Stranger Danger
In decades past, parents would remind their children not to talk to strangers or to accept candy or car rides from anyone outside of the family or immediate friend nucleus. Strangers were easy to recognize as they were not one of a defined composite of friends and family who the child would easily identify as a safe contact. In the 21st century, however, stranger danger has taken on an entirely new construct, one that’s both more complex as well as more ominous than past definitions.
Today’s stranger danger affects everyone, but especially children. They regularly play on-line games and have interactions in this cyberworld with virtual strangers, sometimes daily. They have expansive groups of synthetic friends in the wide world of social media who they readily accept and follow on a constant basis. Within these groups of hundreds of follower friends are also friends of friends, depending on one’s security parameters. As the children post narrative clips, images, and photos, they stay perched to their accounts searching for any number of strangers to “like” or comment on their lives. Within these posts, the students often unwittingly are sharing a variety of personal images and private thoughts which make them most vulnerable to very real stranger danger.
Given that 2018 surveys from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) show 90% of teens between 13 and 17 use social media, with 75% having at least one account and over 50% visiting social media daily, the access they are granting to strangers is frightening. A 2018 report from the Pew Research Center revealed that 95% of teens have access to a smartphone with 45% admitting to being “online almost constantly.” While this activity threshold may not surprise many, there definitely are some ominous surprises on the World Wide Web. For example, the Department of Health and Human Services reports from 2016 that 94% of teens’ images and data have been exposed to predators. They detail a survey of over 600 teens, revealing that nearly all shared their real name, photos of themselves as well as their school and hometown.
Social media also empowers stalkers and cyberbullies who can use the opacity provided through social media to harass and humiliate others to depression, to withdrawal from their real community, or even to suicide. Given that, on average, the AACAP reports teens to be online almost nine hours per day, that gives strangers and those more familiar with the students, an unimaginable opportunity to do massive and irreversible harm to students’ images of themselves as well as to their psychological well-being.
Teaching today’s students to avoid stranger danger is a much more complex and multi-faceted exercise. It long ago surpassed the novice warnings about refusing a ride from a stranger. Now parents must be vigilant and consistent in their monitoring of their children’s social media activity, including apps, social media sites, as well as on-line communications. There are so many ways that individuals with malice aforethought can track and follow and eventually harass or even destroy lives. It is incumbent upon the parents to have regular conversations about the cyber world, the tactile world, and the need to always be wary of strangers, even those who only want to be “friends.”
Dr. Angela Farmer is a lifelong educator, an author, and a syndicated columnist. Serving as an Assistant Clinical Professor of Honors for the Shackouls Honors College at Mississippi State University, she can be reached at afarmer@honors.msstate.edu.