How Groomers Reach Kids Through Their Tech
By Movieguide® Contributor
With a generation of kids having already grown up on technology, older teens and adults are now speaking out about their difficulties with the tech and the ways they have been abused while using it.
Harrison Hayes is a tech safety advocate who was groomed by an older man when he was just 12 years old. He met this person who told Hayes he was an older teenager through gaming, and after building a relationship with Hayes, this “teenager” began to send him vile content.
“In so many ways, his relationship with me, our friendship, it started so slow that it didn’t feel like I was talking to a stranger. It felt like I was talking to a mentor, like a brother,” Hayes, now a 20-year-old college student, told GOOD MORNING AMERICA. “I definitely connected with him better than I did with my peers at school, because for every time I got bullied, he was there to support me.”
Eventually, however, the nature of their relationship began to change as the “teenager” began texting Hayes multiple times a day — instead of once every couple of weeks — and began exposing him to graphic sexual content.
“Now I was getting more messages at school,” Hayes said. “He slowly started exposing me to content like self-harm and images and videos of online pornographic content as a 12-year-old, my first time being exposed to porn.”
“When things started to go south with our friendship, and he started exposing me to pictures and videos of self-harm and internet pornography, I didn’t think I could reach out to an adult anymore,” he continued. “Part of the issue was the taboo and the stigmatization of all that. I didn’t feel like I could reach out to a principal or a counselor and or my parents, because I felt like I was going to get in trouble.”
The relationship continued like this for months until Hayes was finally caught by his parents texting the “teenager” while in bed one night.
“They told me that they saw everything, and they didn’t seem upset. They didn’t seem mad at me like I thought they would. They sat me down and told me I was being manipulated in some sort of way,” Hayes said. “I don’t think anyone in our world had the language yet for grooming. I don’t think we knew that yet.”
Thankfully, the “teenager” hadn’t asked Hayes to send him any explicit photos of himself, but that is all too often the path that these groomers lead their victims down. They then use these photos to blackmail them into sending them more photos or even money.
Hayes’ story is unfortunately common nowadays as more and more children are contacted by these vile groomers. He hopes that by sharing his story he can raise awareness and help inspire changes that protect to upcoming generation from this experience.
“I think for almost every generation in America right now, everyone was told that there’s going to be a stranger in a white van handing you candy, and you should say no to that stranger,” Haynes said. “But I think for us and for my generation, the danger isn’t the stranger in the white van. That’s not where the call is coming from. The call is coming from inside our pockets. It’s coming from inside our iPhones.”
Movieguide® previously reported on child safety:
Apple recently announced a new feature that blurs nudity found in iMessages.
Months after its debut in the U.S. with iOS 15.2, Apple plans to integrate the new safety feature in the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
The technology scans devices owned by young users for potentially sexually explicit images received or sent via iMessage.
One motivation could be due to an increase of child sex abuse material (CSAM) shared among younger users during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite privacy concerns from opposition to the safety feature, Apple notes that the CSAM scanning does not look at pre-existing data but matches new content with material provided by child safety organizations.
