In the last few months, I have read quite a few stories of kids who have been blackmailed after sending explicit pictures of themselves to catfish accounts. I read one story just yesterday about a 14 year old boy who killed himself just three hours after getting the blackmail message. And then today, there happened to be a story in the Finnish news that so far this year, the police have been contacted for 101 such cases, with 94% of them being boys. I suspect though, that the number is far higher. And likely, there are more girls also.
What is interesting though, is that these same kids also consider themselves digital natives, raised on screens, gods of the internet. Yet, obviously, a lot of them are not quite as skilled as they believe themselves to be, which is natural, because they are kids. But they are kids that have been exposed to a lot of the worst sides of the internet too, desensitised to violence and sexual content, and building personal desires that would have made a worldly adult blush, just a few short decades ago.
Deviants are everywhere.
Which makes them mainstream, not deviants. Average behaviours have changed and a lot of what used to be considered fringe behaviour, is now mainstream. And the mainstream is put in front of the eyes of children, behind the privacy of their screens, in the privacy of their rooms, with no one to help them understand what they are seeing. Is it any wonder that these digital natives are naturally quite open to sending explicit photos of themselves to strangers online, when they think they can get a bit of attention from someone they find attractive?
They are kids. They haven't learned self-control, especially in the current environment they have been raised in, nor do they have good judgement, and they have very little understanding of the consequences and ramifications of their actions. Regardless of whether they have been raised on screens and the internet, they just aren't equipped to make good decisions, and they do not fully comprehend how they are going to feel when things go wrong. And when they put so much of their self-worth into their digital persona and care so much about what their peers think of them, they are an easy target for exactly this kind of blackmail.
The blackmailers should be ashamed.
But they aren't, because as has been proven time and time again, if there is money to be made, no matter how disgusting or heinous the activity, there will be someone willing to do it. Rooms filled with people willing to do it. Organised groups willing to force people to do it. They don't care that children are committing suicide over these things, it is just collateral damage, much like civilians dying in a warzone. As long as there is profits to be made, the cost of death is acceptable.
And they aren't going to stop.
The only way to stop an incentivised activity, is to disincentivise it. Since the majority of the tracking leads back to poor countries with shaky legal systems, the disincentive can really only come through making it unprofitable, by having so few people tricked into these kinds of scams, that there is no money to keep them operating. While they use some sophisticated methods, every child should know that they shouldn't be sending explicit images to people on the internet. Let alone people they have never even met in real life.
Isn't that a pretty basic rule?
There is another way to stop it of course. And that is to make the behaviour so prolific, so accepted, that children don't care if there are sexually explicit images of them plastered all over the internet. And unfortunately, I think that this is more the direction we are heading, which is why there are children today who "can't wait" to turn eighteen so they can go onto sites like OnlyFans. And we have a thousand teenage boys lining up to bang a pornstar on camera, one after the other.
What have we done to humanity...
Education might be key, but we also have to remember that children are children and no matter how many times they are told, many are just not going to listen. They think they know better than those older than them, because that is part of being a child. However, even though children haven't changed at their core, the risks aren't the same as they once were, and the costs can be much higher.
Their whole identity is built around the global internet, which means one mistake and the whole world knows. And even if no one cares, the feeling of that immature individual is that everyone knows and they will never live it down. That their mistake will live with them and be part of who they are forever. And for some, it is impossible to imagine a happy life with that hanging over their head, so they end their lives.
I don't believe that just because children have been raised on screens, that they innately know how to handle themselves on the internet. I don't believe they are more capable and actually think they are more gullible than previous generations, because they have socialised so much less. They haven't learnt to read the warning signs, so fall into all kinds of situations they don't actually want to be in.
Will they learn, or just keep giving in to their nature?
Taraz
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