Determined to find what goes on in the modern world of young teen dating, Tanith posted this picture of her 14-year-old daughter online. What happened next horrified her . . .
AT FIRST glance, the clip appears to be an entirely innocent glimpse of a teenage boy having fun in the snow in his back garden.
With white fairy lights decked out on the trees behind him, 15-year-old Mark grins as he shows a friend a freshly made snowball, which he then crumbles between his fingers.
But the video, posted on Mark’s profile page on Yellow, the most popular new social network for teens, does more than capture a pretty wintry scene. The focus quickly moves to the foreground and onto a step where a message is written in the snow.
As it pans along, the letters don’t spell his name or ‘Hello’. Instead they spell out ‘Send nudes’ — a request for any girls, aged 13 and up scrolling through, to send explicit pictures.
Welcome to the seedy world of Tinder for teens — as Yellow has become known since its launch last summer.
Just like Tinder, Yellow, which now has seven million users around the world, was launched as ‘a virtual flirting app’. Users make a profile, posting a selfie photograph or video, then flick through all the other people on the site.
In exactly the same way as with the adult version, they can then ‘swipe right’ if they like the look of someone, or left if they don’t.
If two people like each other, they are matched and can talk directly on a chat feature on the site, which can be linked to their Snapchat — the nowyou-see-and-now-you-don’t phone app — where images and messages are shared, before automatically deleting themselves.
As the mother of a 14-year-old girl, taking her first steps into that terrifying no-man’s-land between adulthood and childhood, I spent two months monitoring the activities of youngsters on this site.
What I saw truly horrified me. Night after night, as I scrolled past thousands of fresh young faces — many still plump with baby fat and downy top lips — I found an unedifying meat market where children are reduced to little more than sexual objects, there to be scrutinised and objectified on demand.
It was so depressing. Is this what relationships will be like for children my daughter’s age?
Getting onto the site was shockingly easy — another terrifying discovery. To sign up to the 13 to 17 section, all I had to do was make up an age — in this case that of my 14year-old daughter Lily, who agreed to let me post a picture of her on the site in order to help me understand the pressures her generation are facing.
I had to send my phone number in order to get a code to make a profile.
But otherwise there was no other attempt to verify my identity or age — and nothing else to deter children under 13 (many looked no more than ten), let alone adult paedophiles who couldn’t have invented an easier way to get access to youngsters.
In her profile picture, Lily is turned away from the camera. Her face could barely be seen. All that was visible was her hair plaits. There was nothing remotely sexual about it.
Yet within five minutes of posting the profile on the site, a stream of messages had arrived saying her picture had been liked by boys.
‘Awwww, proper cute,’ wrote one. ‘Hey beautiful,’ said another. I’d familiarised myself with the language and tried to engage in some safe ‘chat’ about ‘skl’ (school) and homework.
Yet, without any prompting, it quickly became transparently clear what a giant sexual fishing exercise this website is. When I asked what a particular emoji meant, the boy said it signified he was ‘always horny’.
Most boys clearly like every single picture of a girl they see to get a match, talk to her — and see if she’ll send ‘nudes’.
Swipe on a few more profiles and you will find Joseph, 14. For his profile picture, he has super-imposed a filter on his baby-faced features to give him a puppy dog nose and floppy pink ears.
Yet, at the same time, he is naked from the waist up as he gazes down at the camera.
A message super-imposed across his chest makes the reason why he has joined obvious. It reads: ‘Swipe only if u…could send nudes.’
Like Mark and Joseph, many boys do not bother to sugarcoat the reasons why they are here.
Rory, 15 (but who looks 11), poses for his picture in his school blazer, white shirt and stripey tie.’ ‘T** pics’, he announces across the bottom of his profile. A few minutes later, I get my first direct request on the chat feature from Jonathan, 14. It simply reads: ‘Nudes? Xxxx’
Josh is equally direct but without the kisses. The picture he posts is of a headless, bare, ripped torso complete with impressive six-pack. He says he’s 13. Clearly, if that is his picture, he is not. And if that isn’t his picture, whose is it? And who is hiding behind it?
In another conversation, I ask Jacob, who is pictured in uniform with his feet up on the desk, why he has asked me for naked pictures. ‘Why not?’ he replies. ‘Bout the only thing this app is used for.’
All conversation here is cursory and quickly directed by boys towards the sexual. One of my new correspondents tells me that he’s still in bed before getting up for school. We only exchange messages for a few minutes when out of the blue he volunteers that he had been pleasuring himself.
Emoticons — this generation’s hieroglyphics — are another way for young teens to signal to each other upfront what they want sexually. Users can choose from a huge library of symbols on Yellow, including the notorious aubergine — which I now know is shorthand for male genitalia — and is used by boys as an offer to send an intimate picture of themselves.
Then there’s the purple devil emoji — codeword for ‘let’s sext’, meaning exchanging sexually explicit images and videos. But in case I am having problems deciphering the code, George, 16, sends me a dictionary.
This reveals numerous other meanings, including how the picture of a cat with a surprised face means: ‘I wanna see you naked.’ I also learn that requests for most sexual practices can be implied by these images.
It’s virtually parent-proof. Anyone stumbling across these pictures really wouldn’t have a clue what was going on.
The young people here come from every conceivable background. Many boys’ profile pictures consist of closeups in bathroom or school changing room mirrors, showing off six packs like racks of lamb.
However, one of the more modest profile images shows a boy in a suit presenting a speech to the Model United Nations at one of the most famous public schools in the country. Another shows a boy on a horse, about to take part in a fox hunt.
For children so young, there is also a wide range of sexual preferences expressed here, with both 13-year-old girls and boys presenting themselves as bisexual, gay, lesbian and even pansexual (not limited in sexual choice with regard to biological sex, gender or gender identity).
Really? So young? Aged 13, I barely understood what those terms meant. Does any sane parent want their child sexually categorising themselves at the tender age of 13?
And it is not just sex that the teens on this site seem so flagrantly nonchalant about. Every single night, I saw videos of under- age boys ostentatiously smoking spliffs, blowing what appeared to be marijuana smoke into the camera or using bongs.
Clearly, they do so because they feel able to act how they like (and even openly break the law) in a virtual world where no adults — except, of course, paedophiles — are watching.
For Pippa Smith, of the Working Party on the Family, Lords & Commons Family & Child Protection Group, Yellow is one more sign that most adults have no idea what their children are doing online.
‘The result is that some children don’t seem to be worried in the least about what they say or do online any more. Children are left to their own devices so much that they are operating in an adult–free Lord Of The Flies universe. This is a place where no rules apply.’
But beyond this worrying free-for-all, what does it do to children of this age to grow up in an era where they can treat each other like disposable commodities?
To get some idea, you have only to look at what Tinder has done to adult relationships and how it has been blamed for normalising casual sex and increasing STDs.
Ryne Sherman, psychology professor at Florida Atlantic University, who studies changing sexual habits, says apps like Yellow give children unhealthy messages.
‘Yellow is like Tinder in that it suggests relationships are made quickly and at a glance. It’s asking young people if they want to be in a friendship or a romantic relationship based on a profile picture.
‘And because the age of 13 to 17 is such a sensitive time for adolescent development, the effects could have a
The boys ask for nude pictures within minutes They talk using emoticons, so it’s parent-proof
long-lasting effect on young people’s self-worth.’
But beyond how anxious and unhappy children make each other, there are also the obvious safety dangers from paedophiles.
As educational consultant Nicky Hutchinson, co-author of Body Image In The Primary School, says: ‘If you were to devise an easy way for adults to pose as young people and get inappropriate sexual images from children, this would have to be it.’
Indeed, the NSPCC has warned: ‘Yellow’s settings enable adults to view children through a service blatantly aimed at flirting and relationships, and also create an opportunity for sexual predators to target young people.’
As a result, schools are starting to warn parents, most of whom don’t even know Yellow exists.
So who are the people behind this unhelpful addition to children’s online lives? Based in a suburb of Paris, the founders say they are five millennial friends, who met at college: Emmanuel Khayat, Sacha Lazimi, Arthur Patora, Jeremie Aouate and Anthony Tuil.
In their launch last summer, they described Yellow as the ‘first dating app for Generation Z’ to ‘target the Snapchat generation’. ‘We made Yellow to answer this need of long-distance digital- only relationships. For us, virtual flirting is the future of dating.’
In exchanges with the Mail, the makers insisted the site is moderated, children can report problems and ‘more than a significant number of profiles are checked every day’ — although they twice declined to say how many.
‘Like all social media companies Yellow does not give out numbers but action is taking place to remove inappropriate content and profiles,’ they said in a statement. And still, six months after its launch, the company is ‘still in the process of developing a safety centre’ and ‘building links with law enforcement to ensure any suspicious behaviour is acted upon’.
After spending two months on the app, so far I had spared Lily all the detail. When I showed her what I had seen, she was stunned by the volume of requests from boys.
Her verdict was stark. ‘What is it going to be like for me if boys grow up learning to treat girls like this?’
Indeed. Just how easy is it going to be for her to find a healthy, loving relationship in a world where oldfashioned ways of getting to know the opposite sex, such as courtship and dating, have been replaced by the cold swipe of a computer screen?
What sort of future can she look forward to when the boys she has grown up with think there is always a better option in the next profile pic, where they do not care what girls feel or think, but simply what they look like naked and how keen they are to indulge in sexual practices that would make most adults uncomfortable?
Nicky Hutchinson says our young people are at the centre of a huge, ghastly experiment — and, as yet, we have no idea what the outcome will be. ‘To be honest, I believe we will end up looking back in horror at why we allowed unregulated apps like Yellow to teach our children that they are disposable,’ she says.
A statement which should remind every parent to keep a close eye on where their child wanders on the internet.
TANITH CAREY is author of Girls Uninterrupted: Steps For Building Stronger Girls In A Challenging World, published by Icon Books, £7.99.