kid a phone.

[00:00:06 ] Sandie Morgan: She calls her tattoo sleeves “armor,” covering years of scars from predators who convinced her they were her friends, when what she really needed was one trusted adult. And that’s what your kids need too. Someone who says explicitly, if this happens, it’s going to be okay.

[00:00:31 ] I’m Dr. Sandie Morgan with Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice. And my guest today is Clayton Cranford. He’s a former school resource officer, juvenile investigator, father of two, and founder of Cyber Safety Cop teaching parents and students how to stay safe online. Now here’s our conversation.

[00:01:05 ] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, Clay. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you. I still remember when your mother introduced me to you.

[00:01:17 ] Clayton Cranford: That must have been a while. Yeah, that was a while ago.

[00:01:19 ] Sandie Morgan: at that point, I, I just promoted out of, I was a school resource officer, just promoted to the school threat assessment team.

[00:01:27 ] Clayton Cranford: and a lot is, you know, a lot’s happened since then.

[00:01:29 ] Sandie Morgan: Well, and your book is like the fourth edition now.

[00:01:34 ] Clayton Cranford: Yeah, I just updated the, this summer and it was actually a complete rewrite. It was, I, I really considered just calling it a new book, but I’m like, you know what? I like, I like the name of my book. And it is, parenting in the digital world, and I’ve read a lot. I mean, I collect all the books that people are writing on this, on this topic, helping parents, parent their child to digital world. and I just felt like, I think parents need a little deeper insight of what, what actually is going on. Talking about things like ai, some new emerging things, and, more importantly, you know, parents, if they want to dig in really deep, I, I really kind of.

[00:02:14 ] Get way under, like what’s actually happening. Like what is the, the title forces, behind this technology and, and, and how it’s changing our kids, but also then making it very simple and saying, Hey, these are the, these are the conversations you need to have, and these are the things you should start doing.

[00:02:31 ] And so before we started the show, we were reminiscing. And you mentioned you started off when we were at the iPhone four.

[00:02:45 ] Sandie Morgan: So do a a capsule time capsule for us. How old were your kids? What have you experienced as a parent going from a flip phone to where we are today?

[00:03:00 ] Clayton Cranford: Yeah. So, original iPhone comes out in 2007, the iPhone four in 2010, which had the first forward facing camera on an iPhone. And at that time, less than 20% of teens had smartphones. They all had the flip phone, they had like the razor phone, stuff like that. and then over the course of like two or three years, and this is when I was working as a school resource officer in retro center Margarita, I had 14,000 students, nine schools in that city.

[00:03:28 ] We went from less than 20% having smartphones. In about three years, we had more than 80%. So it was this huge uptake. And parents had no idea what they were, what they were kind of getting themselves into when they handed their kid a phone. Dealing with all the issues and everything from, you know, just being hurtful things happening, which, is to be expected, I guess, when kids are on these screens.

[00:03:51 ] But a lot of other things like sexting, sextortion, sexual exploitation, threats. When I was on the threat assessment team, most of our, most of our threats at schools were happening online. and it’s, figuring out, so we, I talked to BMI instructors. We talked to students K through 12 at schools all over the United States, but mostly here in Southern California.

[00:04:12 ] Although kids know like what is safe and not safe, but then at the same time to make bad choices online, really kind of understanding why this, why this is happening. Took me a while to figure out, but that’s kind of what we do now. We go to schools and we help kids kind of understand the digital world a bit better, then supporting parents so that they can mentor support their kids in the digital world as well.

[00:04:41 ] Sandie Morgan: All right, so you used a term from your past school resource officer. Do you wanna tell us what that role is? I think school resource officers are key in this battle.

[00:04:58 ] Clayton Cranford: They are, and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and I, I, frankly, all the police departments here in Southern California, do a really good job of handpicking people. That are the right fit. ’cause you, ’cause you’re basically kind of embedded in the schools. And my office was at the an RSM Intermediate had, you know, I was their first school resource officer.

[00:05:19 ] And so, no, like, they were just happy that I was there. ’cause they’re like, we’re not sure what you’re gonna do, but we’re just happy you’re here. and so it was kind of, it was kind of to some degree up to me. To help fill that role and kind of figure it out. And that’s actually where the, a lot of the cyber safety came from, just based with the things were happening.

[00:05:38 ] But it was really being at that school every day, interfacing with the kids every day, being a positive influence. Men, I was a mentor. I wasn’t, I really wasn’t there to get, you know, to enforce things necessarily, but I was there if, if that needed to happen. And, and, and actually the three years as a school resource officer, I never arrested child.

[00:06:01 ] it was everything that I did there by and large was about supporting the kids, supporting the parents, supporting the administrators, and, and obviously, you know, safety on campuses is, you know, paramount obviously. So one of the, the other things I was involved with was, you know, being, going around to the schools in our cit