What Apps Are Children Using At 10pm? Keeping Children Safe in a Digital World. ~ Part I

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Our Love And Hate Relationship With Tech:

Technology is a complex thing. On the one hand, the ability of being anonymous, makes it difficult to track who’s doing what. On the other hand, you can’t be your most vulnerable self on it, because there are strangers lurking everywhere watching your every move.

At the same time, it is ubiquitous, and a lack of presence on it is impossible. Of course, we can vilify the big bad world of the internet, but, nothing is much possible without it these days. We can engage in elearning, collaboration, and connection with our family that’s far away, thanks to the internet.

So, why worry about it too much? Kids will also learn by themselves about it right? Not so fast. As adults, we have the added advantage of having the discretionary power of figuring out what is wrong and what is right.

It’s important to find out about what’s going in the world of digital apps that our kids have access to. As people from a previous generation, we didn’t grow up with them, but it’s important for us to understand what are kids are playing with and watching.

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How Children Are Vulnerable:

Children and Teens have some unique vulnerabilities for the stage of life they’re in.

• Due to their still developing brains, they might have poor judgment.
• Their changing bodies and their sexual curiosity is at its peak.
• They spend a lot of time alone especially while commuting back and forth from school.
• They feel insecure and misunderstood by their parents.
• They test their boundaries and take risks without understanding the consequences of their actions.
• They want independence and want to fit into their peer group.

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Child Sex Trafficking And Grooming:

“Sex traffickers increasingly turn to social media and online platforms to recruit children for trafficking schemes.

In 2020, considering the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, the National Human Trafficking Hotline identified a 22% increase in online recruitment into trafficking schemes and reported the internet as the top recruitment location for all forms of trafficking.

From 2019 to 2020, there was a 125% increase in recruitment on Facebook and a 95% increase on Instagram since the previous year.”

The below resource will give us a the different kinds of trafficking that are happening and the methods employed by traffickers to exercise control and deception over child victims, convincing or persuading them using fraudulent promises made over the internet for their recruitment.

Click here for the Human Trafficking Report.

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What Is Grooming?

Groomers or perverts, through DMs, are encouraging children and teens to send them explicit content in the guise of mentoring. Read more HERE.

Online recruitment may begin with commenting on potential victims’ photos and sending direct messages, carefully building the rapport and intimacy needed to entice victims into a false sense of trust.

Examples: fake romantic interests, extreme flattery, promises of gifts or other financial assistance, etc.

Find out more about how perverts attract our children at the POLARIS PROJECT.

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Continued In Part II:

Check it out HERE.

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Child Sex Trafficking Myths:

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Cited Works:

This post is an adapted version of the workshop that I attended.
It’s 9pm..Do you know what apps your teens are using?
Online Parent University “Keeping Teens Safe in a Digital World” on 9/27/23 Wednesday, 6pm-7pm.

In this meeting, we learnt about the safety concerns of popular apps among teens, unsafe default settings/parental controls, cyberbullying, and ways to teach teens to stay safe as they navigate the digital world.

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Truth About Technology

Going out for dinner, calling your mom or going to a party used to be about talking to people, about conversation. But during the last ten years something has shifted. Instead of talking about the food, we post a picture of it online; instead of calling our mother, we send her an email updating her on our lives; and at the party we’re busy showing other people YouTube clips and messaging with friends at a bar instead of talking to other people there. In short, face-to-face conversation is nowhere to be found.

~ Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle

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