If you have paid close attention to the news lately, which I sincerely hope you have not, a particular items came to public light that reflect poorly on our overall cultural moment. It pertained to the youthful misconduct of a candidate for public office in a state in middle America. If I seem irritatingly vague about this, it is because I suspect that the person in question is the kind of person who thrives on that kind of notoriety. If you really want to know, I have provided links at the end. Both stories, though, reflect our culture’s tragic indifference to how it brings up children.
In our first case, someone running to represent his friends and neighbors at an age lower than when one normally indulges in that sort of depravity had to withdraw from the race following very much founded allegations that, as a child, he had engaged in an especially ugly form of cyber-bullying. Specifically, this was the form that involves extorting compromising images from young women. The story is bad enough as it is, but then I ran across this quote:
“Seven years ago, he told another girl, who was 13 at the time, that he would circulate a naked photo of her if she didn’t send him more nude images. When she refused, she said, he followed through on his threat.”
To cut to the chase here, the kid was 12. This is the conduct either of a severely troubled individual or someone who has never learned how to comport himself in a civilized world. And the rot goes deeper than that. The victim in this story evidently believed that taking and sharing nude pictures was in any way safe. Two people, neither of the in the best years of their lives, making bad decisions, one of them only naive, the other sinful and outright criminal. We see only one person truly at fault, but both are the products of the unhealthy social forces that have shaped them.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the best way for one’s nudes not to leak is to have none in the first place, but the exploitation here is quite cruel. We have growing up now generations of young girls who think the world expects them to present themselves as sexually enticing to young boys, and generations of young boys who encourage that understanding. Clearly, some are exploiting it in terrifying ways. My purpose here, however, is not to lament the hypersexualization of our culture and the way we think about women in particular. This topic is fodder for many discussions, but I want to address something more sinister, and in some sense more distressing.
To dig into what has gone wrong, we have to look into what has enabled this sort of behavior. As sexuality has been with us forever, it is not really worth discussing. We really ought to cast the blame on technology or, more precisely, the cultures it has enabled. Humans, and males especially, have sought sexual gratification for longer than we have written about it, but only recently has explicit material become readily available. Even the Victorians had a market for prurient publications. Time was, though, that getting your hands on this kind of thing took some doing. Before the internet permeated every corner of the country, if you wanted to get this kind of thing, you had to go to some exceptionally dingy establishments that you did not want others to know you frequented, and especially did not want to be seen in. You could get to it, but you had to accept social costs and impediments to doing so.
And such products were not altogether unavailable to the young. If you talk to people who grew up before anybody outside of government or corporate industry was using the internet, you’ve heard the stories about neighborhood boys who had to slum it with the one copy of Playboy or Hustler between them, usually furtively hidden somewhere away from June Cleaver’s prying eyes. Then the 1990s and the 2000s came around, and with the internet came ease of access. Granted, you still ran the risk of getting caught looking at that which ought not be seen, but it was much lower, and the potential audience much smaller. What was more, the very impersonal nature of the process itself reduced the embarrassment of it all. Your predilections could be catered to with the press of a button.
We have known this for some time, but what has truly changed the equation has been the near ubiquity of smartphones. When you only had one or two desktop computers in the house, controlling access did not pose excessively steep challenges. Now that we have small, fully functional computers in our pockets, it has become next to impossible. Furthermore, we have put these devices in the hands of children, who can now make their poor decisions in the very moment they think of them. Away from their parent’s eyes, and often without even their knowledge, they can make some truly self-destructive decisions.
But the easy availability of such naughtiness is only one variable in the equation, one piece of the puzzle. Information technology’s power over us derives from its power to bring people together. Sometimes, though, it encourages interaction between people probably best kept apart or supervised. Technology helps us build relationships, but we have to mind with whom we build those relationships, and the effects they have on us. Our relationships mold us and shape us both for good and for ill. If we look reality dead in the eye, we have to acknowledge that when we hand phones to kids, we give them the power to communicate more or less unsupervised, with people their parents cannot monitor, under circumstances they cannot control.
These phones are with them always, they never put them away. They can access information, good or bad, at any time in any place. When kids go to school with phones in their pockets, that makes 7-8 hours during which kids can communicate whatever they want with few to no consequences. Kids are being shaped not just by the institution of the school itself, but by the digital culture they have plugged themselves into, and that they try to access whenever they can find the chance. And this is true for nearly all of them; kids’ online interactions shape and mold their offline interactions as well. Sometimes, these are even people the kids themselves have never even met. When kids get to the stage when they are soliciting and sharing explicit images, they do so in the context of a social world that accepts it, and that has been built by technology that not just enables it, but is entirely indifferent to it. If we want better kids, it means we want better relationships for them.
As a teacher you learn both how profoundly important parents can be in kids’ lives, and also how little time some parents spend with their own kids. At one time, the main forces shaping your kids were kin networks, your place of worship, and the common institutions you shared with others in your community. Today we live in an age in which these institutions have either been gravely weakened, or made entirely optional whether by cultural norms or by the state itself. If you give your kid a smartphone and send them to school with it, who is raising them? The answer is: their peers and the tech giants that have a vested interest in your kids continuing to use their technology. Time they spend staring into those screens is time they don’t spend with their families or with other potentially healthy communities. Somebody is going to raise your kids. If you don’t, somebody else will, and you may not like the results.
When we look at the depravity that abounds in much of our culture, wagging the finger at sexually provocative media and the tech giants is all too easy. Responsible people who want curtail this kind of thing have to make decisions for themselves. Raising strong families is not a “fire-and-forget” affair. We cannot continue to send kinds to school or out into the world and just assume that everyone shares our priorities. I work in the school system. I count myself lucky I’ve never had to deal with a situation like the one described above, but I know people who have, and it does happen with some frequency, though not necessarily with extortion involved. I once heard from a local prosecutor that the country juvenile court handles such cases roughly once per week, and I wish I could say it surprised me. So the question falls to you, mom and dad: school is out, your kids should be heading home. They should be coming back to you slightly better than they were the day before, but they can access some of the most toxic communities imaginable at the push of a button. It’s 4 PM, do you know where your children are?
Link to source here.