Fear-Driven Conceptions of Safety
I remember pleading with my Mom to let me use popular children’s gaming websites of the early 2000s like Club Penguin, but the limited chat room function that the site hosted rendered my begging useless. My Mother, like many other parents at the time, had seen a story on the news about a police officer who had pretended to be a child on Club Penguin to prove a point about the ease of child predation and stalking made possible by children’s social networking. The officer befriended a child player and was able to solicit information about where this child went to school and that they had a soccer game coming up. The officer arrived at said soccer game over the weekend to announce to parents that through a brief conversation on Club Penguin, the officer had attained enough information that, had they been a child predator, would have allowed them to kidnap the child they had lied to and befriended online. My mom told me this story every time I asked if I could make an account. She eventually settled on allowing me to join Webkinz, another popular children’s game site with notably no options to chat with others online. I bring up this story to demonstrate how far the state went to demonstrate the dangers of cyber predators. I question what other state resources were dedicated to staging fake instances of cyber predation on youth. The collective anxiety harbored by adults was bolstered by the series To Catch a Predator which ran from 2004 to 2007, during my time in elementary school.
The panic that children must be protected from the internet intersects with classism and the assumption that one must have the ability to supervise their children’s online activity to be a good and watchful parent. In reality, internet safety for children is currently an issue of access and privilege. “Working-class and poor children often do not have the same options for supervision as children in middle-class homes” (Vickery, 2017). Therefore, increasing internet literacy for youths would also remove a layer of pressure that has been sustained through the individualization of parenting. This individualization has created expectations that parents are completely responsible for their children's online safety rather than a community-oriented vision of education that makes developing young people’s online literacy a collective responsibility.
There would be a more equitable digital landscape if all children, regardless of class privilege, had equal access to cyber safety knowledge. Such digital literacy goes hand-in-hand with more equitable access to comprehensive SRE.
Fostering digital literacies and enabling youth to create and produce media can serve as opportunities for equity and risk reduction… affordances of the informal learning space, and the opportunities presented by digital media production, allow marginalized youth opportunities for empowerment and facilitate alternative aspirations and identities beyond the marginalized subject position (Vickery, 2017).
If there was genuinely a desire to protect all children, not just white and upper-class children, from the dangers of the digital world, there would be a collective push for equity in digital literacy. It is the children from low-income families, children with disabilities, and children who are Black, Indigenous, and Brown, who are more likely to grow up to engage in survival sex work due to the ways capitalism inhibits equal access to education, job opportunities, and social services. If there is a genuine desire to reduce the number of young people turning to sex work for survival, part of that requires creating alternative ways to learn how to safely engage with technology other than from one’s own guardians. Beyond that, there needs to be significant systemic change, the minimum being creating widespread access to work that offers a living wage that does not discriminate who is hired and for what based on identity. Imagining past the confines of our current labor system, we need to reconceptualize how value is assigned.
People are valuable and deserving of life regardless of their ability to work or produce. Laboring of any kind should not be required for survival.
When I was a teen, I did not know that Planned Parenthood’s website offered sex education materials written with high schoolers in mind. I did, however, know how to use incognito mode and Youtube. I would look up instructions on how to flirt, how to kiss, and more specifically: “how to kiss girls if I am a girl?” I imagine my youngest sister who is currently a junior in high school doing the same on TikTok. I imagine her typing into the “Discover” page on TikTok things like “bisexual,” and I wonder about what she finds, and if it is helpful to her. I imagine her and her friends sending each other TikTok’s about being young and in the closet, about being in high school relationships, about her best friend starting to date her crush, and my sister becoming the “third wheel.” I imagine what questions she may have about sexuality and dating. I was her age when I was both sexually assaulted and when I lost my virginity. I am terrified by this thought. I wonder if she has come across the pop sex-ed content that I have been seeking out and obsessing over for the last two years. I know that she learned how to twerk from a TikTok video, but I do not know if she has learned about consent or different birth control methods. I know that TikTok has helped her learn body confidence, but I do not know if it has also taught her about sexual autonomy and self-worth in relationships. I hope it has.
