Why Do People Still Let Their Children Roam Free on the Internet?
It isn't about how smart you think your child is. Do realize that adults are smarter. An adult can pinpoint a vulnerable child in a crowd and take advantage of that. As with any predator, they look for those points of weakness (a cheetah will chase a slow gazelle, a lioness will take down a wounded zebra). In the wild, animals use different techniques to hide from these carnivores. They shield their young from an incoming attack. So why do humans offer their children to snakes?
When I was young, I used to go on online chats a lot. A visit with my older cousin introduced me to that world when I was eleven, and I one day decided to search the words “chat room” on Google when I was thirteen. In one month, I was talking to a nineteen year old who also lived in California. Almost immediately, the conversations evolved into him asking me if I wanted to meet up, and it was cool because my thought process as a thirteen year old was that I had an older friend. I was that interesting that someone older wanted to meet me, and if he would have been more sly about his approach, groomed the situation for a few more months, said “I can meet you at your school”, I may have done it.
Instead, he jumped the gun. Wanted to meet really quickly, started saying I should just quit school and “run away” with him. Unfortunately, he didn't guess that I actually liked school and learning and that that wasn't something I was willing to do. But another kid, with a shittier home life and less to stick around for, could have easily been persuaded. Realize that thirteen year olds, teenagers in general, begin to see themselves as adults. They want to be part of that crowd and many think they can spot that snake in the grass, but the truth is that even some adults can't.
I see many children on YouTube, the ones with their pictures on their profile and the ones that so quickly confess their age. Now, I don't mean to sound creepy (or maybe I do if that will make someone change their mind about this), but if I wanted to meet up with a few of those kids I could. Maybe I could just meet one, and if I were some pervert, wouldn't one be bad enough? Because all I have to think about is what would have worked for me? What would have convinced me to meet one of these people? What would I have liked them to say?
When I was thirteen, it was 2004. People weren't so aware of chat rooms and the dangers that come with them. There weren't all those “safety on the internet” movements. What's the excuse now?
Here are some stories of teenagers meeting people online:
Tell me, which of these results is something you'd like to see happen to one of your kids? There are dozens of stories like these. You never know who is behind the screen.
You can try to argue that your child would never meet someone online in real life. Not if that person convinced your child that they were a classmate? Not if that person pretended to be a family member or a neighbor?
Let's pretend for a moment that that is true. Your child would never meet someone from the internet. What about someone finding your child? This is made easier with pictures, with an email address, with a phone number, and with information you wouldn't even think would be identifiable enough (a scenery picture that shows a store in the background, part of a username that matches a street in your city, the name of another classmate writing on your child's YouTube feed).
What about your child being blackmailed. Do you think this situation is uncommon? Improbable? It's not:
And if that predator gets a child's physical address, there are many unfortunate outcomes for that. This is not that hard to do if they know the parent's information like a first and last name that people so easily give out on Facebook: Spokeo.com will lead people to your last used DMV address, the one on your license. But many people don't think twice when posting pictures of their children online.
If a predator knows your address, how difficult do you think it is to park a car across your street, watch the child leave for school, learn the name of the school, study the streets your child uses on his or her walk home, and one day approach your kid? After a few weeks of watching, they will know what to say, what pertains to your child, so that they can start a conversation. Your child doesn't talk to strangers? No problem. They can pretend to be the parent of your child's friend, the one that didn't make it to school today. They just want to to know what the class assignment was, so they can tell the child, and a conversation starts. Your child won't talk to anyone? No problem. A child can easily be dragged into a car. This is something you and your children should be aware of even outside of the internet.
So your child finally reaches 18, legally an adult, and you think none of this happened, your child made it out unscathed.
If you think that then you need to reassess your opinion of the internet.
Predators are not the only danger. Think about what your child is exposed to on the internet. Think about those things you've seen or heard that stick with you.
I asked my brother recently what what the worst thing he's ever seen on the internet. I'll put out a trigger for you, because I don't think everyone wants to read this. But he saw it.
/START TRIGGER
It was a video of a woman, and you could only see her legs. She had high heels on, and there was a kitten on the ground beside her. She put her heel into that kitten, tearing through its body.
I said, because I try not to get too emotional about these things or I'd go crazy, “At least the cat died quickly.”
He said, “No,” shaking his head. “It didn't. She put her heel into the cat's eye and twisted her heel into it.”
/END TRIGGER
I've read my share of racism (who hasn't?). I've encountered porn videos that did not seem consensual and beastiality videos. I've seen people get cut up, cut themselves up, and I've read stories of child rape, baby rape, all kinds of murders, the things people do in war to humiliate the men they fight against, to destroy them before they kill them.
I've stumbled upon child porn. It was a woman (could have been the mom) giving a blowjob to a boy that looked like he was seven or eight years old.
I am not some weird deviant that searches this shit out for kicks or even curiosity. This is the internet. Do you want to try to argue that seeing all of this at an impressionable age (when a child is still learning right from wrong and what they should value) does not have a negative impact on a child? At best, it desensitizes people from thinking much of these things. At worst, it becomes so normalized that violence and sexual deviance become part of your child. The attitudes and values displayed on the internet will be your child's role model if your child spends more time on the internet than talking to you. And isn't that so often the case in families these days?
Parents must take the lead in monitoring and safeguarding what their children see on the internet.
This is a real issue. I think most parents are just a little too far removed to understand just how real the threat it. Sex trafficking in particular is real.. they make so much money off of the trafficking that they are even willing to invest years in the grooming process.
Yikes.
It's good that you bring up sex trafficking; I didn't even get that far in my post. You're right that these people will spend a lot of time grooming children. And if for some reason, one child or that child's parents get wise and cut off communication, it probably won't make much of a difference to the predator who is talking to many potential victims at once. A scary thought.
There's a movie on Netflix called The Chosen Ones (2015) that depicts a girl who is entrapped in a prostitution ring by her boyfriend and his family. If you don't mind foreign films (it's in Spanish), I'd recommend it. It's an interesting take on the subject.
It's so awful.. my heart probably can't handle a film on it! It devastates me to hear about.
So glad you weren't sucked into that!
Kayclarity? It's so sad what happened to Amanda Todd in Canada. However, I don't think that only the online predator should have been prosecuted for what he did to her but also the teenage kids who conspired with him to harm this girl. Just because they were minors doesn't mean that they were any less culpable of driving that poor girl to suicide than that online predator over in the Netherlands was.
I am making my way down your content, and I really dig it. You are one of the first people I stumbled upon since joining. I totally agree with this. I have 3 kids, and you best believe they will not be having cellphones and free internet time for quite a long time.
Thank you. That's the best compliment I've gotten since I joined. And thanks for following me. I've only been posting for about three days so I don't have much content yet, but I'll do my best to post something every day, and I hope you enjoy reading whatever else I put up.
It's nice to meet a parent who recognizes the importance of protecting children from this technology. Yes, technology is a tool, but tools can also be used to harm. So caution is a necessity.
For sure! Yeah I am on day 2, following a lot of people in the art community (as I am an artist), but I enjoy your commentary. Look forward to interacting more!
Saywha? You got to do what you got to do.
Indeed, parents have a great responsibility to protect their children, and that definitely includes the Internet.
Agreed. It saddens me that some of the horror stories of teenagers meeting people from the internet are from the last few years or even this year. When are people going to educate themselves and start having real dialogues with their kids so this stops happening? When you give your child a pair of scissors or any other tool, you tell them about the dangers, right? And when you see your kid running with scissors, you don't just turn a blind eye, so it is astonishing to me that people introduce their kids to the internet and then allow them to do whatever they want online.
The issue that I have with the public responding to these events is that whenever the online predator turns out to be a boy the same age as a teenage girl he has kidnapped and raped, self-proclaimed child advocates will act extremely disappointed that the perpetrator was not an older man. When something like that happens and the teenage girl is rescued, people should be happy that she has been found and that the perpetrator has been arrested even if he is a boy the same age as her. In other words, American society needs to take all the pedophile-panic politics out of their efforts to protect teenage girls from online predators. OLDER MEN ARE NOT THE CAUSE OF ALL TEENAGE GIRLS'S PROBLEMS!
Okay, orcainutah. I get it. The Internet is like the Wild West, particularly if you are young. I used to live in California, so I know what goes on out there in terms of it being less sheltered for adolescents than other parts of the nation. Your article was undoubtedly interesting. However, a major problem that I have with many of these online vigilantes who try to intercept adult men who attempt to meet up with teenage girls via the Internet is that they promote the misconception that older men are the cause of all underage teenage girls' problems, and that is not necessarily so.
As much as our society spends time worrying about a middle-school or high-school girl crossing over to the other side of the legal age line with some older man she met online in her romantic pursuits whether he be 35 years old or only 19 years old, I cannot understand why our society goes so easy on deadbeat teenage fathers who are still minors.
When a 13-, 14- or 15-year-old girl thinks that she has found the love of her life with some school hunk in her class, and he pressures her into having sex with him before she feels ready and he turns on her like a betraying angel after he gets her pregnant, I don't understand how anyone can consider such a scenario to be normal adolescent behavior. And there are a lot of teenage boys doing this sort of thing inasmuch as they figure that they can get away with it so long as they are minors. They should be drafted into the military on their eighteenth birthday.
And doesn't society send a mixed message to our youth whenever it leads a young girl between 12 and 17 years old to believe that she is a victim if she has sex with an older man she has hooked up with in an online chat room but that if she gets pregnant with the baby of a boy the same age, then she is always a slut? That to me is a double standard, and no young girl should ever be given those mixed messages.
Just a thought.