Protecting Your Child from Online Predators
When I teach my course on cybercrime one of the topics that piques the interest of my students are the cases where children, primarily girls are exploited online by adults, usually men. This exploitation falls into two general categories — when a pedophile grooms a child for the purposes of seeing images of that child or sexual contact with that child, or when a trafficker grooms a child for the purposes of getting that child to go into forced sex work.
Now to be sure, these cases are rare. They get a lot of attention because they are heinous crimes that disgust us on a gut level, and when children are victimized everyone’s eyes and ears are opened. But the benefits of the online environment for learning and personal development are too great, and to take that away from a young person because of the small chance that they could cross paths with a pedophile or trafficker would be a mistake in my opinion. It would be like locking your child in the house for fear they may get hit by an asteroid from outerspace.
So what follows are four tips that parents can use to protect their child from being victimized online.
- Make sure that your child has attachments with people and places offline (friends, clubs, groups). Studies have documented the process of “grooming” for other types of cybercrimes, most notably romance scams. What scammers want to do is communicate with the target repeatedly, slowly creating a reality that only they and the target share. Once they have created that reality, they can exploit the target. By having your young one involved in many offline activities, it reduces the likelihood that they can be pulled into that false reality.
- There may be a sense that it is the very young, prepubescent child that is most at risk. But my reading of the literature is that those cases are relatively rare. Some studies have shown that men who are attracted to underage girls are attracted to those girls well into puberty — between the ages of 14 and 17. Our understanding of child exploitation, then, needs to shift from thinking that there are “creeps” with psychological problems waiting to prey on pre-teens, to a recognition of the fact that men are attracted to youth in general. Therefore, as your daughter gets older, the need for a discussion about child predators needs to increase.
- Daughters need positive adult male role models. I’m not a psychologist, but it is pretty well understood that children need to have experience interacting with both sexes. This is regardless of your views on same sex marriages or single motherhood. This is not a political statement I am making, where I am saying those types of family arrangements are bad or not as good. All I am saying is that girls need to have positive interactions with male adults, so that they will not be easily deceived by the first adult male they have interactions with. So the third thing that parents can do is make sure that their daughters have an uncle, cousin, or brother whom they have warm, positive relationships with.
- Finally, the lines of communication need to stay open between parent and child. When children reach puberty they stop sharing everything with their parents. Their parents start to recede in importance in comparison to peers at school. Teenagers are learning how to be young men and women and are more interested in what their friends are wearing, listening to, and thinking. As a consequence they will be less interested in hanging out with their mom in the kitchen or dad in the garage. But that does not mean that parents should be satisfied with not knowing what their kids are doing in their rooms for hours and hours at a time. It is important that your child knows they can come to you with issues and you will validate those concerns and not judge them too harshly. With those lines of communication open, your child may tell you something about what they are doing on social media that could alert you to the fact that they are being groomed.
I hope these tips can be put to good use. In closing, always remember to alert the police if anything seems suspicious.
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