Protecting your child from predators – knowing when circumstances are ‘not normal’
In the Archdiocese of Newark’s Department for the Protection of the Faithful, an important part of our mission has been to surround kids and vulnerable adults with safe, trained, criminally-background-checked adults.
We continue to teach the Virtus Protecting God’s Children program for adults hundreds of times each year. Virtus is a leading-edge provider of safe environment training. I have personally taught over 9,000 of the nearly 100,000 clergy, employees and volunteers who have taken classes on child sexual abuse awareness and prevention, and Internet safety.
One of the key elements of the training is to help a child understand that when someone is making them feel uneasy by getting too close, either in person or online, showing them something violent or sexual, or asking them to do something that makes them uncomfortable, they need to take it seriously and tell a trusted adult. Something that they sense is not normal is to be taken seriously. Laying a strong foundation for child safety starts before Kindergarten and continues into college years.
Significant increases in screen time during the pandemic lockdown have sharpened the need for concern. For example, Roblox, a gaming app popular with middle-schoolers, averaged 31.1 million users a day during the first nine months of 2020. This was an increase of 82 percent over the year before. Consider that in 1970, the average American child began to watch television regularly at age 4, yet today, children begin interacting with digital media at the age of 4 months.
Research has shown that the primary consumers of online pornography are youth between the ages of 12-17. In addition, UNICEF maintains that a lack of face-to-face contact with friends and partners may lead to heightened risk-taking, such as sending sexualized images. At the same time, increased and unstructured time online may also expose children to potentially harmful content and a greater risk of cyberbullying.
There are three things that adults can do to help the children in their lives to stay safe, especially as their screen time increases. The first is to give young children a language with which they can express their concern about things and people that are creeping them out. The second is to help young children realize that what they see on the Internet may not represent reality. The third is to keep up with the rapidly expanding technology used by kids today.
Give your child a language
As parents and other caring adults read books and watch movies with their children, they can mention occurrences where the main character has a concern about something unusual.
For example: “Did you see what Sponge Bob just said to Patrick about being uncomfortable with what Squidward asked him to do? Do you think he feels he could get in trouble? What can we call that feeling of “I’m going to get in trouble…” “Mom or Dad wouldn’t like what’s happening…”?”
Work with the child to come up with a word – any word – to name that feeling. For example, “Let’s call it a ‘Squidward Feeling’,” or “Let’s call it an ‘Uh-Oh’ feeling.” That way, you can help the child identify a complex situation without getting caught up in the language, such as someone violating his or her personal boundaries, or an attempt at a deviant action such as pornography with a phone camera.
It’s much easier for a child to say, “Uncle Bobby gives me a Squidward feeling when he babysits me” or “I get an ‘Uh-Oh’ feeling when cousin Sally plays with me,” rather than, “Uncle Bobby keeps rubbing his hand on my private parts when he gives me a bath.”
Use of that special word or phrase should always prompt action on our part – it’s important for the child to know that we will believe and protect them. It’s also important to teach children the names of their private parts at an early age.
In one of our Virtus Protecting God’s Children classes, a participant shared a story of a young girl complaining about her “pocketbook” being touched on the bus. Efforts to help the girl by advising she leave her pocketbook at home were to no avail. As it turned out, the girl was taught that her genital area was called her “pocketbook.” What was actually happening on the bus was more concerning. She was not taught the correct language to help adults understand what was happening to her. Help kids to verbalize any abnormal events in a way that adults can understand and respond to them.
View the internet with a discerning eye
Clay Olson, CEO and co-owner of Fight the New Drug, said of internet pornography, “This material is more aggressive, more harmful, more violent, more degrading and damaging than any other time in the history of the world. And this generation growing up is dealing with it to an intensity and scale no other generation in the history of the world has ever had to.”
A nationally-representative study of U.S. youth between the ages of 10 and 17 years indicated that 34 percent of the study population intentionally viewed pornography. Another study of online pornography use in the United States revealed that 42 percent of 10 to 17 year-olds had seen pornography online, with 27 percent describing the use as intentional.
By 2025, pornography will be the third-largest Virtual Reality sector, according to estimates prepared by Piper Jaffray, an investment and management firm. Only video games and NFL-related content will be larger, it predicted, and the market will be worth $1 billion.
Virtual Reality pornography, or even today’s overly-violent, unrealistic and misogynistic porn affects children’s brains, as well as their expectation of their own sexual experiences.
When I teach kids Internet safety, I start by talking about cats on YouTube. We look at why certain cat videos are so popular. Then we discuss how the video was edited in order to generate clicks. Does the video really represent a cat’s true behavior? Do all cats jump high, or drink from toilet bowls, or cuddle with dogs?
If everything we knew about cats only came from what we saw on the internet, we’d have a warped understanding of cats. And then if we bought a pet cat, we would assume our cat is broken because it doesn’t behave anything like the cats we got to know online.
Similarly, a growing youth’s assumptions about sexual encounters may be formed by what he or she sees in pornography online. Consequently, when starting a sexual relationship with a spouse, the perception may be that the ‘cat’ is ‘broken’ – this doesn’t look or feel like what I’ve watched or experienced on the internet!
Another concern is that online predators can share with youth videos of adults and kids engaging in sexual encounters. These may be videos that they can deceptively portray as “normal,” thus, warping the youth’s understanding of sexual intimacy.
It’s important to show children early on, perhaps starting with YouTube cats, that these images and videos often can distort reality to accumulate likes and shares. Explaining this to minors perhaps will help them to look at the internet more carefully to help them identify situations that may not be normal.
Keep up with technology
Staying involved and monitoring a child’s use of technology is an important way to head off situations where they may be subject to sexual exploitation by those with whom they communicate online.
Accountability software, such as that produced by Covenant Eyes, can help you see what your children are accessing and with whom they are communicating. Periodic access to sites such as NetSmartzKids helps parents share engaging and educational videos with their children. Video games such as Google’s Interland, which puts key lessons of digital citizenship and safety into hands-on practice, also teaches kids while providing a game-like experience.
In our Archdiocese, Catholic school children in grades K-12 receive two lessons each year to keep themselves safe. The program, called Empowering God’s Children by Virtus, is now becoming available to parents of public-school children.
Pilot program
In 2021, the Archdiocese of Newark will announce a pilot online program for adults called “Parent Lesson Leader Orientation and Certification” to provide the skills needed to teach their children a module called Physical Boundaries: Safe and Unsafe Touching Rules.
If interested in these modules, sign up for the parent module by clicking on this link.
Together, we can help children understand and identify, name, and share with us the “not normal” events they experience. Together, we can make their world a safer place.
Karen Clark is the director of the Archdiocese of Newark’s Department for the Protection of the Faithful. Learn more by visiting the department’s webpage.
Article sources/resources
Piper Jaffray Investment Research
Journal of Pediatric Health Care
