With the appalling murder of the Leicestershire school girl, Kayleigh Haywood, children safeguarding professionals have once again been reminded of the dangers of online grooming.
How young people need to be careful when using social networks.
But along with the increase in online grooming, there is now an unprecedented rise in revenge porn among school children.
This week a tragic story from Florida hit the headlines when a 15-year-old girl, Tovonna Teamer, fatally shot herself after a video of her in the shower was shared on the social network, Snapchat.
Her distraught mother – who knew nothing about the video until it was too late – found out later Tovonna had been bullied and coerced into sharing the images of herself with friends.
Tellingly – and this is surely a warning for all parents – her mother didn’t even know what Snapchat was. Tovonna’s aunt said: “Everybody was out there talking about her and calling her names, and they said it went up on social media, whatever, Snapchat. I’d never heard of it before.”
This dreadful tale coincided with an investigation by the team at Good Morning Britain (GMB) which revealed that children and young people were being bullied and harassed on Facebook and Instagram to post pornographic images of themselves.
The report claimed that 1 in 6 victims of revenge porn were unbelievably under 18 years old. Many of the victims were 11 and 12 and one was as young as eight.
Facebook accounted for 40% of these incidences, while the report found 183 live Instagram accounts which fitted the description of revenge porn sites, with a combined following of 15,000. Many followers actively requested images and videos of children. Some of these Instagram accounts targeted particular schools and even specific classes. In each case, children were encouraged to send pictures of themselves.
Rebecca Hitchin from the Rape and Sexual Support Centre told the programme girls are under extreme pressure and coercion to show images of themselves to boys and often unidentified adult men. She said: “The levels of pressure are continuous – this is now part of young people’s every day lived experiences – and I’d question that these images are being willingly provided. It’s coercive, continuous pressure.”
“The impact of all this is significant and very wide spread – there’s a lot of victim blaming, so these young girls are being told off for the images being taken in the first place.”
The report said boys regularly call girls names if they don’t share images of themselves. One 11-year-old girl sent naked pictures of herself to a boy who then shared them on social networks and on text messages. Everyone subsequently blamed the girl who refused to leave the house – even to go to school: “She was bullied, humiliated, her family saw the pictures, her teachers saw them.”
Moreover, a huge concern for police, teachers and social workers is that the vast majority of young people and children are not reporting these incidences for fear of recrimination – by their friends and peers, and by their families.
A similar report found that children were being targeted on dating apps such as Tinder. A researcher at GMB created a fake profile posing as a 13-year-old girl and was contacted by 122 men, only two of whom admitted to being 13. Eight men asked her for sex and many sent nude pictures of themselves. Many also asked her to contact them on an encrypted app from the dark web.
Elsewhere, in a recent research by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 15% of teenagers and 13% of young people admitted to sexting people they know only online but have never met in real life. Some 75% of these young people acknowledged that sexting could lead to far more serious issues such as revenge porn.
Unfortunately, apart from the GMB report, there is very little information about the extent of revenge porn and sexting incidences on social networks concerning children and young people. Indeed, there’s no comprehensive report on how many different types of social networks or accounts are dedicated to under age revenge porn images.
Ms Hitchin said her organisation visits schools to talk to children and young people about sex and relationships, to challenge the behaviour of coercion and consent: “It’s a lot more difficult than just putting up a statement – we go into schools talking to young boys and girls.”
Few safeguarding professionals are able to cope with the sheer scale of the technology shift affecting young people. Teachers, for example, are often the last to know about issues around sexting, grooming and online bullying.
The modern Generation Z are markedly different in their online habits even from their immediate predecessors (the Millennials). Their lives are lived in public-private spaces that adults are unable to comprehend. As a result, young people do not look to older people as mentors to help them understand the space they now inhabit.
Think of it this way – Generation Z live in a world largely governed and policed by children and young people.
This considerable gap in the generations is filled by organisations such as the Rape and Sexual Support Centre, but often this is a reactive rather than proactive approach.
Parents, teachers and professionals are failing to grasp the tsunami of changes occurring to young people around them – and this has to change. Schools and teachers need to train children to use social networks safely and this has to happen at an early age – at primary school rather than secondary school.
Generation Z and future generations will share everything online. That will not change. But as they share connections, information, jokes and – unfortunately – pictures of themselves, they need to possess an awareness that what starts out as fun can have serious consequences – and for weeks, months and even years to come.
The question is: are the different services – police, education, social work – dynamic enough to be able to deal with all this?
By Andrew Chilvers and Marisa De Jager