I really should stop idly web surfing and get on with some housekeeping. But before I do I should make a note of something that I encountered on another site that i waste a lot of time on, Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/news
This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »
Heard on the radio that the police in the UK have issued a warning and guidance to teachers regarding sextortion of teenagers.
‘It can happen to any child’: parents of sextortion victim send out warning
Ros and Mark Dowey, whose son Murray took his life after being duped by criminals online, are calling for greater awareness and social media regulation
Teachers warned to be on lookout for victims of sextortion
I don't want to minimize the impact that sextortion can have, it's plainly devastating for the victims and their families. But how does anyone get into such a state. As far as I can tell the pictures concerned are merely, or mostly merely, nudes. So why would anyone feel suicidal over the fear of being exposed? Of course it's seriously embarrassing but surely not the end of the world?
Or is the explanation that sextortion attempts are actually much more widespread than even the people investigating it think and that many of the intended victims just realize that they have been duped and just treat it as an embarrassment but nothing more. But if it's so widespread then just by chance some of the victims will be a little more fragile, less self assured.
I think that children, people in general really, need to be taught how to spot scams and also to be helped to build greater self confidence. Perhaps then the scammers would just be laughed out of existence.
I haven't heard of this being such a big problem in other countries and I wonder why. Is it simply that English is a language available to the scammers whereas Norwegian is not or is it that teenagers in other countries are less likely to fall for it. If so why?
@ninalanyon It's far easier as an adult of a certain age to shrug off the threat of nudes being posted.
Teenagers are far more easily affected by such things, they aren't usually as comfortable in their skin as adults, I remember being that age and I think most of my peer group would've been hugely bothered by such a threat even though the pressure to look "perfect" was no near as great back then. At that age such a thing can easily feel like the end of the world and they've yet to properly learn techniques to stop them from acting on impulse in quite the same way as adults have.
It's an age you are often desperate for the approval of your peers but with all the airbrushed, cosmetically enhanced people they have rammed down their throats these days very few of em are really truly comfortable clothed never mind naked.
They also have the worry of how it might affect them in terms of future prospects too.
@ninalanyon Don't Scandinavians - along with the natives of many other countries - learn English early enough to grasp criminal threats written in English, probably in Africa or the Far East?
Teenagers tend to be very anxious about their bodies and development, relationships and so on, are still largely under parental and school control and even more so under peer control, while trying to think about their future lives.
They are also more likely to be incautious and naive than more mature people about anything hazardous, including the Internet, so more likely to fall prey both to pressure to engage in unsafe messaging between themselves, and to the criminals.
The origins of the threats should be traceable, but even if the evidence and URLs are reported to the authorities in the attackers' countries concerned there is little or no guarantee that any action will be taken there. Meanwhile the social-media sites need be far stricter and responsive: it's no good merely deleting posts as they bleat about doing. They need report, and permanently ban, those wilfully using the sites for criminal, bullying, suicide-encouraging or other wrong-doing purposes.
Don't Scandinavians - along with the natives of many other countries - learn English early enough to grasp criminal threats written in English
Yes, of course. But I imagine that the criminals might think that the succes rate might be lower simply because starting the conversation would be more difficult.
It's hard to tell from media reports about these sorts of scams because they never describe the details. I suspect that the scammer tries to pretend to be part of the same society as the victim and that is surely much easier if you can do it in the victim's mother tongue. For minority languages like the Scandinavian ones this is much harder than for English. However with ChatGPT and similar tools this might be changing.
But what I also meant was that my experience of having children grow up in Norway is that Norwegian teenagers seem much more self assured and, for want of a better word, grown up than British teenagers. When we visited the UK with our children on holiday they remarked on how childish English children of their ages were.
I wonder if this self-assurance would help at least some of the potential victims see through the scam.
that cultural difference. I wonder why it happens?
Norwegian children are taken seriously, treated as people with opinions that should be listened to. Most children here go to barnehage from a very early age (usually at the age of about two) where socialisation and cooperative behaviour is the whole point. There are no lessons but lots of outdoors activity including getting wet, muddy, and cold plus indoor activities that include being read to, helping lay tables, etc. They learn how to keep the indoor spaces clean even though the playground might look like a recreation of the Somme after a few months of winter rain and snow.
I live less than a hundred metres from a primary school and the junior high school is just another hundred metres beyond that. A few hundred children walk past my front garden every day yet I hardly ever hear any noise above normal conversation.
I'm not sure I would want to live so close to two schools in the UK even if only because of the noise and traffic..
@ninalanyon I live near three schools from Infants to Secondary, and the only noise is from the Primary School playground at play-time and dinner-time. Some shouting between the upper school pupils, especially the boys, on their way home. Not really that much of a problem. Rather that than unnatural hush.
The traffic though... yes you have a point there.
A few years ago some woman from London bought a cottage in a West Dorset village then went running to complain when the local Infants' School introduced some strange practice of letting the little darlings have ten minutes or so of noisy letting off steam at the start of the school day.
What was this woman's work?
Being noisy: standing on a stage and singing Very Loudly and Incomprehensibly.... as an opera-singer.
