Of course, these spaces are only meant for adults. They’ll say as much, and they’ll drop the hammer on anyone who admits to being underage. But the key word there is “admits.” It’s trivially easy for a kid to lie about their age to get into such places - and even if they require some form of verification (such as a scan of an ID), it’s not much less trivial for a kid to use a fake ID, someone else’s ID, or a photoshop of their own ID. And they’re going to do it in huge numbers, because teens are horny and impulsive and don’t know what they’re getting into. There is no way to keep them out that is absolutely guaranteed to work in all circumstances - at least, not one that I can think of.
And now these kids are in an NSFW space, interacting with grown adults in a sexual context. Even if no one knows they’re a kid, even if no one deliberately targets them, the adults in those spaces are having inappropriate sexual interactions with the kids by being in conversations with them about things like kinks, porn preferences, &c. that adults should not be talking with kids about - and thus those adults become complicit in something terrible without realizing it or intending to.
It’s the anonymous and depersonalized nature of these online spaces in particular that makes this such a problem, which sucks, because there are many people who have a legitimate need for such spaces - LGBT people in reactionary environments, people with embarrassing but harmless kinks who might face ostracism or loss of their jobs if those around them found out, etc. But the anonymous nature that offers so many benefits is inextricable from its inherent awful risk to children.
I’m not really sure where I was going with this. It just sucks and it’s a bad situation and I wondered if anyone else had thoughts to share.
Yeah I remember being like 11 or 12 or so in the 90s and finding a “teen sexuality” board where even my under developed mind could tell it was adults encouraging children to do bad things. I backed out rapidly. I’m glad I had that instinct. In the modern era when I was moderating a large discord community I realised there are a lot of people who stumble into these spaces and end up groomed into becoming groomers themselves later on.
Then they just like, can’t even seem to see how creepy and fucked up their behaviour is. I almost feel like the situation is worse now than it was when I was young and on the early internet interacting with older-than-me but still young gen Xers, with pretty much zero reference point for what was or was not appropriate. I dunno. It was all text based for me back then and some inappropriate stuff happened that did not mess me up anywhere near as much as the consensual activities between myself and my peers in the real world.
sorry are you just riffing or are you saying that scarletteen is a pervert board?? am not sure if I am reading prroperly
My initial response is below but I don’t think I’m helping much with all my words. I’m not doing either of those things. I am perhaps being unproductive with my posting. Not intentionally, but unfortunately I’m realising that I don’t have much that’s of use to this discussion, just more dilemmas.
Oh I’m not riffing but I’m not specifically referring to that board. I don’t know anything about it and it would be inappropriate for me to visit it to look at it by the sounds of things.
I’m referring to something I came across on the old internet where ostensible children were sharing their fantasies of [inappropriate activities] like, sexual compulsions or whatever that should not be encouraged because they would have been abusive towards siblings, as an example, and users who read as “fake children” to my eyes were encouraging those children to act on their fantasies.
I guess what I’m also saying is that I, a curious child, was able to see that the dynamic was fucked up and likely to be contagious and immediately closed my web browser and went to touch grass. I didn’t even tell my parents about it, it was scary and gross and unsettling, but to talk about or acknowledge what I had seen would have raised more questions about what I was doing there in the first place.
I don’t know if it was problematic for me to be exposed to these spaces, given that I had enough of a coherent idea of what was wrong to protect myself. But presumably not all children are equipped for this or wired that way or whatever.
Later in my juvenile years I had what would be considered by today’s standards obviously problematic sexual interactions with adults, which were not damaging to my psyche or my sexuality, while the real world did present me with sexual situations that were, without an age issue involved, damaging to me.
All in all I guess I’m saying that it’s a very complicated issue, that my online experiences were okay and perhaps even necessary for me to become who I am, but I acknowledge that I probably just got lucky. I’ve met younger adults who were not so lucky and have been permanently damaged and shaped by formative sexual experiences which have in turn led to them behaving inappropriately towards minors. They grew up in a bigger internet, more people, less selection bias towards certain types of personality types etc, everyone is on the net now.
I’m not sure it’s possible for any space to be inherently “safe” for this sort of discussion amongst children, and that with the way the internet works at the moment, there is no reason to believe any space designed for children is safe from adults. To what degree this poses an actual risk of harm though, I think, depends on many factors and that perhaps the best thing is for children to be given solid education on sex and sexuality before they need to use that knowledge to assess the healthiness of the interactions they engage in. We do not currently live in societies where this is the norm, though and in many ways we are regressing on that front.
However I have noticed that a significant number of younger social media users do seem to be well educated about boundaries and demand to not be exposed to inappropriate stuff. It’s an interesting thing.
tl;dr I have no fucking idea what the answer is to any of this, but hiding sexuality discussion away from children seems like an impossible ask, preventing adults from infiltrating “safe” spaces for youth to discuss these things is also basically impossible, and we can only hope that future generations of parents and teachers and media, who are more experienced than my generation’s parents were, will keep them safe and well prepared to cope with what they experience online.