The internet is a great and incredible tool and thanks to it, we have a world of knowledge at our fingertips. Unfortunately, it’s also a dark and dangerous place where sexual predators creep in the shadows and hard-core porn is just a click away.
This is the reality of the internet and, to put it bluntly, parents are failing to adequately protect their children from this disturbing threat.
Recently one mom, Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, a writer and founder of New Wave Feminists, wrote a commentary for The Dallas Morning News, in which she recounted a heartbreaking experience of her 11-year-old daughter confiding in her a disturbing experience she had had with a friend and her friend’s cell phone.
From her commentary:
In glittery red ink, the same she used for her Christmas list, her words sank my heart. At a friend’s birthday party, they were playing on the little girl’s phone. The girl handed it to my daughter and said, “Boys are disgusting.” My daughter clicked on a male classmate’s Snapchat story to find a video of him and a few other boys from her class laughing as they watched rape porn. She said the woman was bound up, saying “no” as a masked man approached her.
Her letter went on to describe a group of boys in her sixth grade class frequently joking about assaulting the girls in the parking lot. She said if any of the girls aren’t sitting with their legs closed, the boys will ask if they want to get pregnant. And if the girls’ legs are crossed, boys from this group often walk by and say, “Spread ‘em.”
They are in sixth grade. No 11-year-old should have to deal with, or even know, about things like this.
I contacted a teacher, and the next day, after a visit with the teacher and the principal, consequences were handed down to the whole class. The boys and girls now sit at separate tables for lunch. That hardly addresses the problem.
Our children are growing up in a very different world than the one we knew as kids. Gone are the days of your grandfather’s Playboy. Today, children have access to explicit, violent and degrading sexual material in the palm of their hands at all times.
This is where many kids get their sex education. This is where they’re learning that consent doesn’t matter, and that actually, the lack thereof is big business.
Her letter ended with the most heartbreaking line: “and this is why I HATE SCHOOL.”
If this isn’t enough to make any parent want to homeschool, I’m not sure what is. Any mother’s heart and stomach churns at this disturbing account. As she went on to discuss, not only do most schools allow cell phones but they encourage them by telling kids to download apps in order to complete their schoolwork.
She says, “Technology is our future,” but at what cost? Not only are smartphones and apps for everything under the sun really just dumbing us all down, but they are also giving children unfettered access to sexual depravity they shouldn’t even be able to imagine. What this is doing to their malleable, fragile minds is immeasurable and disheartening.
It’s really time for parents to honestly evaluate the level of access their children have to the internet. Some apps, like Instagram and SnapChat, are especially dangerous for children and parents need to be doing their research to find out what apps are safe and which apps give their children too much access.
Not only do parents need to be active participants in their children’s online activities but there are also companies like Bark who offer monitoring services dedicated to protecting children from all manner of harmful online events.
Parents, it’s time to wake up and take control of this! Protecting your children should be a top priority, especially in 2019 America.
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