[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.

[scotty79]

I completely agree with you on all accounts. None of that is ok. And traumatic events should be avoided. I just ask about how founded is the automatic assumption that sending naked pictures to someone on the internet, possibly adult, is automatically traumatic for a kid who does that.

[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