by Mary Aiken
How many teenagers have mooned a passing car on the highway or flipped the bird at a police car or other figure of authority—and paid a price for it? Many. And they went on to live perfectly decent, law-abiding lives. I am not saying these dumb mistakes of adolescence should be encouraged, but I believe they should be accepted as part of a long process called growing up. Mistakes are supposed to be made. And teenagers will make them. In the case of Amanda Todd, she lifted her shirt and flashed her breasts. Should it have been the end of the world for her?
There’s one more important point that needs to be made as I finish retelling the sad story of Amanda Todd. Her video has 19 million views now and is still available online. I have to weigh in—and share my opinion of “memorial sites” on Facebook that honor teenagers who have died or killed themselves.
I realize that this is where family members visit and leave updates and posts, and express their sorrow and remember their departed loved ones. And yes, it’s true that families and friends may find great comfort in these sites. But I have a greater concern. This type of memorial afterlife is very powerful—and can appear to leave a legacy, and bestow fame, on the departed teen. I am concerned that this could lead to more self-harm and more suicide attempts. Some teens fantasize about dying as a way to get attention or even revenge. The Internet has the power to turn that need into a spectacle. I believe we need to reevaluate the constructiveness and impact of the memorial sites, and consider taking them down.
There should be no upside to suicide, in the real world or in the cyber one.
The Privacy Paradox
In real life, would a teenage girl walk around with a photograph of herself naked—and show everybody at school? Would she undress in class and pose suggestively? That’s what happens, potentially, every time a sext is sent. Besides impulsivity and narcissism, what are the other possible explanations for this disinhibited behavioral shift online?
It could be this simple: It’s fun.
You probably don’t need to be told that kids like to have fun. But for scientific purposes, it has been demonstrated in studies that having fun is another important part of development. In psychology, it’s generally referred to as play. Could sexting constitute an adaptive form of play? Psychologists haul out the word adaptive whenever they want to describe behavior that is changing in order to keep up with either the environment or evolving social mores. Considering that as many as half of all U.S. teens report sexting, it could simply be another way of “keeping up.”
Another way of saying this: Mom, all the other kids are sexting. But what about privacy? Don’t teenagers worry about their photos careening around cyberspace and being seen by strangers? This brings up another fascinating and much explored area of research. In cyberpsychology it is called the privacy paradox, a theory that was developed by Susan B. Barnes, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, to demonstrate how teenagers exhibit a lack of concern about their privacy online. It’s an interesting shift because so often in the real world, many teens are self-conscious and tend to seek privacy. But online, something else happens. Even teenagers who are well versed in the dangers and have read stories of identity theft, sextortion, cyberbullying, cybercrimes, and worse continue to share as though there is no risk.
In the early days of the Internet, this paradox was somewhat understandable. Very few people were able to imagine how behavior would shift and escalate online. In 2005, when the Facebook accounts of four thousand students were studied, it was discovered that only a small percentage had changed the default privacy settings. The most recent study, done in 2015, shows that now 55 percent of teenagers in the United States have adjusted their Facebook settings to restrict total strangers from viewing their content. While that shows a change to greater concern about privacy, it still is too low a number.
The explanation is lack of interest.
Teenagers simply don’t care.
Why?
Because privacy is a generational construct. It means one thing to baby boomers, something else to millennials, and a completely different thing to today’s teenagers. (In ancient Greece, it meant nothing at all; there wasn’t even a word for “privacy.”) So when we talk about “privacy” concerns on the Internet, it would be helpful if we were talking about the same thing—but we aren’t.
But just because teenagers don’t have the same concerns about privacy as their parents do—and don’t care who knows their age, religion, location, or shopping habits—it doesn’t mean they don’t pay attention to who is seeing their posts and pictures.
According to danah boyd, the TED Talk celebrity and visiting professor at New York University, most teenagers scrutinize what they post online very carefully. In her book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, she argues that teens adjust what they present online depending on the audience they want to impress. Everything is calibrated for a specific purpose—to look cool, or tough, or hot.
In other words, when it suits them, teenagers can be enormously savvy about how to protect the things they want kept private, mostly from their parents. “The kind of privacy adolescents want is the same kind of privacy that they have always wanted,” says Ian Miller, who studies the psychology of online sharing at the University of Toronto. “They don’t care if Facebook knows their religion, but they do care if their parents find out about their sex life.”
For my generation, a “secret” is something you tell only your closest friend—and swear them to an oath for life. For teenagers, a “secret” is shared online with four hundred of their closest friends, some of whom they’ve never met face-to-face.
This explains why the “privacy” debate has been muddled. There’s a communication breakdown. Although we share the same language, we are sharing a label that refers to two very different things. How about a new label—open privacy—a different concept from “privacy,” since teens have a different understanding of what they feel is appropriate to share with friends, friends of friends, and basically strangers.
The Risky Shift
We’ve explored explanations for why an individual teenager might post a heartless selfie and why teens don’t consider their privacy in the same ways that adults do. But why does sexting continue to be popular with teenagers when it has been shown repeatedly to be a bad idea? And why has it become more prevalent, in spite of all the school lectures, social awareness campaigns, and so forth?
Group dynamics are a powerful force. Individuals behave differently when part of a group than when they are alone. For example, it has been proven that teenagers in particular can be judgment-impaired when in a group of peers, due to what’s called the risky-shift phenomenon. (And this is why in many jurisdictions in the United States, teenage drivers are restricted from riding in cars with more than one other teenager.) It was James A. F. Stoner who first discovered the tendency in groups toward riskier behavior. Stoner found that each participant’s opinion became more extreme as a result of the group conversation.
Groupthink is another way to look at how an individual’s behavior changes in a group. The larger the group, the more people tend to conform. Logically, the same thing is true online.
So it goes without saying that large groups of teens online, connected by social networks, are likely to behave in riskier ways, and they will also feel more peer pressure the larger their online social group is.
Consider the story of the “sexting ring” that was uncovered at Cañon City High School in Colorado. In November 2015, students in a small town of sixteen thousand were found to be circulating between three hundred and four hundred nude images of classmates as well as some eighth graders in the local middle school. Some of the photos were even taken on school grounds, and then uploaded onto a shared site.
The students used a “ghost app” that they’d downloaded to their mobile phones as a vault to store these images and then trade them like baseball or Pokémon cards. A ghost app hides itself on the screen of a device by appearing to be a calcu
lator or something equally innocuous, which keeps parents or other authorities from noticing. And as with Snapchat, images can be permanent or created to disappear.
An undisclosed number of students were suspended for their participation in the sexting ring, including members of the football team—which led to the cancellation of a game. The alleged crimes, possession and distribution of child pornography, are both felonies. But due to the age of the students, who are all minors, local law enforcement wasn’t sure how to respond. Said George Welsh, the school district’s superintendent, “There isn’t a school in the United States probably at this point that hasn’t at some point dealt with the issue of sexting.”
What would make hundreds of small-town kids behave in such a way? If you combine the effects of increased sexualization and attention-seeking, obsession with cyber self, new definitions of “privacy,” conformity and groupthink enhanced by the strong ties of social-networking connections, and a cyber-risky-shift phenomenon, the previously unthinkable becomes possible.
When Pimps Go Online
Cutting-edge journalism is more necessary than ever, as the speed of change in the cyber world outpaces academic studies. We have to thank Wired magazine for breaking the story of the indictment of Marvin Chavelle Epps, one of a growing number of sexual traffickers who use the Internet to find new young recruits and rent out their services in adult ads. To meet the supply and demand of the sex trade, there’s nothing as fast and easy as cyberspace.
The beginning of Wired’s 2009 story “Pimps Go Online” should send a flash of fear into the heart of any parent of a teenager:
She was a 16-year-old California girl looking for trouble on MySpace; he was a 22-year-old self-described pimp who liked the revealing photos she posted to her profile. Three weeks after they met on the social networking site, they were arrested together in real life outside a cheap motel in Sacramento, 50 miles from her home. She was turning tricks. On her arm, a fresh tattoo showed bundles of cash and her new acquaintance’s street moniker in 72-point cursive.
Epps was a “new kind of pimp,” a tech- and Web-savvy guy who used sites like Craigslist to prostitute girls. On his chat log online, he even gave out free business advice to other potential pimps: “Get some professional, beautiful, elegant, glamor shots, put ’em on these escort websites, and her phone gone slap.”
Here’s the forensics piece: You may say to yourself that the risk of your own daughter meeting a pimp online is small—and that could be true. But the demographic is shifting. “We’re seeing kids who are getting into this stuff that do not match society’s stereotype,” Ernie Allen, president and CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, told Wired. “These are not just kids in poor families who have no other options. We’re seeing kids from the full spectrum of society, and a lot of that is due to recruitment over the Internet.”
Girls who were already at risk of recruitment into prostitution now face escalated circumstances and danger. They may be acting out. They may be looking for money. Already at a vulnerable age, they can be easy to find—and preyed upon. On social-networking sites, these girls give cues that they are vulnerable. And pimps have ways of knowing how to exploit them.
Asia Graves is a case in point. The daughter of a drug addict, Graves began working as a prostitute on the streets of inner-city Boston at the age of sixteen to keep her family afloat. She was picked up by her first trafficker in the middle of a snowstorm. He told Graves that he’d help her, take care of her. “He showed me the ropes,” she told USA Today in an interview in 2012. “If we didn’t call him Daddy, he would slap us, beat us, choke us.”
Sold from one trafficker to another, Graves was forced to sleep with men in New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and Miami. She posed for Craigslist and Backpage.com ads and set up “dates.” She worked six days a week for up to $2,500 a night.
“You think what you’re doing is right when you’re in that lifestyle,” Graves said. “You drink alcohol to ease the stress. Red Bulls kept you awake, and cigarettes kept you from being hungry.”
I had a chance to meet Asia Graves in 2012, when I was recruited to work on a White House research initiative to find technological solutions to technology-facilitated human trafficking. Asia was a participant: A beautiful, intelligent, poised young woman, she silenced an entire room of power-suited White House working-group members as she told her moving story.
The phrase human trafficking is a broad umbrella. It is sometimes just called “trafficking in persons.” Either way, it is a term that describes any instance when one person obtains or holds another person in compelled service. The U.S. Department of State Report in 2011 described major forms of trafficking as forced labor, sex trafficking, bonded labor, debt bondage among migrant laborers, involuntary domestic servitude, forced child labor, child soldiers, and child sex trafficking. It has been proven that technology has created a new dimension for these cybercriminals in which to operate, and has changed the way they do business.
On the White House project, I was introduced to and worked closely with Dr. Steve Chan, a big data scientist, in a research group that used machine intelligence to analyze huge volumes of online images publicly posted on escort sites. Our research was designed to help law enforcement identify young trafficking victims online.
In one month alone—April 2013—the leading U.S. publisher of online prostitution published 67,800 listings for “escorts” and “body rubs,” both considered euphemisms for “prostitution”—in twenty-three U.S. cities. But prostitution can also be a proxy for human trafficking, and, in yet another cyber evolution, what was once visible on street corners and in hotel bars is now an increasingly invisible online activity.
According to a 2015 police report, it has been established that online classified adult advertising facilitates trafficking. The sheer volume of online classified adult advertising and potential human trafficking activity, along with the increasingly tech-savvy cybercriminal, is resulting in a problem of epic proportions. Human trafficking is not confined to a specific geographic locale. With more than 20 million victims of human trafficking around the world, it has become an issue of global importance.
We published our paper for this work in 2015. Using a corpus of publicly available big data, we were able to move toward big insights and contribute to scientific knowledge in this area. Indeed, the implications of our research may extend far beyond the problems posed by human trafficking and into the realm of tackling other technology-facilitated exploitative crimes, such as the generation and distribution of child abuse material.
Courage and resolve propelled Asia Graves to finally escape from the control of traffickers. She joined a group of former prostitutes who had founded FAIR Girls (which stands for Free, Aware, Inspired, and Restored), a girl-empowerment and anti–human trafficking organization based in Washington, D.C. They were behind the development of an app called the Charm Alarm, which girls on the street can use to call for help. FAIR Girls has also been instrumental in getting trafficking sites shut down.
Craigslist was dubbed “the Walmart of child sex trafficking” and vilified for years for allegedly fostering sexual abuse. But it finally shut down its “adult services” section in September 2010. Backpage picked up where Craigslist left off, making an estimated $22.7 million annually from thousands of ads for young women—many of them teenagers—claiming to be escorts, strippers, or massage therapists. They are photographed wearing very little clothing and in suggestive poses. The good news is that advocates like FAIR Girls study the advertisements and reach out directly to offer victims jobs, housing, legal support, medical treatment, and a new life. In late 2015, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to file civil contempt proceedings against Backpage. The action followed the site’s refusal to attend a Senate hearing to provide information regarding online child sex trafficking. This is the first time in more than twenty years that the Senate has taken such extraordinary action. I’m delighted to see a proactive st
ance on a contemporary cyber problem.
I + Me
We owe teenagers an apology. That’s what I think. We are failing to protect and defend them in cyberspace. We are failing to understand and therefore protect their developing selves. Tech companies have made billions of dollars while looking the other way. Opportunistically, they have jumped in to offer solutions to emerging obstacles, creating social platforms such as Snapchat, Wickr, Confide, and the German-based Sicher, where risqué images can be sent and viewed. While they supposedly can disappear almost as soon as they are posted, in fact there are many ways they can be saved. I have serious issues with the facilitation of covert and potentially illegal behavior of minors. I find it inherently unethical.
Do teenagers need to explore and have adventures? Yes. And we should let them. But the risks in the cyber environment are real: sextortion, predation, cyberbullying, and harassment.
And what about the more nuanced and much-harder-to-study risk of harm to a developing identity? Juggling two selves, the real one and the cyber one, is a lot to expect of young individuals who are still figuring things out, about themselves and the world. We are likely a decade away from seeing the cyber effect on psychological and emotional well-being and the formation of a sturdy and sustainable self. We can see signs and clues coming already, I believe, in the new norms of sexting, the obsession with the cyber self, premature sexualization, the plastic surgery among younger people, the escalation of body and eating disorders, and the rise of narcissistic behavior (if not true narcissistic personality disorder). These trends should be cause for alarm. Narcissism and excessive self-involvement are both known attributes of those who suffer chronic unhappiness.