Special Report – Dangers of sharenting

Sharing pictures and information about our children on Facebook and other social media shows our love and pride in them. But it can also sabotage their self-esteem and career prospects – and make them prey to bullies and paedophiles.

For most parents social media is a blessing, allowing us to capture our children’s special moments and share them with those we love, however far away. But as with many good things, it’s easy to overindulge, and share not only milestones but anything we think cute or funny, from nappy changes to bath times – and the night your 4-year-old walked in to dinner in your new heels and nothing else.

“Thandi* just looked so cute in my sandals, I had to get a shot on my phone,” says mom Lindiwe*, a 27-year-old Durban businesswoman. “I put it straight on Facebook and got nearly 30 likes in one night. I was so happy!”

Her happiness turned to horror eight months later, when a cousin’s boyfriend was arrested for sexually molesting the cousin’s two young children. “When police took his phone and laptop, they found all these photos of little kids. Thandi’s picture was there, smiling so sweetly in my shoes. My cousin had shared it with him and her other FB friends. It’s been a year, but I still feel sick thinking about this man looking at it and getting excited! And I worry that his sick online friends could still have it.”

A growing problem

Parents’ habitual use of social media to share images and news about their children is now so widespread that it has a name: ‘sharenting ’, first used by The Wall Street Journal in the US and now listed in Collins English dictionary.

In an Australian survey by Fisher-Price, 90% of parents admitted over-sharing. And in a US poll by the University of Michigan, 74% of parents who use social media said they had seen another parent over-share, including embarrassing information about a child and inappropriate photos.

“There are many instances of sharenting in South Africa, which are commonly confused as just being the work of proud parents,” says Matthew Simon, senior security consultant for Wolfpack Information Risk in Johannesburg. “However, it can have serious social and personal implications.”

Simon has compiled local statistics based on his research on social media platforms closest to himself. He estimates that 20% of parents over-share sensitive data (pictures, status or private information), including on messaging platforms (WhatsApp); 17% share embarrassing data that can lead to serious bullying; 10% share data that can cause trust issues as children age; 12% over-share their children’s habits and location; 18% pressure their children through sharing data that makes them proud; and 23% over share birthdays, pet names, favourite music, holiday plans, favourite TV shows, family members, schools and favourite books.

“If I had to profile you as an attacker would, this is everything the attacker could use to authenticate you to a bank, for example,” Simon says. It’s also everything a sexual predator would need to find and make friends with your child...

“It appears parents of the generation under the age of 36 are the biggest social media butterflies, and most are moms, rather than dads,’ Simon says. But sharenting is widespread and cuts across ages and cultures. On social media, barriers and inhibitions come down and it becomes an engagement simply between digital beings united by a common interest – in this case, in children, because most parents delight in their own and other people’s.

The biggest sharenting platform is Facebook, which Wolfpack cyber security analyst Simbaredi Chiwanza reports has the largest number of social media users in South Africa – 16 million, almost one in three of the total population.

We start posting from birth and sometimes before, sharing photos of our pregnancy scans and videos on our Facebook pages. A staggering 82% of children in 10 Western countries have a digital footprint before the age of 2, according to a study by Internet security firm AVG. And by age 5, parents will have posted 1 000 pictures of their children on social media, notes a study by The Parent Zone in the UK – that’s a picture posted every second day!

The good and the bad

There are clear benefits to sharing for families and friends who live far away, and for those wanting parenting advice from trusted friends. “Connecting with another parent who is awake in the middle of the night can help to counteract feelings of isolation,” said the researchers of the University of Michigan poll.

“When technology is available to help us keep the ties that bind us, who can resist sharing photos of their children, to allow an aunt or cousin feel like they’ve not missed out on an important milestone such as baby’s first tooth and first day at school?’ asks Bhavna Lutchman, online counseling manager

Childline South Africa. “However, with this instant good side of technology comes the bad side.” Many of us ‘friend’ people on social media who we don’t personally know. But even if we share photos and posts only with a close group of family or friends, those people may in turn share the photos beyond this circle, Lutchman says. “This may result in other pupils at your child’s school having access to a photo captioned “#ThrowbackThursday here’s my cute boy having his nappy changed”. And as much as they may be close to your heart, such photos can lead to your child being unnecessarily teased and even bullied, which we know may have a lasting impression on a child. Embarrassment, isolation and anxiety are some of the emotions your child may go through after a photo they dislike has been shared online.” There have been serious cases of peer bullying and outcasting through sharenting, Simon reports, with many parents forced to move their children to new schools. But beyond that, everything we post contributes to our child’s online reputation – a record of shared pictures and comments that’s virtually impossible to delete. It’s easy to ‘label’ your child through your posts, presenting them as a particular ‘type’, even when this doesn’t accurately reflect their personality, says Durban psychologist Dr Akashni Maharaj. Those who view the posts won’t know the context of a picture or post, which may show the child in a certain light – perhaps throwing a tantrum (they may have been overtired and unusually stressed), pouting provocatively (they may have been innocently imitating a movie image for gogo, who’s been cropped from the shot). And however harmless we consider those images, as children grow older and leave school, what we’ve shared can affect their future prospects, as increasingly prospective employers and tertiary institutions check social media accounts before accepting candidates. Ultimately, what we post about our children is not our information. It belongs to them, as it is creating their digital footprint. It’s our duty as parents to help them do that through posting about them carefully, and teaching them to do the same, to guard their reputation – and their safety.

The frighteningly ugly

The most alarming aspect of sharenting is that once on social media, your child’s photos and information are exposed to those who may be sexually aroused by the images – as Lindiwe learnt. “These people may easily identify a school uniform, a park where you spend Saturday afternoons, a sports field where you leave your child for training,” says Lutchman. “Sharenting makes it easy for predators to gain information about children, and they’re just as big a threat as the predators we meet face to face, if not bigger.”

“We upload pictures of our children with identifying features, gratifying even the laziest paedophile,” says Dr Colin Thakur, KZN e-Skills CoLab director of the Ikamva National eSkills Institute. ‘“We give pictures of home and geolocations, checking sites that plot our habitual movements. We caption photos of our kids with their nicknames, and give their pets’ names – all things that can provide a persuasive connection for paedophiles if they approach your child in a park or mall. Paedophiles hunt 30 to 40 children at a time, and they hunt all the time!”

Around half the images shared on paedophile sites are taken from social media sites, according to a study by the Australian government’s eSafety commission. “Online prowlers often start by seeing pictures on Facebook,” says Wolfpack MD Craig Rosewarne. Some reach out directly to children, often by posting attractive or novel images of themselves using Adobe Photoshop and other apps. “In one local case, the guy eventually exposed himself on a webcam – the young girl was so shocked, he was older and 100kg heavier!”

Some predators then go on to try to meet in person. “It’s estimated more than 30 000 children are trafficked in and out of South Africa every year,” Chiwanza says.

“You don’t know what monsters you may be feeding out there with your posts,” says Jackie Branfield, director of Bobbi Bear, a human rights organisation that helps sexually abused children. “I’ve seen pictures on Facebook of babies having their nappies changed, lying naked, sucking one toe. That child must look at that picture at 13, and what will her peers say? But the real shocker is the number of people out there who will get off on it.”

In 2012, Branfield flew to the Netherlands to co-lead a protest against the Dutch sex advocacy group Martijn, which, as part of a drive for ‘freedom of sexual preference’, was demanding the right to have sex legalised between adults and children from birth upwards.

Branfield says. “It’s very dangerous to post pictures of a child in any form of undress, or that could be interpreted as provocative. Moms proudly put up shots of their little darlings in lipstick, pouting with a hip thrust out. If they have hundreds of Facebook friends, they’re bound to include a creep or two. As to posting pictures of kids in the bath: don’t! I’ve dealt with creeps who like to assault kids in the bath – one used to baptise them first!’

You don’t know what monsters you may be feeding out with your posts. It’s very dangerous to post pictures of a child in any form of undress.

Under the law

Under both the Sexual Offences Act and the Films and Publications Act, you may not take a photograph of any child under the age of 18 that may be used for the purposes of sexual exploitation – such as showing their private parts – even if you are the parent, says Branfield. “You can get jail time for taking it (production of child pornography), having it on your phone or other device (possession of child porn), and sharing it (dissemination of child porn).”

Two years a 13-year-old American boy of 13, Darren Randall, was reported to be suing his parents for ‘character assassination’ for posting hundreds of pictures over a decade, many naked with funny captions. He can be heard speaking of his embarrassment in a CBC Radio clip (google Darren Randall CBC Radio).

A tough new privacy law in France now makes it illegal to post pictures online of anyone without their permission, and while this is aimed primarily at protecting social media users from revenge porn, it’s technically in a child’s rights to sue their parents for inappropriate posts – they could face a fine up to R600 000 and a year in prison, reports the Daily Mail.

Children have a right to privacy under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and in South Africa the constitution guarantees the right to privacy for all. “The common law test is, if you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a particular set of circumstances, and someone infringes it, you can sue,” says attorney Emma Sadleir, CEO of The Digital Law Company.

“The way it works is, the more you look after your privacy rights, the more privacy you have. So if you routinely post pictures in which your child is identifiable, and these are picked up and republished, you’ll have a hard time taking action. Whereas if you don’t ever post identifiable pictures of your child, and someone publishes a picture of them without pixilating out their faces, you can sue.”

She advises parents to take the route of ex Miss South Africa Vanessa Carreira: “Look at her Instagram account – she has four children and posts beautiful pix of them, but they’re taken from angles so you never see their faces. Compare that to other celebrities, like Serena Williams. She had her first baby in September, and little Alexis Olympia Ohanian already has her own Instagram account! If she wants to sue for invasion of privacy one day, should these pictures be used without permission, she’ll have a hard time.”

How to clean up

Sharenting is the new norm and it’s here to stay, says Lutchman. But parents need to educate themselves about the dangers, and limit it and manage their sharing:

1. Think before you post! Ask yourself: would this photo be appropriate if it were an adult? If my kid saw this now or in the future, would they be upset or embarrassed? Would they want this to be part of their digital footprint?

2. Friend people frugally on social media. If you receive a request from someone you can’t place, ask a mutual friend how they know the person and view their complete profile. Be wary is the information is sketchy: Google their name. Regularly review your friends list and weed people out if necessary, says Simon. (Lindiwe has now done this ‘ruthlessly’.)

3. Create a separate group of family and close friends and share about your children only with them. But remember that they may share with their own friends. Consider making it so they can ‘like’ a picture but not share it.

4. Don’t tag pictures of your child which reveal their location and allow predators to form a picture of their movements. It’s especially risky to post Facebook pictures using smartphones with geotagging, Rosewarne says.

5. Use privacy settings (these change with each new version of Facebook, so reset them each time). Teach your children to do the same when they’re old enough to join Facebook (age 13) and use other social media – it’s as important as teaching them to protect themselves and their bodies in the real world.

6. When your child is old enough, check with them first before posting anything: it’s good manners, lets them know you care about their opinion, and will help them too be selective in what they post. * Names changed to protect identity