There is a stats model as to why this is. I can't find the reference, so my recollection may be spotty.
Essentially, assume there are more men than women in some room. Assume that some percent of either sex will espouse sexist comments at the other sex. Running through the math, you find that women hear more sexist comments than men do. If you plug in some real world numbers (of sex imbalances, sexist remark frequencies, time in various environments, etc) to these percentages and not just some random ones, then something like 95% of women will get some very crude remarks thrown their way nearly every day. Again, I can't find the reference, but it has it's own eponymously named rule to it on Wikipedia (though it's not on that linking page yet for some reason).
Basically, one possible reason men don't hear a lot of very sexist stuff all that time is 'because math'. Men need to listen to their sisters, mothers, wives, friends, and coworkers and believe them more often.
I think exactly this is the reason why many mans perceive the sexual harassment and the sexist argument has overkill sometimes, basically it's an issue cause by a low exposure to it.
Thank you for this comment, i'll use it as an argument in sexism discussions trying to help other fellow mans to understand it.
On the other hand, it's my experience that women are far more likely to share obnoxious comments with their friends. But I admit that's based on a small sample, just close female friends and lovers, and wives. And perhaps I'm not the sort of guy who encourages such sharing by male friends. Or even has such male friends, for that matter.
So as a summary: if there are twice as many males in the room and everyone is equally likely to make a sexual comment against the opposite sex, then females would get 4 such comments for each comment a male gets.
Now, for normal everyday examples like walking down the street, asking a question in a class, taking the train, etc.. Does it seem likely to be twice as many males in this "room"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio says that there are 1.01 males to each female, I would say that this is not nearly enough to account for this difference.
Definitely. It's hard to fathom pretty much any "deluge of interactions" and their destructiveness at scale without having going through.
An other common case is online pileups e.g. a random tweet gets retweeted and is controversial enough that people now viewing it want to reply. For them it's just a reply, for the rando it's thousands of by and large useless repetitive and unoriginal message.
It's fundamentally a DDOS, and the skeeviness or even maliciousness of the interactions you experienced only serve to make things workse.
On the other hand, the kind of existential dread many men experience now is something only modern society really made an opportunity to foster. Depression, loneliness, and feelings of abject hopelessness can eat you from the inside out. You feel anxiety as if there's a tiger outside but there is no tiger, you can never "escape" the tiger until you find a partner (and even then your past life can have a permanent lasting effect on you), and being clocked as experiencing all of this makes you "desperate" and less attractive creating a vicious cycle of misery.
If I could have chosen I'd rather have been born onto the other side of that experience instead of barely being able to enjoy life up until recently. Manageable specific threats presenting themselves throughout the day that go away when I remove myself from a situation (or mace them or something) instead of going through the motions day in day out feeling increasingly worthless with every failed attempt at reaching out to a potential partner, online or offline. Having too many options presenting themselves to you versus knowing that at least 500 people in a row online deemed you not even worth responding to.
It’s entirely reasonable to assume people then had the same existential dread and fear of social exclusion we had today plus festering wounds, lack of hygiene, and poor dental care.
She looked to the construction workers and seemed baffled. She told me she was she was surprised that they were 'NOT' catcalling her with me walking with her.
That opened my eyes a bit. She had walked by them before several times and they had harassed her many times, from across the street.
She was either 16 or 17 at the time. I am pretty sure she was not 18 at the time. The age of consent in California.
But then, I'm a guy. However, I have been catcalled and propositioned, by gay men. In clubs, at parties, in restrooms, etc. Rarely, though. And sometimes I flirt, just for lulz. Almost got me knifed, one time.
And then there's all the other crap that we all need to deal with from obnoxious guys.
On the latter, I keep having the thought that in 2019, that comment should not be needed. I feel the same about your comment and how men act.
(I say all this as a older white man.)
[1] (See also: "teach them not to rape!" and the like. You can't teach a rapist not to rape - the leopard doesn't change its spots. And the moral majority of dutiful, ethical, law-abiding folks don't need to be taught not to be predators!)
This is generally true in both directions. While I have never experienced sexual harassment, I do experience nothing. As in, no woman (online) initiates contact with me. Every woman apparently initiating contact is a scammer and likely not actually a woman.
If you're looking for a relationship, look offline. And not in pick-up joints - take any interests you have and make them sociable, invest in social gatherings with people your own age (anyone younger than a couple of years is going to think you're a creep), and tell women you find attractive that you find them attractive subtly, and don't be childish if they knock you back.
I'm trying to make sense of this comment and am drawing a complete blank.
Seems to me that zero unwanted online sexual advances from creepers of the opposite sex would be an example of "winning", not an example of "men have it bad, too."
As a guy who wishes he'd had zero unwanted online sexual advances from creepers, what am I missing here?
ps: my story is very slightly related to the thread and your example as I was not a minor nor made a minor female profile. Strangers annoying young girls should be stopped immediately.
What is the lesson there? Go meet women in person. Online/tinder/okc is for schmucks. Women have it so easy.
Also this article is submarine pr for bark. Honestly bark sounds like something that would be awful for parents mental health. Do you really want to know what your kids are doing? At 10-15 we (girls included) we were trying to be as offensive as possible on the internet.
This is accurate, first and foremost before what I say could be interpreted as shifting the blame from these perverts. But one thing not mentioned in this article is why an 11 year old would be on the internet at all. I think we need to have a serious think about whether it makes sense to expose a child to everything to world has to offer, unguided, before they're much older than 11.
There was a lot of optimism about the internet, or more specifically the web I guess, as it developed. But realistically it's not the utopian vision many expected it to become, large parts of it are a cess pool.
Back when I was younger the idea that it would aid in education, and make it easy for children to research any topic. Is that truly the case? I'd argue not, misinformation is rife, could any child really be expected to critically examine this stuff unguided? I think we were better with something like encarta to be completely honest.
Social media is an abomination, I'm not convinced many adults have the faculties required to use it in a non destructive way. How many of us have parents that seem to be completely radicalised by one Facebook group or another? We know that because they won't shut up about it, so what's it doing to a bunch of kids that don't share what they're reading with their parents? God knows.
This is all before we admit that children can be really quite cruel, which gets magnified by them not actually seeing the result of their words/actions. Putting a screen in-between the bullying is a sure fire way to make it much worse. Couple that with the isolation that's felt by this fake 'social connection' and its a recipe for disaster.
I really worry about the future if our education systems can't be retooled to teach children critical thinking, and if we don't start to change the way we look at the internet to realise its way more dangerous than we expected it to be.
My 12 year daughter, for example, is one of only a few kids in her class that don't have their own phone. And it's been like this for a couple years. Her friends think we're dragons for restricting her and her brother to 1 hour a day. Throughout the school day she is getting access to school iPads for 'free time' where it's open season on YouTube and the like.
The ages 11 and up are when parents get a harsh education in just how little 'control' they can (or should?) have over their kids. The best bet is to make sure there's open channels of communication and enough mutual respect that your kids will come to you when confused or upset, and maybe even listen to your advice. Trying to clamp down on them and control their access to the Internet (in an era where most of their peers have almost unfettered access) doesn't encourage that trust. We've learned the hard way.
Because she wants to expeirience and learn society where it happens.
Internet is main space for human interaction. Asking why 11 year old would be on the internet is like asking why would she be in the mall or on the street or anywhere really except home, school and inside of family car.
She should be on the internet and she should be expeiriencing it because that's the only way she can learn to tolerate it and find her way around it. She won't learn it at school or from parents that barely have any clue what's internet outside of their email accounts.
When children access internet you need to keep an eye and explain parts of it you yourself do understand. Same as with TV or people in the streets. You can't ban things till children become adults because you are stealing from them opportunity to learn when learning is easiest for them.
If they have your support internet won't break them.
For an 11 year old, absolutely not.
It shouldn't even be the main space for adults.
> learn society
Calling what happens on the internet "society" is just leading us down the darker path.
Homework, from a surprisingly young age, often expects and requires internet use. Personally I would have preferred a reasonable mix of all sources, including using a library, and when and why to choose - the internet often lacks depth, or is wrong, and kids often go through a stage of "it's on the internet, it must be true". I'm not convinced they all get past that, as if they do it's self-learnt. Adults too.
Guided use is for younger than 11 as they'll use the net in class and for homework, as well as socially well before high school these days. You'd better have tried to give them the tools and skills to try and judge, be suspicious etc before then. Considering most people really aren't that tech aware, how is a non-tech parent meant to judge when is the right moment? My peer group isn't even slightly representative as there was a heavy presence of router rules, firewalls, non-admin access and so on. None of which is there the moment they hook up to coffee shop or friend's wifi. So, just like walking to school, best you can do is give them the nudges to fend for themselves, and hopefully know when to yell for help or advice from parent or teacher. (Teach would probably be non techie, and not much use either).
Then you have peer pressure. It's hard to resist too early smartphone or social media use when your kid is the last in class without, and it's their main form of contact. They don't call round houses or phone like we did in my, pre-internet schooldays. Facebook et al say you shouldn't have an account before 13, but there is precisely no enforcement of that. So what to do? As you say children can be quite cruel, often especially to those who don't conform. We judged the right moment was around 12-13 - high school is when kids get properly cruel. We were amongst the last of the very late adopters as far as we can tell...
Critical thinking is one thing that is markedly absent in education, it's far more checking the boxes of giving them a tech education, and schools using "modern stuff", like those mostly pointless interactive whiteboards all the schools got at great expense. No evidence of teaching them to think, to judge, to differentiate between ads and SERPs, or which SERPs might be potentially trustworthy, how to judge a source's credibility, etc, etc. Course critical thinking might have some of them questioning the system... :)
When I went back to school for my Master's degree, I had the highest confidentially settings I could set. If I wanted to ask questions on a homework or project, the school required I gave my name, email, and course information, along with the content of my post to Piazza.
The argument and agreement was that they can't use my information unless I also am a member on their website outside the context of Piazza... Funny enough, I used LinkedIn... So since I want to use LinkedIn, my school information privacy is violated.
I imagine there's a similar goal with high school students. As soon as they turn 18 and claim that on LinkedIn, they can go back and mine their high school and middle school data.
The bank in your example is beyond negligent, as it provided the opportunistic thief the opportunity to abscond with customers' money the bank exists to protect.
In this case, the bank is the parents of children who are obligated to supervise their behavior online, not the children themselves.
The great bane of the internet is that it allows the crap voices to be heard much more loudly, too.
About child cruelty, I can remember how mean we could be. And how innocent it was at the same time. It's all a game of loud teasing, we were all calling each other names to make everybody laugh; it's just that sometimes some people get too much and sometimes some people already have too much on their plate. I was as much a victim as a perpetrator.
You're not shifting the blame so much as directly blaming the victims and their parents.
The fact that there are people preying on children over the internet is disturbing, but I don't find it surprising. I'm not upset in the visceral sense because I can't keep that feeling up for something that has been a matter of fact about the world since time immemorial.
The way people engage ethical questions is very complex. One way of looking at this is along the emotion vs. logic spectrum. Both strategies work, but have different advantages and require different feedback loops to improve. But it is our collective responsibility to engage those feedback loops as much as possible (which you're doing by your posting, which I think took courage).
On this particular issue it seems you're more towards the logic end. That's fine. If that makes you uncomfortable, that's ok. Dig a little but don't judge yourself - this only hurts the process.
At the end of the day, in the words of Batman: "It's not who you are that defines you, it's what you do."
Edit, for anecdata: I lost a parent to disease early in life, and it took me years to come to terms with the fact that I very rarely feel any emotion about it. Interestingly, I find my reaction changed with age.
I'm not that worried either. This issue is already being discussed quite widely, children will get educated, etc.
Naked/sexual images aspect doesn't disturb me much, what disturbs me is the manipulation/secrecy/blackmail aspect, and attempts at real life contact. Both is hopefully preventible with educating children on how to treat the internet, and how to keep their privacy, and how to recognize danger and deal with it. Newer generations of parents will have more clue about this, and will be able to prepare their children for this better.
From what I've heard so far about the issue, and given how widespread this is, I have a theory that children get targeted more, simply because they are more likely to give attention to people giving them some attention and simple adoration.
There are an infinite number of things in the world that are troublesome, that don't affect you. You do not want to let it take over your life. I have a friend with severe anxiety and he worries over everything that doesn't involve him or that is inconsequential. He is absolutely miserable because of it. You do not want to be like that.
That said, I feel anything to do with children being victims much more viscerally now as a parent than I did before.
This company is training machine learning on grooming language and they could sell that data to companies like Facebook to automatically monitor child accounts-- with their parents' consent. That's a much better solution.
I suspect the conflation occurrs because most people don't want to bear thinking about specifics, and stop at "abuse". This is understandable, but distinctions are important when analyzing any problem. For example, the idea that grabbing the perps from the story means there are fewer kidnappers is highly wishful thinking.
Details are necessary to develop appropriate solutions. The behavior in the article is something that legal enforcement likely cannot curb, like "speeding" 10mph over. The perps are certainly problematic and guilty of something, but their quantity/fan-in is too great at Internet scale. The only solution I can see working is curated whitelist-only environments, the same way you drop kids off at a purpose-tailored daycare rather than a downtown alley or a prison.
Details are also important for making sure that the "kid-safe" solutions are appropriately targeted so they don't end up leaking to wider society. Anonymity in general is important for a whole host of marginalized peoples, and there are many interests that wish to erode it for their own nefarious ends.
A lot of the conversation around sexual predation, especially around child porn, is problematic from a democracy point of view: You get authorities asking for more power (usually, more draconian surveillance laws), without showing evidence of what it is that they are supposedly fighting -- and of course, nobody wants to ask too strongly for such evidence being shown, lest they be accused of being a potential predator as well. But we can't just give authorities more power just based on their say-so. Hence, my appreciation for the choice to release some of that material in the article. I'm against more draconian laws, but I do think people should be able to make up their own minds, and the discussions we have about those issues should be more open.
No dark web, no Hollywood hacker shit. Just go on social media and pretend to be a pretty underage girl and fish meet barrel. These days you could automate this with a good adversarial neural net (including image generation!) that would engage predators and let them incriminate themselves.
The authorities don't do this because they don't really care. Child abuse is a political dog whistle but it's not a real priority. As with many child care issues there is an unspoken classism at work too: that only happens to the children of less responsible lower class people (which is false).
This was one of the hard problems about the Rotherham abuse scandal. Many of the victims had been in "care" (ie taken away from abusive parents), and their reports weren't believed. Therefore a substantial grooming ring could be built up. This is why people keep saying "believe victims".
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for pursuing any person who behaves as in the article to the greatest extent possible, but you they have to get IP, dig up the person, contact authorities in that country and hope they do something?
That's a lot of paperwork for maybe something _might_ be done and no one died and no large amount of money went missing (so to speak).
Maybe it's not so much they don't care (most people would care about this no?) and more they are limited in resources (and perhaps motivation) and it is difficult to get results.
The revulsion that people experiencing true homophobia have towards gays looks a lot like the revulsion many people here are expressing about pedophilia. The justifications are a little different, but the emotions look similar. It's nothing like the feelings people have towards objectively worse things like death. They talk about car accidents, disease, and even murder without that sense of disgust.
But that's not the scary thing here in the least; the scary thing is how absurdly many of these men are immediately and overtly predatory towards someone they evidently clearly perceive as being a target for manipulation. They contacted her unbidden for the sole purpose of getting sexual gratification out of an individual who they knew was at a disadvantage to them. What are the cultural roots driving this behavior? What does it say about the perception of sex we're engendering in these men that they're so driven to express their sexual will on someone they perceive as vulnerable? These could never constitute a healthy sexual interaction, they are compulsively extractive and impersonal.
I'd argue the real damage that our society does is foster in people an addictive appetite for exploitation and satisfaction through the expression of power over others. No doubt, for these men these young children don't register in their minds as human beings, but as valued objects they can attempt to have control over.
How deeply fucked up are we as a society that hordes of men seek sexual satisfaction through that kind of dynamic? What did we do to them to generate a pathological craving to dominate and feel power?
I'd argue that perhaps this is just what a society based around hierarchies does.
I don't mean it as victim blaming or shrugging it off, either. It is in a way a sad fact of life. On the other hand, I personally think there is too much emphasis on the downside of being attractive, and not a lot on the upside.
Personally, to be honest, I also think about a rich white woman walking through a poor village in a third world country. She'll be swarmed by beggars, but is she really oppressed?
As another commentator answered, men typically experience nothing of that. Zero, zilch, nada - no interest by other people at all. I am not convinced that is the better side of the deal. The usual comment will be "talk to women" - I have talked to women who would be bothered if nobody would notice them on the street. So there is that.
To point to another example: we learn to lock our doors, don't show our valuables around, and so on. Not because everybody else is a thief, but because a few people are thieves after our valuables. It sucks, but outrage about it doesn't really help against it. Not do draconian laws, it seems.
On the internet, there are presumably over 3 billion people, so if you are fishing for predators, you can easily attract some, even if their general prevalence in the population is low. Even a "horde" would be few in relation to the several billion total.
Another issue, of course, is how to explain it to young girls. I am really not sure what to tell my daughter yet.
Maybe they’re just a small minority of psychopaths that have always existed, and the internet has made it easier to trick them into revealing their true nature and produce objective evidence of it.
I'm not actually convinced there is any damage.
Dunno, around where I lived, every kid in school knew what sex is by the age of 10-12, boys probably had found porn magazines in the woods, and would've been excited if some older lady with actual boobs sent them nudes through a computer.
I think parents are way more shocked and traumatized than their kids are.
Edit: Can someone paste the whole article? As a parent of 9 and 7 year old girls, I'd like to know what platforms to be weary of. There's no way we'll be letting them have public social media accounts for a very long time.
All of them.
Again, this is not about a 'police sting' or anything like that. It is about a 'project' (stunt) carried out by a private company that sells software for monitoring kids. The author works for the same company.
We shouldn't rule out that they're being substantially misleading, but I don't think we should just assume that either.
I find it dubious that each one of them gets over 50 predators attacking them the moment the post a selfie on Instagram. Either a small number of pedophiles would be targeting thousands of kids per hour, or there are millions of pedophiles.
The basic premise of the article rings true (posting selfies on can lead to getting attacked by predators), but the numbers are just ludicrous.
I don't doubt that this stuff happens. The web is full of filth and excrement. But using the language of moral panic to sell a dubious service is just crass.
If we must wade into the debate about whether kids should have access to it, my answer would be a resounding no. I know of ten year old girls with smartphones. I try to tell people that those things are portals to hell, and they look at me like I have two heads.
The web has morphed into a raging monster, and 'mobile devices' are the devil incarnate.
We should step back from the abyss, or at least refrain from looking into it, lest we discover that we are but monsters ourselves, and the abyss is only a mirror.
The fact that it takes three letter agencies multiple years and inter-country coordination tells me that it isn't quite this simple.
I wish I could say something constructive, something about a panacea or partial solution to what this woman experiences while posing as a child. I know that VPNs, Tor, Proxies and the like will hide the determined, but I wish that something could be done about this.
Oh, and for those of you who may feel the need to say "don't let kids on the internet". That's almost impossible to enforce. Kids visit other kids houses, sleepovers, libraries, schools, etc etc. They get exposed to this stuff and it's horrible.
Using these chats to train machine learning corpus on child grooming is a great idea too. Social networks could use that data trivially and at very low cost by having parents opt-in to having their childrens' communications automatically monitored and alerting the parents when a conversation trips a threshold.
You've got to figure anyone harassing children on open channels isn't exactly a master criminal and will get caught sooner or later anyway. But harm done is substantial so you want it to be sooner, not later.
A fair warning to those who haven't read the article yet but are planning to: Be warned that it contains very explicit elements, not for the feeble of heart.
The idea behind the disucssion/story was that pedophilia (the desire) is a condition (like any other we treat; alcoholism, depression, etc). Treating it like that, looking for ways with the urge to avoid hurting people, was a reasonable approach. It was argued that making such fictional items illegal hurt, rather than helped, children; because it took away non-harmful outlets for the desires.
Because we've saturated our society with messages telling them this is how to be popular and successful.
Trying to put a label on these people will make you overlook the ones who don't fit.
I am well aware that terrible stuff happens on the World Wide Web and it may well be that Bark was legitimately founded to stop that stuff, but as a natural skeptic I'm at least a tad concerned that this is self-published by a company that sells a service to catch these kinds of activities.
Were there no journalists interested in covering this story?
Is Bark profitable?
SESTA doesn't help here because of 'knowingly'.
I buy the argument that 'without section 230, ISPs wouldn't exist.' I hate my ISPs specifically but in general I think internet access is a social good.
But I don't feel the same way about instagram, or even the AOLs and compuserves that existed when this law passed. Rewrite this so that it protects ISPs but not social platforms. 'Without this exemption, FB has to charge its users so they can afford moderation' is a fine compromise for me.
You want some faceless moderator at Facebook/Google to read all your private messages and look at all your stuff? I don't think you've thought this through.
It's about liability for public posts.
Home school the children!
Take control of the Internet (firewall and DNS) and don't allow access to social media or a smart phone until appropriate age.
Teach the children about these problematic issues so they actually understands why they can't have free access to a smart phone, and what's really bad about the Internet. Make them understand these issues!
Make contact to other people who do the same and let the children's social contacts be with like minded people in real life.
We, and several other families, have done that, and are still doing it, with great success.
When I was young, I was cautioned against giving away personal information like my age or any personal photos. What happened to that mindset?
Obviously, nobody should let their 11 year old child make an instagram account. It isn't even permitted by the terms of service.
I grew up using internet with zero parental supervision, but there's no way I could do the same with my kids until they're at least 16 and capable of recognizing danger. Hell, you can get into plenty of trouble on the internet at age 16 too. Social media has made the internet a worse place.
Seemed to me to happen right around when Facebook got popular. When it was college-only a real identity didn't seem that big a deal, since you were linked with people you already kind-of had access to, and anyone who could see who you were you could also see who they were. But then when it went public the dam broke - hundreds of thousands of people suddenly unmasked on the public internet.
This is serious and naturally the extreme proposed solutions are all flawed, yet we as a society ought to spend more energy managing and ultimately solving this. (Education of kids about exploitation, better tech solutions to prevent these messages reaching them - reputation systems on social media sites - for establishing contactability for both senders and recipients. Long term probably some serious genetic engineering to make consentability a must for sexual attraction, and whatever out of the box ideas are out there.)
There is something about the online world that blurs red lines.
p.s having said that, this post is beneficial from educational perspective partly because it is explicit and disturbing. It shows exactly what it is we as society want to uproot.
You think this hasn't been tried? These guys are not like you or me, they are severely lacking in empathy. They feel no aversion whatsoever to engaging in predatory behavior on fellow humans, including kids, as a matter of basic temperament. You can prevent them from becoming predators only by providing clear consequences for such behavior, and an appealing alternative for them to choose instead. (The latter is why smart people don't tend to become predators of this sort - they have other ambitions, whatever those might be.)
That is absolutely disgusting. It is heart wrenching and stomach turning to read this exchange of messages. I guess I knew this kind of stuff happens but to have it right in your face and read it; it is almost surreal that people are this depraved.
I don't have a clear opinion on the validity of a sting as an argument, but I suspect every large platform with a crime or fraud problem is doing some kind of counterintelligence work.
The Facebook will even helpfully provide you with the closest children around you, and help you infiltrate large groups of children, just by sending a few invites around, and being lucky to hit a few that will accept your invitation mindlessly. Then you'll get much easier way into their social circle, and easier time getting accepted by others in the social graph.
We used to laugh this off and reference the Cyndi Lauper song.
Both turned out to be professional and independent women btw.
Is all this monitoring really going to help? Or is it just going to freak parents out?
I'd rather see them go after predators actively than help AI monitor children.
Ok, so suddenly I want to say we should have no internet social media for kids. Also, internet drivers license so we can trace all these men and go arrest them and put them on a list.
A teen boy in my family had some adult man in another state sending him presents and inviting him to come visit. The mother thought it was not a problem. The father was pretty sure it was bad. I eventually convinced both of them they needed to shut this down and make sure the boy understood he was being groomed. So I know this happens. But it wasn't anything near as bad as the article describes what happens to girls.
15 is the median age of consent in the entire developed world (the US is as developed as Nigeria in sociological view). Problem solved.
