The introduction to this blog series is here.
This blog post discusses things I heard in a community lecture to parents and teens. I have grouped cyberbullying, sexting, texting, and online social networking together.
The speaker for this topic was a local police officer.
This is a huge topic and some important things I've heard elsewhere were not even mentioned at this talk. Here I talk about what I heard at that meeting.
Online Social Networking
Parents you should have all of your kid's online account names, login, and passwords. Look at what your kids are doing online. Read their Facebook.
Responding to a question from the audience: minors do not have a right to privacy. Their parents are responsible for them until they reach eighteen.
Look at the photos your kids put online (Facebook, etc.). The photos can tell a lot about what they are doing. Do you want that online? Do the photos reveal behaviors that you didn't know your kid was doing?
Texting:
Get the app My Mobile Watchdog. This reports every single text message that people on your account send, including photos (your kids and anyone on your account). When this was mentioned the teens in the room let out a huge gasp of horror. Some parents were glad to hear of this and wanted the information repeated. An audience member commented that they felt reading a child's texts was an invasion of privacy and was not respectful.
(My personal opinion about that is that cyberbullying is real, someone is doing it. If a kid who is being mean through text messages knows their parents will read it then maybe they won't be the mean kid. If parents read text messages they would find the first and earliest messages that their child was a victim and a stop would be put to it.)
If you are being cyberbullied by text message do not delete the messages. Report this to the police. It is easier to work from texts you saved than using legal procedures to get copies of the texts from your phone company.
The phone company keeps a copy of every single text sent. Do your kids know this?
Sexting
If you photograph yourself nude and you are a minor, you have produced child porn on yourself. If you send your own photo to someone you have committed a felony child porn crime with your own image. Just because it is your own image doesn't mean it is legal to do.
Anyone who sends a nude photo of child porn to someone else has also committed a child porn felony crime.
Police find that if a girl sends a nude photo of herself the boyfriend usually send to multiple people then those people send to multiple people. It is not usually one person sends to one person then to one person, it is like a branching tree that gets bigger and bigger.
It is very hard to scrub images from existing. The images wind up being on the Internet and can be viewed by many people, thousands or more, strangers, older people and people from other countries. Therefore do not send photos out that you don't want anyone else to see, people will send them out.
If you are found guilty of a child porn crime from a sexting shared photo it is a label that stays with you for life as a registered CHILD sex offender. This can negatively impact your ability to get a job, get into college and can give very serious lifelone implications.
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At this talk they did not discuss the age at which parent supply their kids with text messaging. Young kids have it. Nothing was said to suggest that kids wait until some certain age before letting them have texting.
I personally think some kids have the technology in their hands before they are mature enough to have judgement to help them regulate their own use of it. Kids have always said mean things on the school bus or in school but having a written record of mean statements and having the ability to send it to someone 24/7 is different. If you are a victim, reducing your face to face exposure is not enough to prevent it from happening as the technology can reach you 24/7 even in the privacy of your own home. This is why victims of cyberbullying often feel trapped and that they cannot escape the torture, there is not sense of privacy when a person is being slandered and bullied on Facebook or through text messages.
I know many parents do not check what their kids are doing on Facebook or what they are texting. Maybe if more parents knew what was going on the kids would stop the behavior and problems would stop before they escalate to the point where desperate kids commit suicide as the only escape from it.
Parents, I say, do your job and actively parent your kids. If they are doing no wrong they have nothing to hide by knowing you are looking at their Facebook account or reading their text messages.