[sam36]

Am I reading this right? They basically are trying to measure sleep quality and whether or not they have depression based on some random questions? Sleep quality and depression are no where near my concerns. My wife (who gives piano lessons) recently had a student (13yo girl) that for over a year was sending naked photos of herself to an account on instagram that was supposed to be the secret "true fans only" account of Justin Bieber (or some other popular singer). Can't remember how her parents found out, but they took her to the police department to let them handle it (they did nothing). My wife told her she should be more careful. Her only response was "Yea.. but what if it was really Justin?".

[aidenn0]

I'm with you on that, but if 10 years from now, her emotional health is fine and she doesn't lose sleep over it, then long-term the damage to her may have been minimal?

I think the idea is that poor mental health outcomes would be a proxy for a large fraction of the wide range of issues phones could cause.

[prepend]

> but if 10 years from now, her emotional health is fine and she doesn't lose sleep over it, then long-term the damage to her may have been minimal?

That’s a huge if and not substantiated by what they measured in this study. It’s like saying “so what if they were sexually assaulted, she’s fine now.

The harm a pre-teen suffers from sending nudes to internet strangers is likely substantial trauma for the rest of their life.

[scotty79]

> The harm a pre-teen suffers from sending nudes to internet strangers is likely substantial trauma for the rest of their life.

Was that ever researched? Or is it something that adults just find reasonable?

From my experience people are fairly good as adults, with dealing with memories of their own youth voluntary stupidity especially if it didn't result in damage to their bodies or didn't alter their life in significant manner.

This by no way excuses the behavior of a person that misled a kid into something like that, but I think one can abhor somebody doing something that has potential horrible consequences while at the same time observing that damage they managed to inflict in that case was actually minimal.

[soupfordummies]

But do you have a lot of experience with people that were groomed into cyber sex abuse?

There probably isn’t a lot of research wrt OP’s example since it’s such a new(ish) phenomenon.

[scotty79]

Of course not. But I have experience of being a kid and doing potentially life threatening and borderline criminal things because of my youthful stupidity that may have ended horribly.

I was never groomed but I managed to screw up my perception of romantic relationships all by myself with little help of same aged friends as I grew up.

[prepend]

Do you have the experience of being a kid who didn’t do those things and seeing how you turned out.

It’s good to survive and thrive. It’s another thing to say that traumatic events in childhood shouldn’t be avoided. And perpetrators of those crimes shouldn’t be punished.

Adults soliciting nudes from minors seems pretty bad to me. The fact that most victims don’t have dire outcomes doesn’t convince me that adults soliciting nudes from minors is ok.

[aidenn0]

> The harm a pre-teen suffers from sending nudes to internet strangers is likely substantial trauma for the rest of their life.

My point was that if they have substantial trauma, that should show up in e.g. higher rates of depression

[prepend]

Maybe it does. Depression is rampant and also under diagnosed. Or maybe it’s treated and recovered from.

I can’t find a study of people with depression to see who was sexually groomed as an adolescent vs who wasn’t.

[DSingularity]

Or at the very least a major shift in their development… and why allow that?

[hosh]

The doxxing, deep fakes, and generative AI will come later in life.

[aidenn0]

That's true; any damage out further than the length of the study will not be quantified.

[clolege]

It feels like it's the reactions of adults that cause most of the trauma in some of these situations.

It would be a different story if she got blackmailed or something, but it seems like she was just exploring her sexuality. That's healthy, right?

What are teenagers supposed to do during a pandemic?

[willcipriano]

> What are teenagers supposed to do during a pandemic?

They are bored so go ahead and send pictures to a pedophile? What?

[frognumber]

I do fundamentally agree with the logic -- we should be looking at harm. If I had send nude picks as a kid, and nothing came of it, it's probably not an issue. However:

- With growing compromises, anything sent on the internet today is likely to be found and linked back someday.

- We have no idea what risks will happen in 20 years.

- Even today, it can lead to stalky / groomy / etc. things

Those sorts of rare events won't be captured well in metrics. Usually, it's not that 100% of people are harmed, but that 1% suffers extreme harm.

So as much as I agree with the logic, I disagree with the conclusion.

(you're the other way around: your conclusion is right, but your logic is missing, and replaced by outrage)

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

while I understand your point, I have to believe that anyone hosting and showing naked underage pictures is very quickly going to decide not to so that particular threat really holds little water.

[clolege]

I meant it as an honest, open-ended question.

Would you prefer them to just not explore their sexuality?

Or explore it online with people they know, like their classmates?

[prepend]

There’s ways to explore sexuality besides sending nudes to strangers and being tricked into transactional relationships that exploit their sexuality.

Everyone matures at different rates, but I think it’s pretty universal that no 13 year old is mature enough to consent to nude photos sent to strangers who are likely adults. Not to mention it’s criminal.

[icytrumpet]

What an absolutely awful take.

[VBprogrammer]

I mean I absolutely agree with the first point. The reaction of the adults in these circumstances almost certainly is worse than the damage caused in the first place.

What this means in the grand scheme of things though I'm not sure.

What is the alternative though? Trying to shelter kids from the internet with filters which are guaranteed to be either overbearing or easily bypassed? Deny them a phone which many of their peers will have (in all likelyhood the photos will just get taken on someone else's phone)? Try to treat them as intelligent young people and explain the realities.

[clolege]

Treating them as intelligent young people seems like the obvious answer, although those conversations are hard, especially at the young ages that kids can access adult content nowadays.

The "best" solution in my mind, is probably filtering internet access until they hit puberty, then have the talk. What goes in the talk, idk (probably what catfishing is, promoting neck-down nudes only, sex-positivity, and maybe one or two other things).

The sex-positivity feels like the most important part though, and what I was getting at originally. So many parents (including my own) only focus on what not to do, that kids don't know what to do. So many keep doing the same things in secret and just feel guilty about it.

Is there a future where it's the norm to promote safe sex amongst teens? Or are we too much of prudes to ever touch the topic?

[dzhiurgis]

The paradox is that kids are sexually active from around 13, yet it's almost illegal for them to be so

[dvt]

> they did nothing

I know this is meant to be a bit of a swipe at the police, but I mean... what can they do? You'd have to subpoena at least 3 entities to find the creep, and then potentially have to extradite them. A guy I play video games with used to be part of the FBI's cybercrime division and he always laments how difficult it is to go after people (he works in cybersecurity now). I hope to have kids one day, and I can't imagine how difficult it is to be a parent in the age of texting, Instagram, and Tiktok.

[prepend]

> You'd have to subpoena at least 3 entities to find the creep, and then potentially have to extradite them.

They could at least subpoena the social media company transmitting the nudes. If it’s across state lines then get the FBI involved. Daily photos means hundreds of counts of felony child porn, soliciting minors, etc etc.

I expect them to pursue this case.

[bitwize]

Wait, this is the FBI. You mean they can't just knock on the door of the NSA, say "hey, use your XKEYSCORE to trace this creep", then parallel-construct an evidence chain with fictional provenance so they can nail him in court so hard all his lawyers can do is recommend taking a plea bargain?

What are we paying those guys for, anyway? What are secret police even for, if not prosecuting people you can't legally gather evidence against?

[kneebonian]

Well they would if it was the daughter of someone in power. But right now they are too busy trying to convince mentally ill people to commit terrorist acts so they can stop them.

[throwup]

The FBI would rather more children get hurt than risk the public learning any more details of their spying programs. https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/06/fbi_lets_people_off_t...

[justsomehnguy]

> What are secret police even for

Ask FSB and it's former head for that.

[throwaway0x7E6]

to serve and protect the regime

[Spivak]

I mean if you're young enough to have done something stupid like this when given unsupervised access to the internet you know that there's nothing you can do to prevent it except try to impart some good internet hygiene that they probably won't listen to anyway because they're 13 and humans are fantastically bad at learning from other people's mistakes -- "nice cautionary tale but this is different."

Sheltering doesn't work because it just postpones the naivete; it's called experience because you have to experience it. Plus it just makes your kids hate you, not trust your advice, and worse not come to you for help.

Your job as a parent isn't to devise some system to make it impossible for your kids to do stupid things, yes even serious ones like this, your job is to try as best you can to help them understand and choose to not do stupid things and, when they do and need an adult, help them deal with the consequences.

I mean if anything what I did at that age was worse, I knew the guys I was talking to were way older and still exchanged spicy photos. Yeah yeah something something daddy issues but it's true. At that age we crave male attention and validation, especially from older men, like a dried out sponge and when we don't get it or enough from dad we find it other places and I'm so sure that's what happened here. I didn't know there was anything wrong with the photos I was sending, I was just following the attention and praise and knew they liked them.

[hosh]

Experience works in a learning process if, and only if, there is awareness of consequences, and the developing brain is capable of linking actions with consequences. If there is a long feedback cycle, it is doubtful an adolescent is going to put much thought into it — or care.

Free range parenting, by the way, don’t necessarily advocate letting a child wander off with zero awareness on the part of the parent. There are often environmental rail guards invisible to the child — neighbors that know the child and the parents, for example, or in the case of Japan, a culture and social order where this is pervasive.

My view is that parents curate environments, and change the possibility space in which catastrophic mistakes can be avoided. This isn’t a question of “sheltering” or “exposure”, but whether or not posting up naked under aged pictures of yourself on the internet is a catastrophic mistake.

[Spivak]

I don't think I really disagree with you but I don't know of any options here where you can do that. Monitoring internet usage destroys trust, same with trying to make it not private with something like "no phone / laptop in your room." This is the age for discovering porn after all. You can't make a web filter for "sketchy guys on IG", and it's the same sort of thing IRL with GPS monitoring or just not letting them go places. Apples new nudity filter thing might be a not too invasive option but that's iMessage only.

Thirteen is about the age where you lose control of what they're doing all the time and there's no way to afford them the necessary independence to actually grow up that they can't do catastrophically stupid things with. Best you can do is prepare them, have a relationship with them so they tell you things and you can smell when the vibes are off, and hope they took some of the bigger lessons to heart.

[karp773]

Are you speaking from experience? How many teenage kids did you have? What are the outcomes?

[Spivak]

Sorry, too young for my own, I'm talking about my own experience. There is nothing my parents could have done to make it physically impossible for me to make the mistakes I did outside of stripping me of my privacy and independence -- the noose I hung myself with was "had a phone" and "had access to Instagram." Well I guess that's not true either, I got my phone and door taken away plus a curfew and that didn't really do much due to the whole "having friends" thing. Parent's somehow never caught on that I took the sim card out before turning it over and just used my friend's old phone.

I feel like you're not gonna believe me but it's the truth. I stopped being a menace when my parents loosened their grip. To this day I still have no idea why they completely changed their approach, probably just apathy, but without this looming oppressive authority to fight against there was just I don't know -- no point. All the twisted satisfaction I got from pissing them off or getting away with stuff just got sucked out of the air. I mean I still did things my parents didn't approve of like going to Forest without telling them, and getting my nose pierced but like I was more responsible about it when it wasn't an act of defiance.

[hosh]

I’ve raised a tween who became a teen step child. I also grew up as a teen in the 90s. I was accessing porn via gopher and usenet when I was around 10. Netscape wasn’t even around back then. The dotcom boom did not really ramp up until after I graduated high school.

There are a lot of factors at play in all of this. For one, in the 80s and 90s, I didn’t have the internet as you know it. I also enjoyed a lot more freedom, as many folks who grew up in that time will remember.

These days, as parents, we can get arrested for neglect because we want the child to be able to walk home from school with their friends school. The laws were put on the books due to fear of child trafficking — little do they know what kids are doing on the internet.

My wife and I now have a under-2 child and another on the way. I can tell you that for me, allowing the child independence forms a crucial part of the parenting, but independence for its own sake is not the whole thing. The key missing piece is somehow teaching the child to _voluntarily_ contribute something greater than themselves. There is freedom, yes, but also responsibility. One chosen by the person.

Without that “contribute something greater than yourself”, independence for its own sake is meaningless. So is forcing the person to take on a responsibility.

I’m not aiming for control of the internet for my child. I’m aiming for raising someone who can discover their own inner purpose and then can grow into someone capable of contributing that. The next generation will have to take care of the world long after my cold body is food for the worms.

[xboxnolifes]

I remember being 13-14. Probably always will, since I have a lot of good memories of that age. So, while I cannot relate to fear's for one's daughter or relate to how a young girl feels, I can safely say that sending nudes, dick pics, etc, was in full fledge at that age. I also cannot see how doing anything like that can ruin someone for the rest of their life. I don't understand the fears that people lament about the dangers of it. Where's the danger? Consequences? Sure, there is a fairly unlikely chance that the images will end up circulating into your adulthood. But dangers?

[irjustin]

The situation you describe is rightfully terrible, but the conclusion you seem to be pointing at is, no one should have a phone until they're 18? or similar?

I don't think that's what you actually mean to say, so when we're talking about larger the group, this specific situation won't lead you to the same conclusion.

> Sleep quality and depression are no where near my concerns.

There aren't many ways to study things at scale. This is 250 participants tracked over 5 years. That alone is hard enough.

In the end, I think that you're agreeing with the study - parents involvement and parenting matter.

[scotty79]

> Sleep quality and depression are no where near my concerns.

Why are they not though? After all harm is not in what was done to you but how it impacted you. And bad quality of sleep and depression are signs that you've been wrecked.