INSIDE EDITION spoke to a safety expert who gives vital tips on how to stay safe if a predator tries to abduct you.
Could Ariel Castro's teenage victims have done anything to keep themselves out of his clutches?
Safety expert Steve Kardian showed INSIDE EDITION's Diane McInerney how to combat a potential kidnapper with the help of 17-year-old volunteer Beth McCaffrey.
Kardian gave the tip to fight back. He said, "What you can do is, if I go to grab her and drag her, she will base out, go to the ground and kick, kick, kick, and yell for help."
McInerney asked, "Why is it important to fight off the attacker in the primary location?"
Kardian said, "It is imperative they fight them off at the first location, because if they grab her and take her in the car, if it is a stranger, she is not coming back. There is a 95% chance we won't ever see her again."
But once a kidnapper has you inside his lair, like the Cleveland house of horrors, the rules change.
Karidian said, "If you have been abducted, you want to try and personalize yourself. Try and develop a relationship with this person on short notice so that you are not looked at like an object, or a thing. You want to become a person."
Ariel Castro’s victims stayed alive by being compliant, but Kardian advises, always be on the look-out for that one chance to escape.
"Always look for some place to escape. Never give up that avenue," he said.
Alicia Kozakiewicz knows the ordeal the Cleveland kidnap victims have been through. She was abducted by a sex predator in 2002 and held in his house in Virginia.
She said, “I did whatever I could to survive no matter how humiliating and awful it was because I knew I had to stay alive as long as I could for someone to find me.”
Fortunately she was rescued by the FBI after four days of hell.
She has this advice for the victims in Cleveland, “if I could see them I would want to give them a hug and tell them that they have some really hard days ahead but that it will get better.”
