We’ve done a great job of teaching our children to be wary of strangers in the real world. In my digital safety presentations children from 10 to 15 years of age are full of stories of what their parents have told them about stranger danger and how to protect themselves.
From not taking sweets, food, drinks, drugs or stickers from strangers to not taking lifts, hitchhiking and definitely to avoid men parked in white vans outside their school!
However, online strangers with ugly motives are far harder to identify because:They are definitely not men sitting in white vans outside school!
They may be men or women and are often disguised e.g. a 50-year-old-man using a girl’s name and photograph passing themselves off as 16 years of age.
They drop breadcrumbs for children to follow online in the form of responses to their posts and all they need is for your child to respond to one of them and they’re in the game.
Grooming online often starts with an innocent conversation that moves very quickly to a private online chat on an app, to affirming a child and making them feel good about themselves (remember needing to be noticed and having someone pay attention to you is extremely attractive to a tween or teen).
Online predators don’t need to do an instant snatch as would happen in the physical world, they take time to build relationships based on ‘trust’ so that when they eventually ask to meet in the real world, the targeted child just can’t resist and does so willingly.
Online predators know a lot about your child because so many children innocently post too much personal information about themselves leaving a trail that can lead right to your front door, to their bedrooms, to their school or to where they might be partying.
The best safety app is the one you cannot buy
You need to ensure you have conversations with your children about the potential dangers of online strangers and the need to protect themselves just as they do in the real world. Research real life stories.
As frightening as they are, they can serve as a wake-up call to act responsibly online.
