The Internet Doesn’t Hurt Kids; Bad Parents Hurt Kids
It seems to happen every time there is a major media blowup about some child who was murdered, raped, or pushed into suicide that the Helen Lovejoys of the world come out with their torches and pitchforks, screaming “Down With the Internet! Won’t Somebody PLEASE Think of the Children!” Recently, the untimely and tragic suicide of Phoebe Prince, who was bullied, harassed, and physically assaulted in school and in public, became the new cause du jour when someone discovered her online profile was filled with mean messages urging her to end her life, not unlike Megan Meier, who was bullied into suicide by the mother of a school frienemy, Lori Drew.
Wikipedia is a parent-approved website on the Internet. As you can see, it is safe for children.
Because, you know, it’s not the perps who are responsible for their behaviors. It’s the Internet!
When I was thirteen, I was picked on relentlessly in middle school, much like Phoebe Prince, for being the new girl, so I sought out friends on local BBSs (anyone remember those?), and began riding my bike all over Burlington County, NJ to meet up with people I spoke with on there.
“But it was different then!” people cry. Yes, it was different then - there were no parental controls; most parents didn’t understand networks and the budding internet back in 1993. There was no profile with a name, face, age, or any other identifiers. There was no COPPA Act. It was just myself and a stranger, chatting in a DOS-based system with now way to prove that Tigger2 was actually the anguished, angst-ridden teenager I said I was. It was possibly the least safe time to be flitting around the internet, but there I was, and here I am today.
By the time I was 16, I had an online journal which is how most of the people on Facebook and Twitter know me, as the precocious teenager whose entire coming-of-age the read as a live-action Catcher in the Rye or (as I’d prefer to be compared) The Bell Jar. I posted pictures, I named names of friends, locations, and my high school. I told people when and where I was going to summer camp. As time progressed, I learned about libel and other serious concerns due to kind adults who would inform me that an entry I wrote, if found by others, might get me into trouble, but that was long after I began writing. In 1996, it was an age of few controls and a lot of wild west-style lawlessness on the internet; and yet, I came out of that one unscathed too.
You might call me lucky, as many concerned adults who read my site did, but I never felt lucky. I took calculated risks. I dated three men - one of whom is now my husband - I met via my website, only meeting up with my long-distance loves after I saw photos and webcam conferences and then, finally, called them at the home number they’d give me. My first online boyfriend, who ended up being my prom date and possibly one of my first truly serious relationships in life, used to joke with me that for all I knew, he was some sort of crazed “ax murderer.”
“For all you know,” I would reply, “so am I.”
My ex-husband, who would get drunk and twist my arm or pinch me so hard I’d bruise, who once hit me in the head after throwing a full can of soda at me, I met in the real world, via my place of employment, like “normal” people.
My husband, David, was a reader of my first online journal which started on Geocities and migrated from there to my own domain, bitterfame.com. He knew me during my first marriage, watched that marriage disintegrate, watched me date other men, and finally asked me out via Trillian. We “dated” for four months before we ever saw each other in person. As of this June 16th, we’ll be married for four years.
My story is not unique. When I attended the first ever conference for online diarists, JournalCon 2000, in Pittsburgh, PA., many people there knew me and each other online from the internet, and mostly only as readers of the others’ lives. There were dozens of us staying in the same hotel, parting together, eating together, and none of us had any idea what the other was like until we met up in the Westin Hotel that Friday night.
Amazingly, no one was murdered, raped, or kidnapped!
The truth is, the internet isn’t to blame when children are abused. In fact, as both the Megan Meier and Phoebe Prince stories point out, it’s the people you know in real life that are the most dangerous to a young person, who are able to inflict the most harm. This should surprise no one: children are most often abused and kidnapped by a parent, relative, or someone else known to them than by a stranger, and that statistic holds true for rape and murder among adults as well.
I remained safe online not because I was lucky, but specifically because I grew up on the internet, never told that the internet was a bad or scary place, that I often had candid conversations with my Dad about what I was doing online. (If it was forbidden, that NEVER would have happened!) I also probably wouldn’t have been comfortable enough to date men I met through my website, and I felt safer with them than I did with random strangers my friends would pick up at bars, because I was Internet street-wise from learning safety at an early age. (And, possibly, because my parents and friends weren’t online to harm me!)
Kids today are growing up with the internet too, at a time when it’s MUCH safer and more controlled (overly so) than it was when I was growing up. Those who don’t learn to navigate it with a parental figure helping them when they’re younger are going to be behind, and when they do get away from Mum and Dad, they’ll be as reckless as most college freshmen drinking and fucking themselves into oblivion because it was kept away from them for so long. It’s the kids who didn’t know how to use Facebook who’ll put up pictures of themselves smoking from a bong and then wonder why they got busted for possession, who put every banal thought on Twitter and end up with a stalker because they didn’t keep their Foursquare friends in check.
My suggestion to any parent who’s scared of the Big, Bad Internet is to stop being afraid of it! Allow a 13-year-old onto Facebook to interact with his/her friends with the following rules:
- A parent must actively supervise at all times.
- The profile is completely locked down except to friends and relatives.
- Before a person can be added as a friend, parental supervisor MUST approve that person, and only friends from school/the neighborhood/IRL activities/etc. who are personally known to the child will be allowed to be friended. Give the person the “Over For Dinner”: ask yourself, “Do I know this child, relative, child’s parent, or teacher well enough that I’d invite them over for dinner? If the answer is no, then hit the ignore button.
- BIOS lock-down the computer (if PC. I’m sure there’s similar security for Macs) so that the child cannot turn on the computer in the middle of the night and get around the HUGE security holes in Windows that even I was able to exploit at that age.
This is a very Vogotsky-inspired approach to the internet: by supervising actively and being involved in decision making, you model the skills needed for that child to eventually be successful on the internet by his or herself - and at an age where that modeling will still be successful, rather than at 16 or 17 when it’s far too late.
It’s like training wheels - I’d never advocate giving a child a bike and letting them go crazy, but I’d also never advocate not owning a bike because of the slim margin of chance that a car might some day hit them or a pedophile may grab them.
Mirrored from Most Likely to Take Over the World.