Source: Protect Young Minds
It’s not difficult to look around and surmise that porn culture targets kids. We meet and hear from parents all the time who are full of fear over this. And for good reason. With the ease of access to porn and its harmful effects on children, porn is a formidable enemy indeed! But fear can be very debilitating.
So let’s get to know the enemy so we can gear up for those battles! Here are TEN things to look out for this year as you raise kids in a hypersexualized porn culture AND what you can do about it!
1. Threats on Twitch
Twitch is a popular platform for watching people livestream video games and interacting with them through live chat. Any kind of live content is difficult to police, but Twitch has become a real back alley of the internet.
While explicit sexual content is banned on Twitch, plenty of users find ways to walk up to the line by wearing skimpy outfits and doing exercises like jumping jacks and squats. Women streaming on twitch are targets of online mobs spewing sexual harassment.
Children who livestream are subject to grooming behavior, with viewers encouraging them to do increasingly compromising things and recording the streams to use for sextortion.
The National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a charity in the UK, reported that “Twitch was one of the most prevalent places where children reported being asked to send explicit material of themselves by adults, along with social media giants Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter.”
What you can do:
With a lack of parental controls and live on-camera behavior, Twitch is not a safe place to let your children explore. The safest recommendation would be to stay off the platform or only watch together. It’s just too easy to wander into unsafe parts of Twitch or witness sexual content or harassment on an otherwise ordinary stream.
Parents have very few options to make Twitch safer (like blocking “whispers” from strangers). If your child wants to watch video game streams, try redirecting them to a safer platform like YouTube where parental controls, although imperfect, at least exist and live content is less prevalent. Whatever you do, talk with your kids about grooming and safe behavior online.
2. Turning Kids into Sex Objects through Dance
It’s astonishing how children’s dance often involves sexually overt moves and costumes that objectify little bodies. Mary Bawden is a dance instructor and founder of Dance Awareness: No Child Exploited or DA:NCE, an organization working to reclaim the beauty of dance for children. She is convinced that pornography is fueling the rise in sexualized dance for kids–dance that includes vulgar and hypersexualized moves.
What you can do:
If you want your child in dance in 2020, please thoroughly vet the dance studio you’re considering. Make sure you:
- view past performances
- talk to the instructors about their policy on sexualized dance moves
- think of the time and influence those teachers will have on your son or daughter and make sure you protect your kids from sexual objectification through dance
3. Dark Web Pulls In Curious Tweens
The Dark Web sounds pretty scary and it is! Here’s what parents need to know in 2020:
- The dark web is used to trade illegal stuff–like child sexual abuse images (aka child pornography). People buy illegal drugs and weapons, hire hit men, harass people in suicide chat rooms, learn about hacking, sell stolen goods and promote terrorism. A dangerous place for anyone, especially kids!
- Tor is one of only a few ways to access this encrypted digital underworld. Tor is a free app and easy to download. It gives anyone the key to the most horrific and dangerous content down in the depths of the Dark Web. But kids use it to get around internet filters, especially at school. A big red flag should go up if your child wants to download Tor onto a smartphone or tablet.
What you can do:
- Teach kids to stay far away from the dark web! For more info on the dark web, read our parent alert post.
- Make sure you understand all of the apps on the mobile devices used by your kids.
4. Porn Continues to Fuel Child on Child Sexual Abuse
It’s a growing trend with no end in sight in 2020. Children who view pornography are at greater risk for acting out sexually on other children. In fact, a new study from the University of Melbourne reports that educating children on the negative effects of pornography could have prevented harmful sexual behavior.
This problem has become so rampant on military bases that dozens of military leaders (and hundreds of others) attended a symposium this past spring in Washington, D.C. called Out of the Shadows: Confronting the Rise in Child on Child Harmful Sexual Behavior where our founder, Kristen A. Jenson, presented more evidence for how porn fuels this damaging and disturbing trend.
What you can do:
- Understand the risk: Children’s brains are naturally wired to imitate what they see adults do. That makes them especially vulnerable to the negative effects of pornography.
- Teach children the 3 R’s: Recognize what porn is, Reject it with a plan from Good Pictures Bad Pictures, and Report exposure to pornography immediately to a trusted adult.
- Teach kids the 3 big red flags of child abuse: bribes, threats and normalizing. Read more about the 3 big red flags here and download our popular Body Safety Toolkit here.
5. Video Game Porn Bots
What?! Yes! Porn bots! Your kids are playing their favorite video game on Xbox or Playstation when a chat request pops up in the corner of the screen. The username is usually some mix of random words, numbers, and a woman’s name.
If your kids interact with the bot, they will be asked for their age and invited to participate in a private video chat to help the ‘woman’ warm up for a job doing “private webcam shows.” Clicking the provided links will send your kids to a website that will either try to harvest their email for porn sites to spam or to get a credit card number to steal money directly. This problem has existed since 2017 but has only gotten worse.
Some of these bots will stop interacting if your kids indicate they are under 18, but that shouldn’t be the only thing protecting your kids from dirty conversations, porn, and fraud.
What you can do:
The key here is to make sure that your Xbox Live or PlayStation Network accounts are set up correctly.
- Children under 13 should not have a regular account, but a sub-account or “child account” which allows parents to access content controls.
- For Play Station, create a child account and make sure that “Communicating with other players” is turned off.
- On XBox, create a child account and set their account to the default child setting, which blocks all friend requests from other users.
- For older kids and adults who want to avoid interacting with these bots, you can use the XBOX privacy settings or Play Station privacy settings to prevent random users from friending and messaging your account. Nintendo Switch does not include chat by default; it can only be accessed via a separate phone app and can be restricted using parental controls.
Read the full article here.
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