Child Sextortion: Technology & Your Kids
Child Sextortion: Technology & Your Kids
Online predators are stalking children even as parents think "not my kid"
[Editor's Note: We recently wrote about how adults are using social media apps to lure and abuse children. Parents listened and looked at their children's phones.]
Imagine you’re a parent. You’re on your phone and across the room your teenager is on her phone. You’re playing a game. You assume your kid is too.
But what you may not know is that your son or daughter may be sitting right there chatting with a person in another state about sex and hooking up. Think about the predator knowing your address, able to even come visit your child because they have looked up the address online. They could snatch your child away when you aren’t even suspecting it.
This is happening all over the country including in small-town Arkansas.
While technology has made life easier in many ways, it has also opened the door to perverts, criminals and pedophiles to have open season on children. They have learned to utilize technology to target victims. These predators play a vicious game with children. They begin as a child's friend then day by day slowly remove the innocence instilled in every child from birth.
What many parents still do not realize is how often their children are being targeted by strangers. Apps like Snapchat and Wizz Speak, or Wizz, seem to be the choice of children, and those who prey upon them.
One mom read a story we recently published about Snapchat and Cash App.
She decided to check her 13-year-old daughter’s phone. What she found was horrifying. She found Wizz Speak and Snapchat on the phone. The mom had talked about online risks and predators. She never thought her daughter would chat with strangers.
“Please check your child's phone,” the mom told South Arkansas Reckoning. “I had no idea so many strangers were having conversations with my daughter. Parents have to check their babies’ phones.”
She kept her child’s phone for several days to monitor it. On Snapchat, she found that no one would show their faces in pictures. Strangers were exchanging random pictures to her daughter for “streaks”. Snapchat saves information between users, a popular aspect of the app is “streaks”. Snapchat keeps track of consecutive daily exchanges of photos between users.
Parents like this mom remain the first line of defense against apps and a virtual world that all too often becomes reality.
Online dangers
Cell phones and video games often assume the role of babysitter or entertainment for children, replacing bicycling, fishing, football, skateboarding, writing, sketching and mud pies of the years past.
South Arkansas Reckoning investigated deeper to provide more insight into how children get caught up in situations online and how experts explain the consequences of the internet and children.
According to the National Institute of Health, sextortion is a term that describes one way children fall victim to predators online.
Author Suyeon Hong in February 2020 study entitled “Digital sextortion: Internet predators and pediatric interventions” wrote:
“Recent findings: Sextortion begins as an unassuming request for personal pictures and quickly escalates. Minors targeted by predators fear both punishment by guardians and the social consequences that follow the release of their explicit pictures. This cycle of victimization endangers minors and may lead to mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression.
Recently, sextortion cases have risen to the forefront of national attention through the mainstream media with celebrities revealed as both perpetrators and victims. This higher visibility of sextortion highlights the importance of reviewing recent research regarding minors and their online behavior and the tactics of perpetrators.”
Rodney Alexander published a study in 2015 warning about sexual predators on the Internet after interviewing 25 teachers and counselors in reference to internet sexual assault.
“Participants stated that mainly the lack of parental support and social networking website were the circumstances leading to teenage Internet sexual assault, while teen needs and gratification usually played a role in teen encounters with predators on the Internet. There were 5 emergent themes in this phenomenological study and those themes were; lack of parental support, social networking websites and chat rooms, teenage need for relationships, instant gratification among teenagers, improved parental support.”
Starting at schools
School policy changes concerning cell phones are happening. That means at least sextortion may be curbed at least in the classroom.
Arkansas Republican Congressman Bruce Westerman recently issued a press release concerning cell phones in schools.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders has also spoken out about social media and cell phones.
Last year, Sanders and Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook, and Instagram with two more lawsuits against TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance.
“We have to hold Big Tech companies accountable for pushing addictive platforms on our kids and exposing them to a world of inappropriate, damaging content,” Sanders said.
This summer, Sanders announced a pilot program focused on two key priorities: restricting in-school phone use and mental healthcare.
Schools can receive grants for Sanders’ pilot program to “provide pouches for students to safely store their phones during the school day, creating a better learning environment and inviting in-person socialization.”
More Awareness Needed
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation has targeted several popular apps including Wizz.
On the organization's website, it states: “Wizz, an app called the Tinder for Teens and ‘kid tinder,’ targeted teenage users looking for romantic or sexual connections. Sextortion was disturbingly rampant on Wizz, with 40% of English-speaking users experiencing sextortion on the app, 77% of whom were minors. Further, Wizz was serving unskippable pornographic ads to minors, a clear violation of both Apple’s App Store and Google Play’s policies.
“Given these facts, NCOSE emailed our contacts at Apple and Google, urging them to remove the app from their stores. Within 36 hours, both Apple and Google complied. However, Apple inexplicably reinstated the app later on, so we are continuing to press on them.”
We checked. As on Monday, July 21, the app was still available on Apple.
Here's the description about Wizz App.
The FBI monitors sextortion. Parents can find helpful information on the FBI website including learning about financial sextortion where kids sell nude pictures on various apps.
The mother South Arkansas Reckoning interviewed has a message to all parents.
“Even if you don't think your kid is doing it look,” the mom told us. “I never would have thought my kid would do it.”
She recommends searching the history in the phone browser and looking for hidden apps. Parents don’t need to solely focus on cell phones. Strangers can reach children through gaming consoles, Chromebooks, tablets, anything that connects to the internet.
“Search all of them,” she said. “If you find one of these apps, remove it. Protect your children.”
She also recommends installing a security app such as Bark Parental Control App to block and monitor apps on phones.
“We have to protect our babies, whatever it takes,” she said.
