The Cyber Effect

by Mary Aiken

  It’s bad enough to watch violence against adults or animals, but what is the impact of children seeing violence against other children? There is actually a real-life forensics case that involves this. A two-year-old boy in Britain, Jamie Bulger, was kidnapped in 1993 by two ten-year-old boys in a shopping center while Jamie’s mother wasn’t looking. The older boys tortured and murdered Jamie; his mutilated body was found a couple of miles away. Here’s the piece that connects the act of witnessing violence with behavior: It was reported that the two boys had been actively looking for a young child to torture after they had watched horror videos, specifically the 1991 film Child’s Play 3. It was claimed that the boys staged Jamie’s death, even mimicking some of the brutality in the movie. While this awful and tragic case predated the Internet, we can learn from it today.

  Let’s return to the study of eight- to twelve-year-olds and what troubled them online. What bothered them most?

  Pornography they’d seen.

  Yes, that was the most frequently reported concern. As a reality check, in the same study, 5 percent of the nine- and ten-year-olds had seen sexual images online in the previous year. In other words, when they were eight and nine.

  Pornography. This is the elephant in the cyber room. We aren’t just talking about nudity. It’s adult pornography and hardcore pornography that is “upsetting, intrusive, or inappropriate.”

  Did we need a study to inform us of this? Have we reached a time in history when we have to ask children what bothers them in order to find out that pornography isn’t for eight- to twelve-year-olds? This is a terrible moral blind spot of our society.

  As much as I trust empirical science and respect the care given to creating studies that accurately reflect reality—when it comes to the subject of the cyber effects of online pornography on the developing child, I am not sure that we have time for the careful studies that would provide definitive results and information. And even if we did have time for studies, it would be almost impossible to conduct them, due to the ethics of exposing children to harmful material for the sake of a study. In many ways, we are simply in the dark. And we may be there for the foreseeable future.

  But does that mean we do nothing?

  It was social psychologist Leon Festinger who created the theory of cognitive dissonance. It occurs when our thoughts or ideas about the world clash, and we feel tension and internal conflict, which is unpleasant for us. Seeking internal harmony, we make a choice—often not consciously—to focus on something other than the conflict, which could be irrational and maladaptive behavior. The elephant in the cyber room reflects what I think of as societal cognitive dissonance, the experience of knowing intuitively that something, like the Internet, is both good and bad for society—but choosing to ignore the bad effects in order not to feel conflicted. Technology causes this trade-off. We want to reduce tension and internal conflict, and to focus on all the nice things the Internet brings us—Wi-Fi, connectivity, convenience, fun gadgets that enhance status. We decide to ignore the problems and risks.

  The bystander effect also applies. We are all witnessing this crime against innocence. Does the size of the crowd online cause each of us to look the other way?

  The Age of Exploration

  Imagine that a nine-year-old child is wandering around a 7-Eleven—or any regular convenience store of the sort that urban dwellers have come to know and rely on because, well, they are so convenient. In Japan, it’s a FamilyMart. In Norway, it’s a Narvesen. You can get cash, milk, energy bars, eggs, juice, a newspaper, and a cup of not-so-great coffee there.

  Candy takes up an entire aisle. Another aisle has magazines.

  When you were a child, you may have visited a convenience store with your friends or parents. You stood and looked at the candy aisle. You may have browsed some magazines—flipping through the pages of Outside, PC World, Popular Mechanics, Newsweek, Seventeen, or Cosmopolitan with its racy covers.

  A nine-year-old child has some grown-up interests. They may still believe in Santa Claus and fairy tales, but they are also curious about the adult world. It terrifies them a little but also beckons.

  Psychologists agree that exploration is a healthy and necessary part of development. Emotionally, a nine-year-old child is developing self-regulation and self-control, beginning to pull away from family and parents by developing closer bonds to peers at school. They are beginning to develop a “self-concept” and self-esteem, usually by evaluating self-worth in comparison with others.

  Around the world there are different cultural mores about what is appropriate for a child’s eyes, but by and large, wherever you go, adult content—words and images—is kept from children. This is often regulated by the government in some way, the result of laws that have been written, passed, amended, and honed for decades.

  In the convenience store, the adult magazines—Penthouse, Hustler, Playboy—are kept under opaque cloth or colored plastic so you can’t see their covers. They might be kept in a separate room—in the way that adult movies, before the era of Netflix and On Demand, were kept in a different room of a video store that children were not allowed to enter.

  Prior to the Internet, it was quite possible that a nine-year-old child would not have been aware of the existence of adult magazines or where to obtain them—and even if they did, obtaining them wasn’t easy. Now imagine that nine-year-old child sitting in front of a computer screen. Perhaps the child is clustered with a group of friends, but more likely alone.

  Parents would be vigilant in a city convenience store with a child, and keeping an eye out. But at home they are not so vigilant. What is there to be afraid of? Yet within a few seconds of searching on the Internet, a child can come into contact with the adult world in a shocking variety of ways—which can leave them disturbed or, as the EU study says, “bothered.” They might be afraid to say anything to their parents for fear of getting in trouble—or worse, having their devices confiscated.

  This is not the same as an issue of Playboy hidden under a bed. Such a magazine might contain a total of sixty images or fewer, which would be (relatively speaking) pretty benign. Now in the time it once took to turn a page, there are thousands of websites with millions of images. There are challenges in quantifying content online, but in early 2016, according to the Internet Filter Review, which is continually updating its findings, there were 4.2 million pornography sites and 68 million daily pornographic search engine requests—or one quarter of all searches. The prevalence and accessibility of this content may be too great to avoid.

  Some social scientists have even speculated that the rapid growth of the Internet, and its design, were driven in part by the great human attraction to and interest in pornography. Given the numbers of people who are into it—a 2014 Cosmopolitan survey of four thousand adult men found that 30 percent of them viewed it daily—we must consider it a relatively normal interest for adults.

  What makes you think children aren’t seeing it?

  I wonder sometimes if the potential threat hasn’t been made clear enough to parents: the impact of pornography on developing children. As Michael Seto described, it could be the largest unregulated social experiment of all time.

  As a society, we are readily having conversations about the impact of Photoshopped images of women online and the impact on young girls, who tend to think of themselves and evaluate themselves in comparison with the appearance of those unreal and Photoshopped celebrities. Society discusses the impact of concussions on young boys who are playing football (though it took decades). Society discusses and amends the appropriate age to begin driving a car, drinking alcohol, voting in federal and state elections, joining the military, and getting married.

  And yet society does not appear ready to have this conversation: What is the effect of explicit and upsetting images of adult sexual practices and pornography on developing children?

  While many parents do describe themselves in surveys as concerned about pornography on the Internet, it is enormously trou
bling to me that not all of them do. For instance, when parents of young children in the U.K. were asked what worried them about raising children in the digital age and were given a list of things that could concern them—the list included children accessing pornography or sharing self-generated sexts—15 percent of them said, nope, they weren’t concerned about that.

  Incredibly, as many as 11 percent of all parents surveyed expressed concern that the technology skills of their under-five-year-olds surpassed their own. It goes without saying that if your tech skills aren’t as sharp as those of your five-year-old child, how are you supposed to protect them online? Eight in ten parents feel they do not know enough to keep their three- to four-year-old children safe online, and the same goes for parents of five- to seven-year-olds and eight- to eleven-year-olds.

  Kids are curious. And when they become curious about something online, they will find a way to see it and share it with other kids. Older children—older than twelve—may have the self-control and self-knowledge to resist the temptation to see something disturbing. But for a younger child, simply due to where they are developmentally, this is often not possible. Which brings us to the important subject of parental control.

  Parental Loss of Control

  I am often asked about parental controls: Which ones are best? and Do they really work? Shopping for this software can be confusing—like shopping for antivirus ware—and expensive, with monthly fees and updates and occasional bugs. There are plenty of offerings available, which are rated and reviewed online by consumers and parent groups.

  My concern isn’t so much for the capable parents who are good at researching and finding the best options; it’s for the overburdened ones who don’t have the time, money, patience, or ability to seek the best options, much less install them. Even after the software is installed, parental controls can give a false sense of security, lulling naive parents into a lack of vigilance. Many tech-savvy kids have lots of ploys they use to get around parental controls. It doesn’t require much resourcefulness. If you want a real wake-up call, just go online and do a Google search for “ways to bypass parental controls,” and you will find more than a million results. It is the ultimate expression of democratization of knowledge.

  Each year, with the speed of technological changes and creation of new social media sites—I hate to start naming them because by the time you are reading this, there will be new ones—it becomes harder to adequately observe, study, and monitor the content that children are accessing online.

  But it is the proliferation of handheld devices—a kind of privatizing of Internet use—that has had the most impact of all, making it unrealistic for parents to watch over their children’s shoulders in order to keep them safe by limiting Internet access to a family room or public part of the house. Studies in the past have looked at the content of TV and devices as separate entities, but these have obviously merged now. Kids watch television programs, movies, and YouTube videos on their computers and mobile devices. At least there is parental control software for most mobile phone browsers and tablets now. For many years after the launch of the first iPod Touch, a small handheld device for music-listening and browsing of the Internet, no parental controls were available for it, even when the largest market for it was middle-school-age children. Eventually this was rectified, but millions were sold before any controls were created.

  Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was known to keep a tight lid on the use of screens in his own household—and Silicon Valley’s most tech-advanced parents seem to be the ones who are most strict about Internet access for their children. But even if you’re a parent who feels confident that the filtering software for the household and mobile devices is working beautifully, what happens when your child goes to a friend’s house?

  Many parents simply give up. According to studies, they are overwhelmed by technology and feel they can’t keep up with accelerating online advancements. Meanwhile, children take advantage of their parents’ limited focus, lack of tech acumen, and lack of time. A large percentage of them “hide their participation in risky and sometimes illegal activities,” as one study described.

  Trying to be helpful to parents in the U.K., the government asked its independent regulator, Ofcom, to recommend proper monitoring of a child’s online life after a study in 2014 found that one in twenty U.K. families with young children did no monitoring whatsoever.

  A panel of experts came up with a four-point approach to protect children online:

  1. Using technical mediation in the form of parental control software, content filters, PIN passwords, or safe search, which restricts searching to age-appropriate sites.

  2. Talking regularly to your children about managing online risks.

  3. Setting rules or restrictions around online access and use.

  4. Supervising your children when they are online.

  As it turned out, only one-third of families with five- to fifteen-year-old children at home provided all four forms of mediation. I can guess why. Because it’s a full-time job!

  How on earth can a parent be expected to do all that, while feeding, clothing, and caring for a family—and probably working forty hours a week? The figures vary from study to study, but in general, for homes with children who are a bit older, over twelve, the percentage of homes with no controls or monitoring rises to around one in ten.

  As a forensics expert, I believe whistling in the dark is a gamble. In my field, there’s a famous case, Situation 21, that speaks to this question. When organizers of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich were trying to prepare for any possible security risks, they called upon West German psychologist Georg Sieber to imagine various worst-case scenarios to help plan for all contingencies.

  Sieber came up with twenty-six possible scenarios. The one that he called Situation 21 described a scenario in which armed Palestinian terrorists invade the Israeli delegation’s quarters, kill and take hostages, then demand the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israel. But this scenario and all the others that Sieber came up with seemed over-the-top and incredibly unlikely to the Olympic organizers. So dark and so negative! After all, the 1972 Olympics had been given the official motto Die Heiteren Spiele, which translates as “The Happy Games.” To even consider Sieber’s awful imaginings could ruin the fun, carefree spirit that the organizers hoped for.

  Eerily, Situation 21 came true. During the Olympics, eleven Israeli athletes and one German guard were murdered. So much for “The Happy Games.” The phrase became a grim reminder that merely hoping for the best will not prevent the worst.

  The reality: When a risk is unlikely—and unpleasant to consider—there is often a strong desire to overlook it. The explanation is that human beings must continue living, day in, day out, despite the risks we all face, whether it’s a car crash, a theft, an act of terrorism, or a visit to your bedroom by a random serial killer with a hatchet. But with the help of laws, government regulations, and technology, we face fewer risks each year. Our cars have alarms, air bags, and better seat belts. The number of airplane crashes varies from year to year, but lessens overall. Same goes for the murder rate in most developed countries. The ability to track serial sex offenders using DNA tests and advanced technology makes them less of a threat too.

  From a forensic psychology perspective, I can’t help but sympathize with Sieber. The desire for the freedom in cyberspace, and the reluctance to consider its true downside, causes some parents to ignore the risks of what could happen to their children online, just as the Munich organizers in their state of cognitive dissonance refused to increase security or to consider Situation 21 because it would go against their desired concept of a relaxed, fun Olympics. Does the actual degree of risk mean that you shouldn’t prepare for it—or discuss these difficult things with children?

  My job, as I see it, is to be fully armed with real insights and information, both open-eyed and imaginative, about potential risks so I can be prepared for the worst-case scenario. As we say in risk assessment, “S
tart at the apocalypse and work back.”

  The variety of unsupervised and age-inappropriate content to explore online is almost limitless. And the number of children exposed to it grows every hour. This is a situation 2.0 that we cannot ignore.

  Sweetie + Webcam Sex Tourism

  Sweetie was a playful ten-year-old Filipino girl with large brown eyes and shiny chin-length hair. “Hello, my name is Sweetie,” she said in singsong accented English as she looked into her computer webcam and greeted new friends.

  Online, Sweetie was willing to have webcam sex for a price. Webcam “sex tourism” is a growing business, partially due to the hypervigilance about sexual offenders in the real world. The result: Men in rich countries pay thousands of children in poor countries to sit in front of a computer webcam and perform sex acts, or watch the men perform them.

  In the first two and a half months of engaging with strangers in cyberspace, Sweetie attracted one thousand predators from seventy-one different countries. But before you get terribly depressed about this wretched story, let me pass along the good news: Sweetie wasn’t real. She was an interactive 3-D computer model that looked and moved and sounded exactly like a real ten-year-old Filipino girl. She was the creation of Lemz advertising agency for the international children’s rights network Terre des Hommes (Netherlands). Sweetie was designed to capture the identities of child predators and pass them along to law-enforcement agencies. At any time of day, according to Terre des Hommes, roughly 750,000 men worldwide are looking for online sex with children.

  “The moment [Sweetie] got online, we were swamped, like an avalanche,” said Hans Guyt, the special projects director of Terre des Hommes at the time.