While I don’t actually love pornography, self-mutilation, anorexia or Justin Bieber (OK, maybe I do like the Biebs just a bit…), plenty of the teens I’ve worked with over the years have joined online groups, “liked” pages or participated in online communities about sex, eating disorders and celebrities, and, as a result, they’ve been at risk of receiving both inappropriate contact and inappropriate content online.
I Love Porn!
Entire communities exist online for people who want to share pornographic videos, hook up or engage in cybersex with strangers from around the world. Any curious tween or teen has easy access to these communities if parents aren’t using parental controls. I recently spoke with a teenage girl who heard about one such site through a friend. Once on the site, she received solicitations and chats from men and women asking her to have cybersex and sending her nude photos and links to pornography sites. She later started exchanging emails and texts with one of the people she met through the site. Similar communities, fan pages and chatrooms exist in every corner of the web, creating avenues beyond pornography sites for teens to access content and engage in incredibly risky cyber-sex relationships online.
I Love Cutting + Eating Disorders!
Another teenager I spoke with told me how she had learned how to become bulimic through a pro-Ana (pro-anorexia) site. She formed several “close friendships” on the site. These online friends encouraged her on her path towards being dangerously thin. A counselor in my area told me that many of her patients are going online to find support groups for cutting (self-mutilation), drug use and eating disorders, and she credits these sites for contributing to the normalization of destructive teen behaviors. One of the kids that she worked with had met up several times with other teens she met through a pro-Ana site.
I Love Justin Bieber!
I also recently spoke to a mom who learned that her 13-year-old daughter was exchanging texts with a 27-year-old man she met through a Justin Bieber fan page on a popular social networking site.
Bottom Line
If you’re a parent reading this, I hope you are starting to see that today’s Internet isn’t just about downloading, it’s about interacting, communicating, sharing, learning, connecting and uploading. These features of the social web can be used for extreme good and extreme evil. Perhaps your kid isn’t visiting Playboy online, but they may be viewing pornography or exchanging nude photos through a community sex site. They can even meet and form a relationship with an online stranger through sex-focused fan-pages on Facebook. They can also find support for incredibly destructive behaviors and can bond with strangers over their love of certain celebrities, TV shows and movies.
I’m sharing this information with you to broaden your understanding about the negative types of contact online. While online predators can—and do—use online communities to target vulnerable youth, teen strangers and online friends (predator and not) can also be a very destructive force in a minor’s life. Even innocuous-seeming online pages, communities, and sites that a teen visits can place them at danger to interact with strangers and even form an inappropriate relationship. This is why it’s so important for parents to be involved and to use parental controls (like Safe Eyes), which can help you protect your kids from pornography, pornographic online communities, interactive sites, and even sites containing drug paraphernalia and sites advocating bodily abuse.