Question 2: How does sexting and sextortion impact kids?

Transcript

Alyson: We know also that many kids are learning about and building relationships online, and this has been especially true now that there is less opportunity for socializing face-to-face and in real life due to all the COVId-19 restrictions. It seems that people are seeing and sending sexual messages a lot more now. So, what exactly is sexting, and how can we talk to our kids about it, including the risks of sexting, in a way that they will actually listen. So Sarah can I ask you to respond to that first?

Sarah: Yes, for sure, that's a great but pretty complex question Alyson. At Kids Help Phone, and especially with the service that I oversee, the Crisis Text Line, we hear about sexting quite often, both from young people, and also their parents.

Sexting, like cyber bullying, really encompasses a large array of possibilities, including sending and receiving sexual messages, sending nude or partially nude pictures or videos through the internet or mobile devices. A lot of young people who reach out to Kids Help Phone mention that sexting is a way to explore sexuality, trust, boundaries and intimacy.

In my personal experience on the front line of the Crisis Text Line, I've had kids as young as 11 or 12 talking about sexting, although I'd say that most commonly, we see it amongst older teenagers. Because we do see younger kids talking about sexting though, it's important to have parents and caring adults have open and transparent, age-appropriate conversations with their children.

The emphasis here really needs to be on openness. Children respond better to conversations that are exploratory in nature, as opposed to immediately jumping into consequences or accusations. Starting a conversation with a young person can start with a simple "I want to talk to you about sexting" or "I saw this on the news can we talk about it." Be curious, while also respecting their boundaries. As a parent or caring adult, your role is to equip the young person in your life with the right questions and the right information to allow them to make informed decisions. Ultimately, the decision to sext is going to be a personal one.

We also encourage that you have conversations about consent with young people in your lives, reinforcing that it's important for them to feel control of the decision to send a sext, and know who they're sending it to, and how old that person is.

The other question we want to prime our young people to think about is will they have control of where that image or video ends up. These are really big questions to talk through with young people, so offer to talk through them together. Some young people might want time on their own to think through things, and then re-visit in in a couple of days. So really keeping that open discussion and offering them lots of options for how we can have that discussion will lead to some of those more successful discussions.

Alyson: And I imagine this gets into some legal territory that the RCMP has to deal with so Kristin can I get your thoughts on this?

Kristin: Certainly, thank you Alyson, and great advice from Sarah. I just wanted to touch on a little bit more about sexting without consent. When a sexual image is shared of someone else without consent, it is known as a non-consensual distribution of intimate images. This is a criminal offence and is a form of pure exploitation.

Sarah also talked a little of some of the implications and the loss of control and I just wanted to re-emphasize that a bit here. When an intimate image is shared with someone else, even if it's shared with someone who they trust, there is that loss of control over what could happen to that image. We see cases where there is sexting initially occurring within the context of a relationship, with consent, with someone who is considered trustworthy, but relationships can end, and they can leave one partner feeling upset, or angry, and as a form of revenge, intimate images can be further shared or posted online. We often hear this being called "revenge porn". Of course, this can be very upsetting and damaging to the person depicted in the images, it can have a negative impact to their health, to their wellbeing, and it can impact how others view them.

In terms of the impact to the individual who shared the image, they could be breaking the law. If an image or video has been shared without consent, or if it's gotten out there on the internet, we do have great resources that young people and parents can access. Your go-to resource is needhelpnow.ca. It's a website geared for teens, for young people, where they can access information on how to regain control over the situation if an intimate image has been shared or posted online. We highly recommend checking out that resource for some tips there.

Alyson: And Noni, can I get your perspective from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection on this sexting topic.

Noni: Sure. Just further to what Sarah was saying and what Kristin was saying, I think that we also are seeing an exponential increase in cases that are coming in to us especially since the pandemic. It has really created quite a flurry of problems for children online from what we're seeing, and that's really important for parents to be aware of, because the majority of kids are not telling anybody about this. The majority of kids that we deal with, their parents don't even know that they are talking to us, nor does the school, it's something they are trying to manage on their own.

As we move over further to the sexting side, getting into the non-consensual sharing, there are other criminal code offences that are important for parents to be aware of. One of them is online luring. That is a report that we take in as well through Cybertip, which is Canada's tip line for reporting any online sexual exploitation of children. We operate that tip line here at the Canadian Centre, as well as the Need Help Now report line and website. So, what we're seeing really is that online luring is when an individual, and typically it's an adult we see doing this, communicates with a child and uses technology to facilitate a sexual offence against them.

They start the communication with the child through a popular app or game or website, chatting with them in a way that would be very innocuous, to build the trust of the child, to start somewhat of a friendship where the child feels very comfortable with the individual. Then it very incrementally starts to move to a sexualized contact. The conversation will become more sexual in nature, the desensitization through potentially sharing sexually explicit content with the child whether it's images or apparent pictures of themselves which could be real or not, and the making requests or demands of the child.

It happens in a very gradual way to normalize the contact, so that it becomes very hard for kids to understand that this is what's going on until it actually is at a place where they are in over their head, when they realize there is a problem. This is something we are seeing happening to girls more than boys in terms of girls being overrepresented in the reports that we receive. 13-year-old females seem to be the most at-risk for this, although we are seeing younger and younger kids coming in.  To Sarah's point in seeing 10 and 11 year olds, we are as well in the online luring space.

We're also seeing offenders younger. We're seeing offenders engaging and perpetrating these types of offences being in their late teens, early twenties, and mid-twenties. We also are seeing sextortion, and luring can often lead into sextortion. What we're seeing is the goal of the individual who is contacting the youth with online luring is to get sexual content from the child, whether that's live-streamed and they surreptitiously record what the child is doing while live streaming sexual acts, or they ask for sexual images to be shared with them. Typically, that is what they are seeking to obtain to move into sextortion.

Sextortion is something where again we have seen an increase. This happens to males and females. It happens differently to males than it does females, but often luring has been the start of it, and then the individual is extorting the child to send more images and using the content that has been shared to control them. It is often with females where they are demanding more content. They can be demanding this on a day-to-day basis. You could be having a child who is trying to manage this for months to years. We've had individuals where the communication started at 12 years old, and the child didn't come to us until they were 16. They've been managing this on their own for several years without parents being even aware of this.

Or it can be very fast. For males with sextortion, it's typically blackmail, something where someone is demanding that a child or a youth send them a sexual image or a video, and if they don't send it or send more, then they will send it out to all their contact list, or if they don't send money. With males we're often seeing a demand for money. If they don't send them money, then they will send the video that they have of them out to all of their contact list and humiliate them. That's often what the control tactic is, to use degradation and humiliation to get the child to acquiesce and comply, and either send the money, or continue to send more images and content on-demand to try and control the situation. They don't want to tell anybody, often the individual tells them that they in fact have committed a crime by sending sexual content so they could be arrested.

We have kids coming in afraid that they might be charged for what's happened and not understand that they have been victimized and that it's not their fault and that they're not alone, this is in fact happening to lots of other children. Those are really two other areas of criminal code offences to be aware of when we look at this space and image sharing.

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