How Many Strangers Are in Your Teen's Bedroom?

I'm so sick of feeble solutions.

Public domain via Pexels

There are many reasons not to let a teen have unlimited access to the Internet and social media. These range from unhealthy visual comparison to displays of relational aggression to public emotional oversharing. There’s also the “opportunity cost”—all the things a teen doesn’t do because he or she is too busy scrolling to interact with the real world.

But another big reason that should give parents pause is that an online presence gives other people access to your child. In a perfect world, those people would all be friends or well-meaning acquaintances, but often they are not. Many are predatory strangers, with an unhealthy interest in your child, who is now unprotected and wide open for approach.

I came across the following short video, created by the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which does a powerful job of illustrating what this means. Please take 1.5 minutes to watch it.

As you can see, a parade of strange men enters the home, walking straight upstairs into teenage Evie’s room, and surrounds her bed. They whisper messages to her. “Don’t be shy. You look so pretty in your picture. I just want to see what you’ve got under there. Just for me.”

Evie’s mother continues to bustle around downstairs, preparing dinner, calling her daughter to eat. She is oblivious to what’s going on upstairs. Of course, the physical presence of the men is imaginary, but just think how she’d react if they were real. She’d be screaming at them, threatening them, calling the police, rushing upstairs to ensure her daughter is safe. There is no world in which such a string of strange men could ever enter a teenage girl’s bedroom without a parent becoming wildly defensive.

And yet, that’s exactly what is happening to many of our daughters and sons, by way of the devices they’re given and allowed to use, particularly in the privacy of their rooms for long periods of time. Like it or not, phones and computers are portals that make grooming, deception, and extortion much easier to do than in the past.

Here is another disturbing 1.5-minute video, from the FBI. It raises the alarm about online gaming, and how live chats with other “players” can quickly go in a terrifying direction. It is increasingly common for sexual predators to use gaming platforms to reach kids. A seemingly innocuous chat with a stranger will quickly move into another platform like Instagram or Snapchat, where 79% of sextortion incidents occur (via Cybertip), and then take a dark turn.

“If you lock your doors at night to protect your family from an intruder, you should be locking down your computers. It’s that simple,” says Bill Sweeney, FBI New York, Assistant Director-in-Charge.

An Immense Problem

The numbers are sobering. Over half of the webpages of child sexual abuse include girls aged 11-13 who have been groomed in their homes via webcams, according to the IWF’s annual report for 2022. The UK’s National Crime Agency estimates that there are 830,000 adults in that country who pose a sexual threat to children.

Cybertip.ca, Canada’s national tip line for reporting online child sexual abuse and exploitation says there has been an 815% increase in online sexual luring between 2018 and 2022. The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the situation, and it has not improved since.

Eighty percent of Canadian kids say an adult is “rarely or never in the room” when they’re online. One-quarter of Canadian parents report having seen inappropriate content aimed at their child, so you can only imagine how much comes through that they do not witness. Many children feel too ashamed to say anything. The IWF insists that many parents have no idea how bad it is.

Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineer who testified in front of US Congress in November 2023, tried to explain just how massive the scale of online sexual abuse is on Instagram. Writing for After Babel, he said:

“Within the space of a typical week, 1 in 8 adolescents aged 13 to 15 years old experience an unwanted sexual advance on Instagram. When you multiply that out by the hundreds of millions of teens who use Instagram globally, it means that Instagram hosts the largest-scale sexual harassment of teens to have ever happened.”

A False Sense of Security

It is ironic that many parents are inclined to keep their kids inside, in order to protect them from potential creeps outdoors; and yet, they fail to realize that their child will encounter more predators online than they could ever meet and interact with in the real world. Do not assume that, because your child is in the other room, you know what they’re doing or that they are safe.

So, if you are seriously concerned about who your child might engage with, getting them off the Internet would be a first logical and quite-comprehensive step.

Enough With the Weak Solutions

This is where most organizations pivot from horrifying statistics to weirdly blasé recommendations like, “Stay up to date on emerging trends and risks online. Talk to your child, establish ground rules, and learn how to use safety settings.” As if that’s an appropriately urgent response to the devastating abuse that’s just been outlined!

Imagine telling those strange men, parading up to Evie’s bedroom, that they just need to check in with her mom first, maybe sign the guestbook, enter one by one, and limit their visit to 10 minutes. That’s ridiculous.

My recommendation is, Get them off social media. Get them out of the soul-crushing, fetid place that gives them so little to feel joyful about. Just say no. Social media is not a healthy place for teens. What little good might exist does not justify exposure to the bad, which we know to be unacceptably rampant. Access to social media at, say, age 14 is not a critical human right that needs to be “managed,” nor is your child going to be a stunted human because they started using it later in life (arguably, the opposite).

The only managing required is deleting or deactivating a profile until the child is much older—16 at minimum, but ideally 18—and helping the child to develop a healthy, balanced social life in the real world where they do not feel the need to seek validation online.

You can also say no to gaming, or draw a hard line about doing it online, with live chats. My sons do not play any video games in our home. However, they sometimes do it at friends’ houses, but always in a group, so there is a social element to it. (Obviously, I’d prefer if they didn’t do it at all, but I’m careful not to impose my rules onto other parents who have graciously invited my children in their homes. You can read more about my approach here.)

Privacy Still Exists

A key concept I come back to again and again is Margaret Atwood, in an interview with Jon Favreau of the Offline podcast, saying that privacy is still abundant in the world—as long as you get off the Internet. Her comment struck me deeply. We love to complain about the death of privacy, how everything is public, without stopping to recognize how much of it we offer up to the world freely. We do it to ourselves.

It doesn’t have to be like that. Our teens can be protected and safe in their own homes, but we parents need to stand up and say no. We need to remove the portals that jeopardize our kids’ well-being.

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