A mother can teach her daughter every internet safety lesson she was given growing up and still discover that the world has changed underneath those l
A mother can teach her daughter every internet safety lesson she was given growing up and still discover that the world has changed underneath those lessons.
Photo by Chad Madden
“Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t give out your address. Don’t get into anyone’s car.” Tell me if an adult makes you uncomfortable.
Good lessons. Keep them.
But today’s child may encounter someone using a false identity, an altered photograph, synthetic sexual imagery, disappearing messages or technology capable of producing convincing material in seconds. And the child may be fifteen or seventeen, not seven. We sometimes speak about protecting “children” while quietly imagining only little ones, even though older children remain children too. Adolescence brings growing independence without magically supplying an adult’s experience with manipulation.
Grooming did not begin with AI. That is precisely why our prevention work must go deeper than blaming technology.
1. Remember that the human problem came first.
Adults manipulated children before smartphones existed. Groomers used attention, gifts, secrecy, affection, threats, pornography, isolation and gradual boundary crossing long before anyone had heard of generative AI. Remember how those vans started being used in the 1970s? And are still used today?
Technology did not put that darkness into human beings. Innovation can, however, magnify human failings. It can make old behaviors faster, easier, more private, more convincing and harder for children to recognize.
If we misunderstand the beginning of the problem, we will misunderstand its solution.
2. Avoid leaving older children out of child protection.
A teenager may look grown. She may travel independently, date, work, drive or know considerably more about technology than her parents.
She is still developing.
Someone who targets a sixteen-year-old may use different tactics than someone approaching an eight-year-old. Grooming can masquerade as romance, sophistication, opportunity, mentorship or finally meeting somebody who “understands.”
Our safety language has to grow with our children.
3. Learn new language instead of relying on old warnings.
Parents once learned “stranger danger.” Today’s families also need to understand grooming, sextortion, sexual deepfakes, synthetic imagery, impersonation, location sharing and technology-facilitated abuse.
We do not learn these words because we want frightened children.
We learn them because naming a tactic makes it easier to recognize.
4. Teach children without making them responsible for stopping adults.
Children need information, but prevention cannot become another assignment we hand them.
Don’t click this. Don’t send that. Don’t trust this person. Check your privacy settings. Protect your photographs. Watch your location.
Eventually we have to look up from the child’s screen and ask what adults are doing.
Parents, platforms, schools, lawmakers, clinicians, researchers and communities carry responsibilities children cannot.
5. Make prevention more than a side issue.
For generations, enormous resources have gone toward responding after children have been harmed. Investigation matters. Prosecution matters. Treatment for Survivors matters enormously.
But prevention deserves that same seriousness.
We need better research, earlier recognition of concerning behavior, effective treatment for people seeking help before offending, stronger institutional boundaries and adults prepared to intervene before suspicion becomes tragedy.
Prevention is not the warm-up act for child protection.
It is child protection.
6. Develop an intolerance for excuses, whoever is making them.
Child abuse conversations can quickly become tribal. People point toward another political group, religion, race, community or institution and ask who is worse.
Meanwhile, a child disappears from the center of the conversation.
Protecting children requires enough moral backbone to confront harm among strangers and among our own. No community’s reputation should require a child’s silence.
7. Change the child-safety mindset.
We cannot watch children every second, nor should we try to build childhood into permanent surveillance.
Vigilance must mean something larger.
It means learning what our parents never had to learn. It means recognizing new methods without forgetting old patterns. It means deciding what adults will tolerate around children and what we will not. It means getting better at treatment, research, intervention and accountability while refusing to confuse understanding with excuse-making.
Our parents prepared us for the dangers they understood.
Now it is our turn.
The technology will keep changing. The language will change with it. Grooming may acquire new tools, new disguises and new doors through which to enter.
But our responsibility is older than every machine we have ever built.
Children should not have to become more sophisticated about predators simply because adults became more sophisticated at building technology. We must become more sophisticated about protecting children.