“The Dangers of Social Media: Child Predator Social Experiment” — I.e., Boogeyman Out To Get Your Kids!

This guy committed an actual crime. Register this chump!

I’m aware of very few cases of older men pretending to be teens in order to lure girls. In nearly all cases of teen girls and older guys meeting online and then going on to meet in real life, the girl was well aware of the guy’s age and frequently had found him on a site intended for adults (like the Zach Anderson story).

The “danger” the internet poses is not that some stranger will trick your teen daughter into thinking he’s a peer and then coerce her into sex but that your daughter will seek out sex with an older guy who in many cases is not going to say no. And that isn’t good. But we need to deal with reality, not fantasy.

Otherwise it’s like imagining that the danger of teen drinking is that some predatory adult will lure your child into a club by telling them it’s really a toy store and then coerce them into drinking. Could that happen? I guess. But, much more likely is that your kid will seek out a fake ID, willingly enter the club, and eagerly start drinking. Yes, it’s fine and good to go after bartenders and club owners who serve drinks without checking IDs or convenience store clerks who sell beer to underage teens, but clearly the primary way to address the problem is to get teen’s to change their own behavior.

It’s possible that there will be a drug dealer standing outside your kids’ school pretending to be having a bake sale and trick them into eating a pot brownie. But, it’s far more likely that your teen will willingly seek out drugs. Again, that doesn’t let the dealer off the hook, but it’s a different problem with a different solution.

The problem is not adult predators tricking and coercing teen girls into meetings, but teen girls willingly seeking out hook-ups with older guys (often guys in their 20s). If we don’t like it–and I don’t think we should like it!–we need to not simply condemn the guys but also hold these teens responsible for their own behavior and start talking to girls about why looking for hook-ups online is something they should not do, just like they shouldn’t buy drugs and shouldn’t use a fake ID to get into bars to drink.

Ok – we have a number of things wrong with this “experiment”

1) where did he find these three families? How many parents rejected this idea?

2) are these the only three families in this “experiment”? That is, is he claiming 100% of the subjects went for this ruse? If not, how many did NOT fall for this crap. Excuse me – meant “trap”

3) if not for the parents, how would this Coby person know how to get in touch with them? He did not present evidence that the girls sought out these encounters. So absent that info this is nothing more than a targeted sting designed to entrap these girls. Why does he not show the 3-4 days of texts? How often did he ask for a face to face and they said no?

4) the 1st girl went to a public playground during day hours and there were other people present. Not wise regarding not knowing who actually was online, but not like going to an out of the way location in a strange part of town. Since the other 2 were at night, I think this girl was also asked to meet at night and refused.

the 2nd girl was waiting for her father to fall asleep – what was the time of this encounter since it appears that the meeting was not in middle of night? Does the father regularly go to sleep and leave his daughter up alone? She did say she was lonely, so more to this story than meets the eye.

the 3rd girl was left home alone as her parents went out. Was this the 1st time left alone? Hard to believe those parents would regularly do this, so this seems like an “opportunity crime” – something she would not do unless presented to her.

I have daughters so I understand why parents are concerned, but establishing trust is best parental gift. Not so sure these parents have fully succeeded in that area.

I do hope all three of these families can work past this manipulative and exploitive bit of self aggrandizing video.

Oh – points to video guy for driving a van with “child abductor white” paint.

My older daughter (15) has had a Facebook account since she was 13, and we’ve never told her that she can’t friend strangers online — just as we never told her “don’t talk to strangers” when she was younger. The danger is not in conversations, but in giving out personal information or going off alone to meet someone you don’t know. Someone in another state said she was planning to drive through our state on vacation, and asked our daughter if they could get together when she came through, and our daughter asked us and I said that we’d take her to meet this person somewhere, but we wouldn’t send her off alone with a stranger. She never heard back so maybe the trip never happened.

It’s hard to make judgments about parent-child relationships based on just one video, but I find myself hard-put to figure out why these young girls were sneaking around behind their parents’ backs rather than saying, “I’ve been chatting with a cute guy that I’d like to meet in person. Can you take me somewhere to meet him?” It seems like the simplest thing in the world to take your daughter to a park or an inexpensive restaurant, meet the guy with her, and say hi, and then tell your daughter “Let me know when you’re ready to go” or, if time is limited, “We have an hour,” and then go sit at another table (or park bench) and read a book so they can chat a while.

The fact that one of the girls gave the guy her address and opened the door to him, and another went and got into the guy’s vehicle, makes me wonder if their parents were so adamant about “stranger danger!” while they were growing up that those girls just went to the other extreme and stupidly assumed that everyone (especially a guy who knew how to post a cute picture on the Internet) was safe and their parents were just paranoid morons.

As to the girl who walked to a public park to meet the guy in broad daylight, this doesn’t seem all that risky, though, as a parent, I’d honestly rather be aware about the situation and also be there — although as I’ve already said, if the guy actually had been close to her age instead of 30, I’d have allowed them plenty of space to chat while I read a book some distance away.

“The fact that one of the girls gave the guy her address and opened the door to him, and another went and got into the guy’s vehicle, makes me wonder if their parents were so adamant about “stranger danger!” while they were growing up that those girls just went to the other extreme and stupidly assumed that everyone (especially a guy who knew how to post a cute picture on the Internet) was safe and their parents were just paranoid morons.”

Along with this, I would venture to guess that most forcible sexual assault of young women is perpetrated by guys around their age, not older guys. Just like, most women are raped or assaulted by romantic partners, or ex-partners, than by strangers. By focusing so obsessively on the danger that “strangers” may pose to people, I think we do leave many people thinking the world can be clearly and neatly divided into “dangerous” people and “safe” people, and of course most of us assume that those who know and like are “safe.” (And certainly things like the sex offender registry do nothing to disabuse us of this idea.) But women and children are both in much more likely to have a violent crime perpetrated against them by somebody they know and trust (and, for teens, who is around their age) than by some creepy stranger, and it’s more likely somebody’s daughter will be raped or murdered by the nice-seeming guy she’s dating than by some stranger she meets online.

(Just like we never talk about how a huge amount of sexual abuse of children is perpetrated by other, slightly older children, but instead assume that when we talk about rates of sexual abuse we are always talking about abuse perpetrated by an adult.)

@bsolar: “Typically because the answer often would be ‘I don’t want you to meet him, so you’re not going to meet him. End of discussion’.”

That’s kind of what I was thinking. While I understand that some sneaking around may be motivated solely by the thrill of trying to get away with something without getting caught (like those shoplifters who really have plenty of money to buy what they’re stealing), it seems to me like the sneaky behavior of these three girls — especially the really stupid behavior of the one who let the guy into her house and the one who got into the car with him — was motivated by a sense that their parents really didn’t care if their lives were boring and their social needs weren’t being met.

And here, I’m not talking about the “I’m bored — entertain me” mentality, but simply about the fact that as kids grow, many of them start craving an ever-widening social canvas. For us middle-aged parents, it can be challenging to remember when we were that energetic. We’re in a different phase of life: we’ve (hopefully) branched out from our families of origin and established families of our own; we may still really enjoy meeting new people and making new friends, but our energy is now a lot more focused on those in our immediate families and on the work that we’re doing to increase our financial security and provide the best opportunities we can to our kids.

Our kids, of course, are in that branching-out phase that we went through so long ago. Home and the immediate family are their reference-points, and a place to find rest and refuge when they get burned out in the great big world, but their energy and interest is still almost solely focused on that great big world. It’s as it should be — but it can feel exhausting to those of us who spent many years helicoptering. It’s just so much easier to helicopter a little one who always wants you around anyway. 🙂

@anonymous mom: “By focusing so obsessively on the danger that ‘strangers’ may pose to people, I think we do leave many people thinking the world can be clearly and neatly divided into ‘dangerous’ people and ‘safe’ people, and of course most of us assume that those who know and like are ‘safe.'”

That’s very true. That’s why I hate the extreme stance of “Never talk to or interact with a stranger.” Rather than labeling certain people as “dangerous,” why not think in terms of having different levels of trust for different people, based on factors like how long we’ve known them and how trustworthy their behavior has been thus far?

A stranger is not a “danger” to talk with — we just take our time getting to know people before thinking of them as trusted friends.

Ive had my facebook since i was sixteen. It wouldnt let me create a fake name. I had to use my real one. The fact that i can use my real name without fear means that the internet is quite safe. I have international friends via tumblr, and theyre all very nice and understanding when i need advice. So to heck with the paranoia of today’s society.

I think this taught these girls a lesson. 1) do not believe everything you read online and 2) your parents just may be watching you at any time.

While this guy may be scaremongoring, you may also be blissfully naive. We live in an upscale area in Northern TX. For the past two school years, there have been several attempted abductions of kids in route to and from school. Stranger danger is real, and your children need to 1) be attended and 2) be taught to be aware. This video shows how the lack of either can result in a tragedy. These kids being left unattended, with opportunity, is part of the problem.

I can’t watch this video. Not without wine.

The perceived and real risks of *online* predators is just another opportunity to make money for companies with tracking software and keep parents up all night cyberstalking their own children.
But kids will always outsmart parents and find other ways to take risks. Just look at Snapchat.

I am not a fan of most forms of social media. Between oversharing personal information, duckface young girls, and those who have Facebook balls (see the comments on the viral FB video Lenore posted a few days ago) and say things they would never say to someone in person, I DO think there are many real dangers. Couple that with hormones and poor judgement, and young teens who don’t get regular social opportunities to meet with kids their own age because of parents who think they are keeping them safe are going to find risks (like posing suggestive photos) and look for attention online.

“The problem is not adult predators tricking and coercing teen girls into meetings, but teen girls willingly seeking out hook-ups with older guys (often guys in their 20s).”

These teens are WILLINGLY seeking attention online. We, as parents, need to figure out WHY. Painting teens as victims, not responsible for their poor choices does not help.

@Papilio, that kind of situation is exceedingly rare. The Zach Anderson type situation–guy is seeking out an adult to hook up with on a site/app where adults meet other adults, and ends up meeting an interested underage person–is much more common. And, every “predator” sting they run involves not going into places where kids go and trying to find somebody attempting to lure them into meeting for sex but going into places where adults go to seek out sex and pretending to be a sexually-experienced, horny teen knowing full well what they are getting into.

I think there needs to be a good balance of common sense and wariness. Because, even if the guy telling your daughter he is 15 actually *is* 15, that doesn’t mean he’s a safe person to meet. I mean, just a week or so ago we were talking about the 15 year old who murdered his neighbor. Going to meet a person you only know online in person by yourself is probably a bad idea in most cases, and parents should talk to their kids about the dangers of that, no matter what the age of the person. If you portray it as, “Well, there might be some creepy 50 year old guy out there trying to trick you into thinking he’s 14 and he’d be really dangerous,” your kid is going to 1) assume that a guy who really is 14 is NOT dangerous and 2) assume that if a guy she’s talking to doesn’t seem creepy or dangerous, he must actually be 14. It becomes this weird tautology where we decide that people cannot be dangerous because they do not fit our stereotype of what a dangerous person looks like.

People, including teens, are going to be dating and meeting people via the internet more and more. We should be teaching how them to do it safely. Even if somebody is definitely absolutely your age and seems super nice, you need to take basic precautions: meet in a public place, bring somebody else with you, etc. If one of my kids wanted to meet up with a person they’d met online, I’d most likely suggest they came over to our house, and if they were unwilling to do so, I’d be a bit wary of that person. But there is nothing unique here to older guys pretending to be teens (which is a really uncommon scenario because, again, there’s plenty of teen girls fully willing and eager to hook up with older guys, so even if a guy were really, really hoping to get with a teen, he really doesn’t have much incentive to lie), and an actual 15 year old could pose just as much danger to your child as somebody 30.

I’m stunned by all the negative remarks you folks are leaving. Have you raised a teenage girl? (Or boy, for that matter, let’s not be sexist..). God love the little poops, but they have NO brains!! Maybe the girls shown here have been relentlessly disobedient, and this is the drastic measure the parents have stooped to to get the girls’ attention. I don’t think it’s necessary to delve into the possibilities and “what if’s” in the parent/daughter dynamic; the girls made these horrible decisions, to me, that says it all. Who cares how many other parents said “no” to the idea, or how many other kids didn’t fall for it. These girls did and it scares the shit outta me.
Remember the tv series, “Scared Straight”? That’s all this is- parents resorting to dire circumstances to get their kids’ attention.

“Teens do things they know are wrong and potentially dangerous. They drink, have unprotected sex, do drugs, drive recklessly, lie, and stay out past curfew. They make these choices willingly, if stupidly.

These are not teen specific actions. And I would bet that the number of adults doing these exact things far outnumber the number of teens doing them. But doesn’t everyone seem to think that it is only kids that don’t know better.

@momoffourgirls
“God love the little poops, but they have NO brains!!”

In your case, I suspect it’s hereditary.

My kids are about this age and a major part of my parenting job is building trust both ways. I can’t imagine that any trust that existing between this girl and her parents has not been shattered by this event. Devastating.

The biggest asset a parent can have in keeping their children safe is building a system of trust between the parent and child(ren). Parents need to be able to TRUST their children to make sound decisions. Children need to TRUST that if they make a mistake, or if something happens, their parents will be there for them.

Tricking your child and then punishing them for falling for the trickery, publicly shaming your child through releasing a video, etc., does not build TRUST. What it does build is wariness.

If I tricked my child into doing something wrong, then punished her for it, do you really think she’ll call me up for a ride home from a party she wasn’t supposed to attend? No. It’s more likely that she’ll get into a car with a person who has been drinking and hope that she makes it home without me finding out.

If my child is attacked or raped while drinking at a club, will she come to me for help or support? No. It’s more likely she’ll hide it from me out of fear of getting a lecture.

If my child finds herself in an abusive relationship with someone I don’t particularly care for, would she come to me for help? Probably not because I’ve already demonstrated that my first inclination is to punish.

Thankfully, so far, my teens and I have relationships built on trust and dialogue. Maybe that’s because I haven’t been shy in discussing my own transgressions as a teen/young adult, I don’t know. What I DO know is that even though she rolls her eyes and poo-poo’s my advice, she still comes to me with her teenage problems.

Honesty and trust.

“There’s no trouble you can be in that you can’t make it worse by lying about it.”

My daughter was independent by nature, and didn’t need much monitoring when she reached her teen years… although she did get some unsolicited guidance from time to time. By the time they’re teenagers, you’ve already had nearly all of the chances you have to imprint your moral and philosophical views on them, and they’ve either taken or they haven’t.

We disagreed on some things… the literary value of Stephanie Meyer’s oevre, the relative musical talent of Taylor Swift and John, Paul, George, and Ringo (individually and as a group), whether teenagers should complete their required reading assignments. I believe that if she’d thought she’d needed to, my daughter would have sought my aid. She didn’t make all the same decisions the way I would have. She didn’t make all right decisions (by virtue of hindsight). But… she is a smart, capable young woman. My work was done well.

“but I find myself hard-put to figure out why these young girls were sneaking around behind their parents’ backs rather than saying, ‘I’ve been chatting with a cute guy that I’d like to meet in person. Can you take me somewhere to meet him?'”

When I was a teenager, I became part of a close-knit online community populated by a mix of teenage girls and (mostly young) adult women. While the message board was interest-based, we ended talking about anything and everything, e-mailing each other, chatting in other forums, etc. I never told my parents ANY of it. They would have been pretty freaked out by the thought of me “talking to strangers” online. (They never went overboard on in-person stranger danger warnings, but the internet was a scary and relatively new place that they weren’t familiar with.) In retrospect, I don’t know how they didn’t ask more questions about all the time I spent on the computer. I think they thought I had a LOT of homework. Some of the other girls/women became particularly close, met frequently in person, etc. Certainly, with enough research, all of them could have figured out how to track me down, if they’d been so inclined. There were absolutely cases where people turned out not to be who they said they were, and at least one case that I recall where someone took advantage of another community member in real life, but there was no physical danger involved – just a bunch of half truths that I think led to some moderate financial support.

But overall, what I got out of that group was a lot of support during the turbulent adolescent years. I wasn’t particularly popular, and there were plenty of Friday nights where my options were sitting at home watching TV or sitting at home chatting with friends I’d never met. I much preferred the latter, and do think it was the healthier choice, though I’m not sure my parents would have agreed.

The one thing that I did do that was kind of stupid in retrospect was to meet another member, alone, without telling anyone where I was going or who I was meeting. She was exactly who she was supposed to be, we had a lovely dinner, and it was nice to finally “meet” a long-time friend. But I don’t think it was a particularly smart way to go about it. But we stayed in public and I think the risk was fairly small either way.

Those AOL boards were disbanded and we mostly lost touch. A few years ago, some of them started tracking down the other members on facebook, and many of us have reconnected, which is really nice. They’re a really diverse group, and have been great resources in many, varied fields. I would gladly meet many of them in person if given the opportunity (these days, I’d tell my husband where I was going!)

I think some of the issue is a generational one – digital natives have a really different perspective on things happening on the internet than their parents, and today’s teens, perhaps rightly, feel like their parents don’t understand the internet as a natural extension of “real life.”

Having had such a positive experience connecting with “strangers” on the internet, I really can’t stand the alarmism of these internet danger messages.

Compulsive child protection is the same as compulsive hand washing except for one key difference. If you wash your hands 50 times but still think they have germs on them then YOU are the one with the painful/raw hands. However if you are a compulsive child protector, your child is the one with painful/raw childhood. (trust issues)

“MAKALA ARE YOU CRAZY? HE COULD HAVE BEEN A RAPIST??!!!!???!!!!”

What does a rapist need Facebook for? Rape has been a problem centuries before Facebook. I think the more likely outcome is that this adds resentment that she may already feel. Any safety this lesson added to their daughter’s life is GREATLY overshadowed by her added desire to get away from her controlling parents.

Instead of making her safer, it’s more likely to chase her into something dangerous.

More can be read on this page
http://www.onmysoapboxx.com/tough-decision

The 12 year old that gave her Facebook ‘friend’ made a bad decision. However this method of ‘scarring them straight’ will backfire. She won’t fall for a Facebook sting again. However there is an infinite number of other possible bad choices that she could make.

Unfortunately this con will make her less likely to seek advice from her parents in the future and will giver her a bigger desire to get away from them.

It’s important for parents to be aware of how easily children can be conned into things online — of course, some adults can be conned into things online too, especially those aged 60+ who don’t understand much about the Internet.

Do I agree with everything said and done in the video? No, not really, but I find this one more reasonable than the toddler abduction one at least. I believe there more kids who meet up with adults from the Internet (with some proportion of those being bad) than toddler park abductions.

I guess what I’m saying is I agree with this video being used as awareness that children can be duped more easily than their parents may realize, but I don’t agree with this video being used as a reason to lock our kids up and send them in a time machine back to the Stone Age.

So, the video has made it into an article on Yahoo! Parenting:

https://www.yahoo.com/parenting/parents-and-video-prankster-lure-teens-on-facebook-126444614327.html

Interesting article with a lot of insight from Ms. Skenazy herself including:

“”To me, they are completely humiliating their kids in a misguided effort to keep them safe from a very unlikely danger.”

The journalist then goes on to quote a 2013 study that was published in the Journal of Pediatrics:

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2013/01/08/peds.2012-1281.abstract

and uses that study to prove that “…these kinds of encounters aren’t all that rare. According to that research, about 30 percent of teen girls surveyed admitted to meeting someone in real life who they had previously only spoken to online, without fully confirming the person’s identity beforehand.”

According to the actual study:

Only 251 adolescent girls between the ages of 14 and 17 were studied. Of these, 130 were considered by the researchers to have “experienced substantiated maltreatment”. The other 121 test subjects were “demographically matched comparison girls”.

That means that of the 251 test subjects, only 75.3 reported having offline meetings. Of these 75 girls, “maltreatment, adolescent behavioral problems, and low cognitive ability were uniquely associated with high-risk Internet behaviors.”

So basically, this study has really helped to support what a lot of people have been saying in response to the video in regards to the home lives of the girls videotaped for this “experiment”. Of course, as is par for the course, the facts have been twisted to make it seem like our children are in need of constant supervision.

this happens all the time,i have known a few girls who have done this,its just stupid,this is not a joke,kids need to get it threw there heads,just because they act nice to you,doesnt mean everyone is friendly,and wont hurt you,they think it wont happen to them,i bet all the girls that this did happen to thought they where invisible that this would never happen to them,and look where there at now?

So much of this freak out is about the parental generation not really using the internet as a social tool so their only view of this aspect comes from Law & Order SVU. To them it is dark, scary place.

I have both met friends and mates online. It really isn’t all that scary of a place. The friends I made were in interest group chat rooms. Some of us ultimately met in person and for a few years, until career and family got in the way, a small subgroup of us had an annual get together. Thanks to this group, I’ve been on a hot air balloon ride, toured a TV set, ate lunch with the cast and met Chuck Norris. I’ve been to some of their homes; know their spouses and children. 15 years later, I am still in touch with a handful. We are too busy to get together regularly anymore, but we keep up with each other online and arrange get-togethers if we happen to be in the same place at the same time.

Back in my younger days, I also did some online dating. Just like the real world of dating, some people were bizarre and some great. I dated one guy I met online for over a year and another for 5 years. I have a few friends who are married to people they met online. If I had time to date now, I would go online again. It was mostly a positive experience. I met some duds, but nobody scary.

Parents need to accept the social aspect of the internet. Teach kids how to navigate it safely, rather than treating it as a total no-no. Stunts like this don’t make most teens less inclined to use it to meet people, it just forces them underground. And, like everything else we try to ban, holding out meeting people online as a prohibited practice just makes it more desirable to many teens.

“I bet it’s very hard to look for them, especially if you can’t actually see them, being invisible and all.”

Yeah, I hope they’re not counting on motorists seeing them in designated pedestrian crossings.

@E, “I don’t think most adults would meet strangers on the internet and that quickly meet them face to face and that alone (presuming there isn’t a mutual friend involved). I guess I don’t know the first thing about on-line dating personally, but I do know that most people I’ve known that do it, wouldn’t invite them to their home (address and all) or get into the vehicle as their first action in meeting.”

Read this article in the September Vanity Fair and prepare to have your eyes opened wrt the “hit it and forget it” culture of today’s 19-to-29-year-olds:
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating

Yes. The children on these videos are feeling shamed in public but I bet they don’t make the same mistake again! It is a good video showing how easy it could be for someone who wants to hurt a child to get to them. Point well made Coby Persin. As for people criticizing Coby and the parents…you missed the point. Better to overdo the lesson then for your son or daughter to wind up a victim.

What worries me about stuff like this is it shows the wrong kind of folk how easy it is! Because we’ve all been there as young teens we’ve all lied to our parents some how or other to go out meet a boy or go somewhere we shouldn’t etc, raging hormones are to blame and some kids are gullible even tho’ we tell them all the stories of what might happen sometimes they just don’t listen because they want to do what they want! Sadly there are these evil predators out there ready to pounce! You can’t look at your child thro’ rose coloured specs thinking they wouldn’t do that because as proved they will, just as those kids shocked their parents in this video! All you can do is arm them with the facts and hope and pray it doesn’t happen to your child and be vigilant as to what they’re up to!

@Google-Master, I’ll read the article, but one night stands were not created with the internet. Going to a bar and finding someone to sleep with is not new (for those that go for that). Perhaps tinder can make that easier, sure. I’ve talked to my 20 somethings about tinder. One of my son’s has a roommate that uses it (my kid has a long-term gf, so he doesn’t). It can be used for everything from sending “joke” obnoxious messages (to see if the girls would respond in kind) as a type of entertainment (which I find ridiculous/offensive) to hookups, to meeting people who are friends of your friends.

My point is that people/adults who are actually interested in meeting friends/mates via the internet like these young girls were (can we give them at least enough credit to believe they thought they were meeting a cute new-to-town boy, and not a sexual hookup? They were 12/13/14), would not proceed to meet them in a van or open their front door within DAYS of learning of their online presence?

Of course people have one night stands, would never suggest otherwise.

The parents need to be parents. If this gets the CHILDREN attention, use it. I would rather traumatize the child and still be able to love on them and teach them more at home then to be calling the police because my child has been abducted by a stranger they met online. That’s the reality of today’s society.

I’m a 22 year old female and I grew up with social media. I experienced plenty of strage guys requesting to be my friend on Facebook, especially when I was around the age of 13. I never friended anyone that I didn’t know, but I had a few friends that did. One of my friends met up with the “cute boy” she had never met at the movies. She told her parents to drop her off to meet friends but she was really meeting this guy. Turns out he was 17 and for some reason very interested in my 13 year old friend. He asked her a lot of personal questions and ended up convincing her to go back to his car with him. As she got closer to the car, she felt uncomfortable. He kept telling her to get in and started getting mad. Luckily, she ran back into the theater and called her parents to come get her.
It is definitely not uncommon for someone to try to add you on social media that doesn’t know you. And it’s not uncommon for them to start messaging you or ask to meet in person. A lot of times people can find these young girls through groups that kids are a part of, including a group of their school or pages that they like. For parents who didn’t grow up with Facebook, they typically don’t realize how easy it is for a young woman to be convinced to meet up with a boy they think is cute. I would say every few months a girl receives requests from guys they don’t know. So it may not happen “every day” but it happens often enough that girls need to be more educated on what could happen if they talk to these people. I think having them see videos like this will help them realize how scary of a situation it could turn into if they decide to meet a stranger. Every young girl should see the video.

The rule at our house is that if my kids want to meet up with one of their online friends, I’ll drive them to a public place. (The theory, which I heard from another parent years ago, is that “Great, my mom will drive me!” is going to weed out anyone who isn’t exactly who they say they are.) Lots of my daughter’s online friendships have developed into face-to-face ones. Nothing remotely scary has ever happened.

What bugs me most about that video is that they blur the faces, but show the houses the girls are walking out of. How many people are watching who know exactly who they are? (I would be so happy if the whole thing was fake and it turned out that the girls were in on it.)

I propose a new social experiment. One that shows parents the dangers of people approaching them to do and experiment on how easy their kids will fall into the hands of a predator.

1. Approach parents and convince them you want to record their child being lured online to meet.
2. Lure and arrange a meeting with the child.
3. Tell the parent to meet you at a location.
4. Tell the child to meet you a different location.
5. After a couple of hours show up at the parents location in a white panel van, with their hooded child.
6. Berate the parents for not protecting their children. And for trusting complete strangers.

@momoffourgirls — I’m in the midst of raising two girls who are currently 15 and 10, so I can’t of course say that I’ve successfully raised a teenager yet. However, my experience thus far has been that they still talk with me or their dad when they want to go meet a new person (well, so far this has just come up with our eldest) rather than feeling a need to sneak off and do so.

I think K and Kimberly have both shared good insights about this. In spite of being 51 and not even learning to navigate the Internet until I was over 40, I’ve had similarly positive experiences with connecting with people through online discussions. Because of where I’m at in life, I’ve really felt no need to turn my online friends into face-to-face friends, although I did go to a picnic in a public park once when it was casually planned as a means of connecting a group of us who’d been communicating on a blog written by someone in our city, and it was fun.

So when my older daughter started connecting with people online, my feelings were not at all similar to the feelings of K’s parents, as quoted here: “I never told my parents ANY of it. They would have been pretty freaked out by the thought of me ‘talking to strangers’ online.”

As I’ve already mentioned, I see absolutely no risk to engaging in conversations with people I’ve never met before — I just don’t get into cars with them, follow them into dark alleys, and so on. And this is the attitude that I’ve always endeavored to convey to my children: there’s nothing wrong with “talking to” strangers — we just have different levels of trust with different people, based on our experience with them.

So, based on my own very limited experience thus far, I’m inclined to believe that when children trust their parents not to “freak out” over the idea of them having conversations with strangers online, they’re a lot more inclined to talk with their parents about the best way to meet someone they’ve been chatting with. Whereas children who expect their parents to go ballistic over the online conversation, are a lot more likely to assume that their parents are not the best ones to turn to when organizing the meeting.

And when it comes to the girl who went and got into the white van, and the girl who gave her address and opened her door to the guy, it’s just extremely hard for me to imagine my own 15-year-old doing something so stupid (even when she was as young as these girls). It made me think that either they were severely mentally-challenged, OR, more likely, their parents had always been so quick to label EVERYTHING as dangerous that when the poor girls finally realized that MOST of what their parents were forbidding was perfectly safe, they just went to the other extreme and assumed that in all actuality, NOTHING was dangerous and they didn’t need to be cautious at all.

I thought there were parents who were arrested for fake-kidnapping their son to teach him “stranger danger”?
Any parent who thinks this is a good idea probably liked the schools that sent in armed police acting like mass murderers to “teach them how to handle the situation.”

We have such a corrupt view of what “research” is in our current environment. Sometimes it leaves me speechless. “Research,” “test” and “experiment” are trigger words that are being used to terrify parents, generate publicity for people behind this and give fodder to a news media that thrives on sensationalism. Thanks, Lenore, for constantly calling this irresponsible stuff out for what it is.

@thomas: You do know there’s something like doctor-patient confidentiality, certainly, I imagine, when the diagnose is as grave as that? (Not sure how much use there is in telling the patient herself instead of the family, given the nature of the condition…)

“You’re so concerned with being a friend to your child you don’t care at all about their safety.”

Please read a little more, not just on this article but many others as well. I’d venture to guess very few parents who comment on this site care ANYTHING about being a friend to their kid.

And to those who link from other sites, it’s acceptable to talk to us and make a counter-argument without using the f-word. It really, really is.

“All you fucking retards that have been commenting on this are just as ignorant as the girls whom he actually got to meet him.”

Generally speaking, persuasive arguments aren’t won when started with “All you f-ing r*tards…”.

I don’t understand the need to insult others who don’t share your viewpoint. It shows YOUR ignorance. And stop using the “R” word. Go in your bathroom now and stick a bar of soap in your mouth for using degrading and insulting language towards others. I’d be ashamed if my child spoke so rudely on the internet and it’s just as bad if you claim to be an adult or parent.

How do you emulate responsible internet behavior for your children when using insulting language online to express yourself? To say “… since females now a day are more prone to open their vagina to any poking stick”, as if ALL girls are sluts, how do would your daughter feel about your observation of…her??

There is a lot of heated debate on both sides. No one can argue that kidnap, rape, and murder is horrific. This is why it’s so important that these girls should have learned years ago that actions have consequences. This is why you start with small things first. The page, ‘Better safe than sorry’ is an excellent source of why to start off with smaller things. This current page also shows how bad things can get from overprotection. We can see from this page that if the kids don’t learn that they’re actions affect their lives (in good ways as well as bad ones) things can become catastrophic!

https://www.freerangekids.com/better-safe-than-sorry-is-wrong/

“So, if someone’s child is abducted and killed, would you console them by simply saying, “hey, no big deal about little Susie, it’s rare”?

Good point. That’s why we it’s better to start with something smaller first. An example would be, ‘If little Suzzie falls off the slide, it pains me. As a loving parent I hate to see my 6 year old in tears. However I know that she’ll learn to be more careful.’

I’m amazed at all the people that feel, ‘The end justifies the means’.

Actually I might feel that way as well if I was so naive to think that, ‘The girls got the bejesus scared out of them and therefore they won’t do anything stupid ever again’.

They now have more

1. Facebook caution
2. Resentment from their parents which is one of the reasons why kids rebel in the first place and sometimes in dangerous ways ( more of this than caution)

The video says a lot more about Jena’s parents (behind the ski masks) then the stupidity of Jena

Then again Jena may think, “Wow mom and dad you really do love me! I’ll start listening to you for
now on”.

hypervigilance [hi″per-vij ´Ä­-lans]

abnormally increased arousal, responsiveness to stimuli, and screening of the environment for threats; it is often associated with delusional or paranoid states.

You don’t even know what your talking about…

Its bad and getting worse.

http://www.traffickingresourcecenter.org/
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/civilrights/human_trafficking

To put it simply, if you need to resort to these scare tactics to teach your kids anything, then you need to take a long hard look at yourself, and figure out where you failed as a parent.

What’s next, hiring stunt drivers to teach kids the dangers of cars jumping the curb, hiring a thug to fake a mugging? Where will it end and how far are parents willing to go?

This video highlights that children can make stupid mistakes. That’s all the more reason why they should be allowed to make stupid mistakes when they’re younger. The bad choices won’t be as severe and they’ll learn to make better choices in the future. I hope this video puts to bed the theory that:

‘If we love our children then we will never allow them harm in any way. Only free rangers do that because they are too lazy to supervise.’

I wonder if anonymous M could explain to us why being either –

a/ slow to have sex (maybe a virgin, which seems odd on a site where most commenters are parents), or
b/ someone who has sex slowly

could possibly have anything to do with the topic at hand? I presume you have a good enough understanding of the English language to perceive that the above is what ‘f***ing retard’ means? Please enlighten us…..

“The only 100% safe social media, is NO social media, period. When you give your children access to the world unsupervised, you also give the world access to your children, unsupervised.”

Way back when I was in high school, I knew a girl whose parents were so strict that the only chance she had to be alone with a boy was at school, during lunch times. So that’s when she had sex.

Thank you for giving to that experiment the critic it deserves.

When I was 17, I sneaked out of the house to meet my girlfriend. I didn’t have a car, so i jogged the 7 miles to see her. I suppose it could be considered romantic 😛

My mother figured out I was gone and had the most ingenious way of handling it. She waited until 25 minutes after I had climbed back into my window and into bed, then she came in, woke me up at 6:30 am, and told me that she needed my help in the yard that day. She gave me 9 hours of grueling yard projects, like digging out stumps by hand. She didn’t admit that she caught me sneaking out, she didn’t say that the hard labor was punishment. So, I had to do the all work with a smile on my face, or else admit I had broken the rules and been out that night. It was a brilliant and devious bluff. It sent a clear message, “You may be big now, and able to sneak out, but you’ll follow my rules because I’m smarter than you and there will be consequences you won’t even see coming!”

No public humiliation or fake kidnapping needed.

In the literature about child abuse and maltreatment, risk factors for the kids are things like social isolation, poor peer networks, a poor relationship with parents. Preventative factors include things like safe, stable and nurturing relationships with parents, strong positive peer networks, & self confidence. Take a look: http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childmaltreatment/

What happens if you engage a strange man to scare your kids, and then post a video of it for the world to see? Does that encourage a kid to respect or resent her parents? It’s like taking out a full page ad in the New York Times that says “My kid is a promiscuous idiot”. I don’t think that the kids are going to trust or confide in their parents easily, if at all, after this. Now here’s the kicker: the breakdown of trust and communication actually puts the kids at greater risk for violence and abuse in the future. Mission accomplished, right?

Better to handle it like my mom did, privately and in a way that instills respect.

Link to the 700 young children that go missing every year, family/custody abductions not included?

@Anne, I bet the Lindberghs wish they had nailed their 2nd story windows shut, but that doesn’t make it sane for everyone to nail their windows shut any deny their kids fresh air on a cool summer’s evening.

You can believe as you wish. I work with teens. I tell you this is the majority not the minority. Do not let your child’s epitah on their gravestone be, “My Child Would Not Do This.” AND why do you think their is a sex offender registry? Those men or women are predators.

@K, it was linked from Yahoo Parenting, home to much civil and enlightened discourse on the topic of child rearing:
https://www.yahoo.com/parenting/parents-and-video-prankster-lure-teens-on-facebook-126444614327.html

Do yourself a favor and don’t read the comments.

BTW, love the blog posts! Couldn’t agree more about Little Blue Truck and Goodnight Gorilla!

The thing that bugs me about this one, is that the parents jumped in very quickly. Like at the park, he didn’t even give the girl a chance to say, ‘you’re not who I thought you were, bye.’ Same with the girl who answered the door. They just jumped in and yelled and probably drove an even bigger wedge between them where she will never share anything again and probably just create a new profile because she knows her parents are watching this one.
This kind of thing irritates me.

@ChicagoDad – Thanks! You may be the first person to read them. I haven’t really shared the blog much yet – I can’t figure out if I’m funny 🙂

@pete, you’re right that those kids needed a lesson, but do you think betrayal and public humiliation will make them safer? A teen with those patents might just well running off into the arms of a no account drifter to get away from her folks! How would you teach a lesson about going off with strange older men in a way that builds trust, respect, honesty, and also the ability to pick up on creepiness and keep herself safe? Not like this, I hope. This is vile and dangerous.

” Thats three girls who will never again put themselves at the mercy of strangers from the internet!”

Though this is taken from Pete’s comment, it seems to be the constant feeling among the supporters of the video.

First, this scare tactic does not guarantee anything. Remember the old Scared Straight program? It only had about a 50% success rate.

Now considering how these teens were treated, by their parents, I would not be surprised to hear down the line that one or more ran away. I would not be surprised that one or more, once they left home, didn’t go overboard with freedom and had problems with alcohol, drugs or just life excessive. So don’t be hailing these parents as heroes or great parents. Because we will never know what this so called experiment actually did to or for these kids.

bob magee,

First, I would like to say that is about the best comment and analysis of this issue, that anyone could write.

Second, I would love to show this to others with your permission.

@Papilio – yes, ridiculous summer! In Madrid one day it was 43 degrees. ..life didn’t seem worth living, and I probably would have jumped in a white panel van with a dodgy bloke, provided he kept the air con on :-).

I just don’t get how the term I was describing above adds to any discussion …except, as you say, of the Kama Sutra :-).

“Shame on you!”

“For Shame!”

SHAME.

As if the monthly curse referred to by the future president of the United States of America in his attempt to shame the debate moderator were not enough off a reminder of her inferior status to a young woman of twelve, or thirteen or fourteen.

“She has eaten of the tree of knowledge. She is banished forever from the Garden of Paradise. Every 28 days she will be reminded of her guilt. She won’t see forgiveness until she is fifty in the shade. But by then she will have done something worthy of her being burned at the stake.”

And she loses her cell phone in the bargain.

What is the world coming to?

Surely she will be under house arrest until the surrogates of her god arrange a suitable marriage for her. And since she has been publicly disgraced, that won’t be easy.

“You don’t think the stupid little girls in this video needed this lesson? You think they listened when the parents coached them on the dangers? These children needed this experience to nail it home how irresponsible they are.”

How do you know this? How do you know that this wasn’t the first time they had even talked to a stranger on the internet? How do you know that the parents ever seriously talked to their children about the dangers of the internet? How do you know that simply talking to the girls about the dangers of the internet wouldn’t have worked for them as it does for the millions of other teens who are never scared to death by their parents and still never go meet strangers from the internet?

It seems to me that one of the girls absolutely DID NOT need this lesson. She properly met the person in a public place that she knew well and made no attempt to leave this public place with him.

@Hineata: Hahaha! Who knows, maybe despite your age he would’ve told you you look hot 😛

Maybe a Kamasutra *parody* site, as I’m pretty sure that kind of language would kill the mood very fast 😀
(It does actually make me laugh trying to imagine a text that would use the phrase f***ing r*tards in a serious way when discussing the Kamasutra!)

Sorry, after 40 years as an educator and many as a school counselor, I believe it is our duty to give our youth these scenarios because they can relate. Many of these may not happen that often, but when they do, it is a media frenzy and any parent’s nightmare. I had to give my own daughter the sad news that one of her friends was found dead in the desert–she had gotten in a car with strangers after mom was asleep. It does happen. Grooming does happen–I have seen it and the results. Most young teens think “it won’t happen to me”. That is normal, so we must continue to remind them how to protect themselves.

@Diane Green – I know it’s grossly off topic, but you can’t seriously think Donald Trump is going to be President? Pleaseeeee somebody, tell me it couldn’t happen!

If you really, truly want a terrible president, I have a group of animals who could share the role. Two rabbits and three chickens, collectively possessing the IQ of a shellfish, yet still a viable alternative to Mr Trump…and actually any of the Republican, and half of the Democratic candidates we’ve been subjected to by the media recently. There’s also a goat who was mayor/president of Whangamomona until he passed away recently, and I’m sure he had progeny who could also do a passable job at the White House. Just send a stamped, self-addressed crate our way….. 🙂

While I agree in part with this criticism, I find the jumping on the bandwagon in all of the comments I’ve read thus far really very odd.

Teenagers engage in irrational behavior, or behavior that shows little appreciation of the consequences (it’s a brain thing), often enough regardless of the relationship they may have with their parents. I worked in a psychiatric hospital where teens were often admitted for being depressed when actually they were experienced another made up illness that insurance would not cover: adolescent adjustment disorder. That’s to say, they’d become teens and were disobeying their parents and the parents were pissed off or very worried (not uncommon given the teenage brain). In my job, I’d watch psychiatrists and social workers turn fairly typical challenges to authority as pathology, usually on the part of kids because they were the ones in “treatment.”

I’m not so naive to think that parenting behaviors don’t have an impact, but they are also not the be all and end all when it comes to teen behavior. (Studies show that peers become the greatest influencers of most kids lives once they enter their teen years.) I think trying to blame the parents in this video could be a way to insulate one’s self from the idea that this could happen to your child. “This could never happen to me; I have a much better more supportive, open relationship with my child.” That reminds me of how people disbelieved acquaintance rape for so long–had to be the woman’s fault–or discounted the word of people who experienced stranger rape; after all, women wore hat pins and it’s next to impossible to penetrate the hole of a moving donut.

My parents talked to me about stranger danger, and I think they were wise to do so and I think I likely benefitted from those talks. But they never talked to me about acquaintance rape. Probably because we didn’t even have a term for it back then (the public doubted rape victims even more so perhaps than today), and women were made to feel responsible; so they kept these “embarrassments” to themselves. It would have helped me to know that the friends of my brother would not necessarily regard me as a little sister and therefore be protective of me. It would have been helpful to know about acquaintance rape.

I don’t think having the opportunity to talk about this particular issue because of a video should be discounted because most rapes, assaults, abductions will be committed by the boys and men she knows or that girls might be more likely to pursue contact themselves.

My parents also never talked to me about emotional abuse and boundary setting. (Though my mother did talk to me about physical abuse and I had a pretty strong boundary there. Would that boundary have held up if physical abuse started up after the birth of a child? I can’t say. Having conducted survivors groups, volunteered at shelters, and conducted days long workshops mediators about domestic violence, I can’t speak to what if with any certainty… not the what if of me at a younger age.)

We, the unwashed masses, pretty much didn’t have words for emotional abuse back then. It was more, “Make sure that boy treats you right,” which is precious little instruction, and good parenting doesn’t necessarily prepare one how to think about emotional abuse let alone respond adaptively to it. I have a friend who was raised by fabulous parents, became a professional, and entered a relationship with a physically abusive man. Physical abuse almost always starts with emotional abuse, and it is during that period, that people are hooked in. By the time my friend was being physically abused she was so very embarrassed and ashamed for allowing herself to be in a relationship like that. I think it would have helped her had her parents talked about how anyone can be vulnerable to abuser. Not their fault, but talking might have helped inoculate her to the embarrassment, which became a barrier to her getting help.

So, yes, the shaming here is disturbing.

However why must people blame fall on the child or the parent if a child behaves irrationally or without thinking of the consequences?

Talking with girls and boys about these issues: the importance of taking your time to get to know people and meeting with them in public, social situations until you know them better, the importance of following your gut–acting immediately–when something seems off, and so on can save lives and help prevent trauma. Also important is letting them know they are not to blame for the behavior of others and that you will always be there for them no matter what. It seems to me that doing anything to give your child the edge in a potentially violent situation would be important.

Knowing that in abductions, whether by strangers or those by people who know you, it’s important to resist while in a public place is important. Would I let the fear that I might damage my child’s gut feelings by informing her of this stop me from providing her with warnings? Not based on my experiences. When I was growing up, violent crime was less than it is currently (though it is approaching those rates).

We girls were taught to be nice foremost and that others would be nice to us in return. Not only were we made of sugar and spice but so was the world. Early experiences at the hands of people who were not my parents taught me that this was not necessarily true. A focus on being mentally prepared for danger would have helped, and I’d rather not have learned it the hard way. But learn it I did, and it allowed me to better recognise danger and respond in ways that may have saved my life when I went off to college (ways that mostly definitely got me out of objectively bad situations).

I grew up in a time when nearly all parents were free range and I am thankful for it. That doesn’t mean these sorts of discussions shouldn’t be had. And if videos like this help a parent talk about all of these issues with their children, including letting them know that they will be there for them if a stranger or acquaintance or a lover ever harms them, then you won’t find me picking it apart for fault and blaming the parents or talking about how girls bring things on themselves or how harms are more likely to come from people they know so this is, what, useless?

its good to teach children about the danger of social media but teaching them in such a way is horrible