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.
It sounds like you are saying the risk comes from interacting anonymously and at no physical proximity to adults, and having conversations about sexual matters.
What are they are risk of?
It seems to me that there is a bigger problems with zero-interactive aspects of sex on the internet: endless streams of videos, animations, images, etc.
There is also lots of non-explicit dialogue about say, relationships between people, power dynamics, etc that kids are actively encouraged to engage in. Example: the recent “your body my choice” thing repeated by 11 year old boys all over.
Back when I was a kid, I was very fortunate to get access to online places where adults were chit chatting about sex in a (more or less) good way. Saved me a lot of turmoil to just understand certain things right away.
Also I made use of resources that were intentionally created for teens. I specifically recall https://boards.scarleteen.com/ which is apparently still around! We had other pre-socialmedia spaces. Of course the problem then is how to keep the adults out.
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.