Wolves who prey on our children online have been hiding in the dark forever
IS there a phrase more terrifying to parents than ‘digital age of consent’? It strikes right to the heart of all your primal fears – evoking sex, technology and the loss of innocence. Why is it separate from the actual age of consent, you ask yourself, a question which becomes even more pertinent when you discover that the digital age of consent is in fact 13.
Dear God, you think, have they gone mad? The internet is a conduit for bullies, perverts, and the deranged to access your home – won’t somebody, anybody think of the children?
Of course, digital age of consent is less about the
State insisting that you buy your child an iPhone for their 13th birthday so they can immediately start sending nudes on Snapchat, and more to do with the data harvested from your child’s activity online. It is not about your child being classified as an adult so much as it is about them being classified as a consumer. But the debate around it has been largely concerned with children and their access to smartphones, as one generation struggles to keep up with the next.
The dangers being spoken of, however, have always been there.
I grew up in the time before the web. When I was 13, another boy in my year found his dad’s porno stash. Then another boy found his dad’s porno stash. Soon, we were adrift in a sea of terrible 1970s pornography – magazines, videos, moustaches.
One boy found his dad’s porno playing cards featuring, in one particularly unpleasant series of images, bestiality. Pornography – extreme, vanilla and everything in between – has always been around, it’s simply that back then you had to look a little harder to find it.
I’m not using the ‘it never did me any harm argument’ here – exposure to pornography at a young age is not healthy, as the majority of pornography is overwhelmingly misogynistic.
However, the product in itself is more of a distillation of the violent culture we live in – author Camille Paglia describes it as “human imagination in tense theatrical action”; yet while we can distance ourselves from it as the ravings of the id, it is – in its most common form – a cruel manifestation of man’s war on women. But it has always been around, it’s just that the internet plugged us into a direct source. There are, of course, other elements on the web that are a far darker presence. My nine-year-old plays video games online. One day he told me he had just got a message from someone he didn’t know. They said their name was Stacii and they were a 21-year-old American girl who was enjoying spring break and wanted to chat. So I sat my son down and explained to him that there are people out there who wished him harm, people who lie, who pretend to be young, or female, or friendly, or supportive, but they are none of these things. I explained that this is why he is only allowed to play video games online with boys his own age that he knows in real life. I check his account to make sure. I don’t like having to have this talk with him, but as we live out in the country, it can be lonely and the games are a good way to play with friends.
The digital bogeymen, like pornography or bullying, are not a recent development, called into existence with the banshee wail of a dial-up modem back in the 1990s.
‘Little Red Riding Hood’, which dates back to the 10th century, is a perfect analogy for the fake internet profiles preying on children that make so many of the headlines we see now. The wolves have always been circling us in the outer dark.
IWENT to the local CBS primary school. There was a teacher there who was known among the pupils as a ‘feeler’. Fortunately for me, I never found out exactly what this meant.
He was a remedial teacher and Catholic Boy Scouts regional commissioner, and was later sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping a child in the classroom. The boy he raped is still awaiting an apology for what happened.
The conduit here was not the internet, it was a school. That’s what paedophiles do – they seek out access points to children, and prey on the vulnerable, and this is how it has been since time began.
All you can do is stand guard over your child, and hope they learn the skills to spot danger, be it online or in real life.
As for the comparisons to alcohol, it seems hysterical to compare the damage to mental and physical health from underage drinking to allowing your child to develop the skills to use the web in a smart and safe way.
They may not have had Snapchat when I was a kid, but we did have fake IDs and bags of cans, and I know which I would prefer to see my children using.
I would never tell any parent how to raise their child, and setting the digital age of consent at 13 isn’t going to do that either. Nobody is being forced to buy their kids a smartphone.
However, as technology plays a larger and larger role in our social and professional lives, I want my children to be able to use the web at the same level as their peers.
Besides, there’s always the off-chance that one of them will grow up to be a tech millionaire – or that they will at least Facetime me when I’m stuck in an old folks home on the Moon.