The father of a victim of sexual harassment on the internet: "At 14, my daughter stopped being happy"

Alberto is the fictitious name of the father of a girl, let's say Claudia.

She says that three years ago, when she was 14,

in a matter of weeks.

She began not to look her parents in the face, to lock herself in her room, to avoid them.

"Every time we saw her more nervous and sad," she says.

Adolescence was for their parents the excuse that fitted in with that distant behavior that they sometimes even interpreted as disrespectful.

"Now I know that he

, but then he used to get angry. We talked to the school but they couldn't tell us anything. One day I yelled at him because I couldn't stand him walking around the house as if he were a ghost, but he withdrew further and the situation worsened. situation," he explains.

Claudia was being

, but they still didn't know it.

What is 'grooming'?

Sexting is a practice that consists of sending messages of sexual content through social networks or messaging services.

The Network is infinite and we know that it contains everything good and also everything bad that we are capable of.

This is the human being and the artifacts we invent.

Its objective is

, of course, but this 'word' in English also has its dark side, 'grooming', which alludes to the sexual harassment that an adult practices on a minor through the internet and that usually begins with an

Someone hides their true identity and contacts a child or adolescent pretending to be their equal.

Once their trust is gained, they start

and once they receive images or videos, that material becomes the ultimate trap and extortion asset.

The result is that either you keep sending them, or the abuser will make the messages public.

That happened with Claudia.

"She had social networks and asked us to guide her at the beginning. After a certain time we left her to her own devices," admits Alberto.

She explained

her and what not and she used parental control programs.

That would be enough, they thought.

"Now we try to let our inner circle know that social media can be the worst," he says.

One night

and told everything to her mother.

And "everything" was: she was terrified because someone contacted her through Facebook claiming to be who she was not.

They learned later that she had difficulty socializing and that this probably led her to do certain things to be accepted.

"That person would not let her live and threatened to make public intimate photos that she sent him because he asked for them. This lasted about

, "she recalls.

Parents and daughter went to the psychologist for six months,

and changed schools, because "she had lost all her friends and was not comfortable."

This was three years ago and Claudia is happy and trusting again.

However, Alberto is clear that they will never forget what happened and recommends other parents "not to leave their children alone on social networks."

"We have to

without suffocating them," he concludes.

From different organizations, warnings are issued to young people in order to educate them in safe and healthy use of screens.

One of them is

that shared this video on networks on October 11, International Day of the Girl.

The topic was, precisely, sextortion:

The darkest side of 'sharenting'

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The 'sharenting' is another anglicism that is used so much on the internet.

It refers to parents who show their children on networks, either through their own accounts or through profiles that they create for them on purpose.

The conflicts that arise around this can be varied, such as the discrepancy of opinions in the case of separated parents or the criticism that showing the intimacy of a minor arouses.

Recently, precisely, the judge of the Masterchef program,

, apologized if she had offended a video of hers in which she appears scolding her son Roscón, with Down Syndrome.

Although there are much thicker issues related to sex, like 'grooming'.

A few months ago an American mother, from her TikTok profile @hashtagfacts, warned of the number of times videos were saved in an account of a three-year-old girl.

"Over 40,000 people have saved a video of her wearing a top and over 100,000 of her eating a sausage," she posted.

Some tasteless comments on those videos, in addition to those viewing statistics, led her to review the followers of her own daughter, 12 years old, and found some strange names that did not seem like clean wheat.

Her verdict and her recommendation to other parents of hers was clear and she also shared it in a

:

What does TikTok say about the safety of its users

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The Chinese social network has received a lot of criticism for not ensuring the safety of its users and there are those who accuse it of

when it detects inappropriate behavior by adults towards minors.

Remember that the minimum age to enter is 13 years but, in reality,

.

Therefore, there are many children under that age who have active profiles on TikTok.

The network, for its part, argues with the existence of a set of tools that, under the name of

, allows parents to link their accounts with those of their children and exercise monitoring and control for a safe experience.

These are also explained by TikTok, its security measures:

• Allows users to set their

  account as private.

  By activating this option, only people previously approved by the user can follow them and see their videos.

  The accounts of users between 13 and 15 years old will be private by default.

  Even if an account is public, the user can decide if each of the videos they post are public or private and if each of the videos can receive or not comments, if it can be used by other users with the Duet and Paste functionalities or if they can be downloaded by other users.

• Let users

  decide how they want TikTok to recommend

  your account to other people.

  Users can decide whether or not TikTok recommends their account to their address book contacts, their friends on other social networks, users they have connections with in common, or users who opened or sent video links.

  This setting is disabled by default for users between the ages of 13 and 15.

  In addition, another relevant piece of information is that the accounts of users over 18 years of age are not recommended for accounts of minors, in the same way that accounts belonging to underage users are not recommended for accounts of over 18 years of age.

  Lastly, TikTok does not allow videos posted by users under the age of 16 to be included in the "For You" feed or the "Search" section.

• Users can decide who can send them direct messages between "friends" or "no one".

  In addition,

  direct messages will be disabled

  by default for all users between the ages of 13 and 16.

• Regardless of age, only videos and photos that are published within TikTok can be sent via direct message, limiting the sending of videos or photos hosted outside the application, and guaranteeing that they must comply with its rules, such as the prohibition of nudity, pornography and sexually explicit content.

• It allows users to decide whether other people can download their TikTok videos and

  share them on other platforms.

  This feature is permanently disabled for users between the ages of 13 and 15.

  For users between 16 and 17 years old, this functionality is also disabled by default, but they can modify their privacy settings so that other people can download their videos.

  In this sense, if a user chooses to activate the function, they will jump to a pop-up window explaining what it entails and asking them to confirm that choice before others can download their videos.

• Users can decide who can comment on their videos, choosing between "followers", "friends" (followers who also follow) or "no one".

  For users between the ages of 13 and 15, this functionality will default to "friends" and can only be changed to "no one".

  In addition, users also have options to

  "filter all comments"

  so that comments received remain hidden until approved by the user, "filter spam and offensive comments" so that comments that may be offensive remain hidden until be approved, or "filter by keywords"

• Users can

  choose who can tag

  them in their videos from everyone, people you follow, friends, or no one.

  The same goes for mentions.

• You can decide who can Duet or Paste with the videos.

  In this way, in both cases they will be able to choose between "followers", "friends" or "just me".

  For users between the ages of 13 and 15, this setting will remain "just me" and cannot be changed.

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

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