The true extent of our digital crisis and what needs to be done

This blog contains some frightening statistics that may be hard to read however as parents and educators, we need to be aware of the harm that is occurring in the digital world. As I am an eternal optimist, I believe that together we can do better to protect our children and teens online. We can create a safer world.

Here are some stats that my Ctrl+Shft colleagues and I have compiled.

• In the last two years, three 12-year-olds in Australia have ended their lives as a consequence of online bullying, one in the last month. Cyberbullying complaints to the eSafety Commission have nearly tripled in five years. In 2024, there were 3,000 verified reports, with 35% targeting ages 12–13, often involving threats or self-harm inducement. No more.
• eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said reports of sexual extortion to eSafety had increased by over 1,300% since 2018, indicating decisive action was needed. No more.
• Some estimate that every second, at least 2 images/videos of child sexual abuse are shared online. No more.
• Self-harm has risen – often encouraged in online groups. (Recent figures from the Australian Government’s Growing up in Australia: Longitudinal Study of Australian Children estimate that one in four girls and one in 10 boys are self-harming). No more.
• Nearly half of children between the ages of 9-16 experience regular exposure to sexual images. According to some sources, the average first age of exposure to pornography is 11 years, with 100% of 15-year-old males and 80% of 15-year-old females reporting that they have been exposed to violent, degrading online pornography. No more.
• Deep fakes are increasing — reports about image-based abuse including deep fakes from people under the age of 18 have more than doubled in the past 18 months, according to the eSafety Commissioner. No more.

As a society we must stop the digital harm happening to our kids. Giving kids devices without real consideration of the potential consequences has been one of the worst ever social experiments.

Big Tech is focused on making huge profits and while it knows the harm it causes – it doesn’t care. So, we need to care more and we need to step up and do more.

The upcoming ban of social media for under 16s in Australia will certainly help make it harder for our precious kids to access harmful content. However, it is not enough. Current digital education – often a once-a-year talk in schools – is not enough anymore, no matter how excellent the educator is. The harms are growing rapidly and AI is partly responsible.

Digital education needs to be ongoing in our homes and schools well before we give our kids laptops and tablets for educational purposes. School digital security needs to be monitored for gaps as some digital harm happens on devices in supposedly digitally safe schools.

Parent digital education also needs to be more accessible and in alignment with students’ digital education and regularly updated according to new risks. Many parents I speak to have not heard of deep fakes or don’t know what they are.

I have joined the CtrlShft coalition to help us do all of these things better: to prevent digital harm, and work with navigating harm when it occurs. CtrlShft.global is working collaboratively and at scale with schools and employers to build a safer digital environment for our children and our teens.

Some more concerning statistics:

Prevalence of Online Risk

• 64% of Australian teens reported experiencing some form of online risk in 2024, including cyberbullying, misinformation, hate speech, and threats of violence

 

Exposure to Harmful Content & Negative Experiences

• 32% of Aussie children reported encountering sexual or violent content online; 49% said they felt scared or upset by content on their phones (source: com)
• 44% of 12–17-year-olds had experienced negative online interactions in the last 6 months: 30% contacted by strangers, 15% threatened or verbally abused.
• 80% had seen potentially harmful content in the past year; 67% faced hurtful behaviour; 31% encountered hate speech; 25% faced threats of physical harm Source: gov.au.

According to the Sexual Harassment of Teachers Survey (SHoT survey), 46.9% of respondents have experienced sexual harassment within a school environment. 47.9% of women (93.9% of respondents) indicated that they had personally been sexually harassed. Overall, 80.6% of teachers who personally experienced sexual harassment at school, were harassed by a student.

Sexual harassment has increased in our schools and the blatant disrespect towards girls and female teachers is largely the product of boys watching content online that promotes the ‘manosphere’. Porn is everywhere online and it is often degrading, violent and uses women as objects to be used and abused by men.

Respondents to the SHoT survey reported students mimicking sexual acts they had seen in pornographic content, making sexual propositions, and making rape jokes and threats.

It can get pretty dark in the digital world…

As my Ctrl+Shft colleague, Kirra Pendergast, has written on her blog:

“Sexual extortion is the fastest-growing cybercrime against children worldwide. It often begins on the apps they use every day: Instagram, Snapchat, and Discord. It doesn’t discriminate by postcode or personality. Victims include boys and girls. Kids who are outgoing and kids who are private. Kids who trust easily, and kids who just want to be liked. Some of them survive the shame. Some don’t. Too many have died before anyone ever called it what it was.”

Some online content is beyond horrific and yet our kids are being exposed to it, often accidentally.

“Children are seeing torture, beheadings, extremely degrading depictions of women and a level of violence that children are not meant to see. They are being desensitised! When it comes to boys they’re being radicalised online, fed misogyny, from the likes of Andrew Tate, and they’re sharing dangerous content with each other. They’re learning callous, brutal ideas about masculinity.” — Collective Shout

I am regularly learning about new forms of harm that are equally alarming. Kirra, again, wrote about this on her blog recently – a Discord server that became a place of digital torture and cruelty.

764 was more than a server. It was a digital dungeon, a theatre of cruelty, a place where abuse wasn’t hidden but celebrated. The name itself was a nod to the ZIP code where Cadenhead (the creator) lived. Local violence turned global. It began with sharing images, then escalated. Members of the group would lure vulnerable girls, and sometimes boys, into video chats. Then they would extort them. Cut yourself. Undress. Show us pain. Perform, or else.

764 has seen young teenagers in Australia displaying all the same patterns that parents have reported to the Police. Girls, mostly engaged in secretive chats with strangers online. Sudden disappearances, running away self-harm, refusing to believe it’s not love. Every textbook sign of coercive control, except the controller is behind a keyboard. There’s no “boyfriend”. Just an IP address. And behind it, someone who knows exactly how to make a teenager feel seen, wanted, dependent — then destroy them piece by piece.

Researchers have already warned us. In 2022, a peer-reviewed study in JAMA Pediatrics found that exposure to violent or sexually exploitative content online is associated with increased risk of both victimisation and perpetration in adolescents. The study emphasised that platforms are not neutral environments.
— Kirra Pendergast, The Children of 764, ctrlshift.global

And then there is the link between social media use by teens and mental health…

In 2022 a group of UK psychologists and neuroscientists, analysing longitudinal data on 17,400 young people, found that young girls experience a negative link between social media use and life satisfaction when they are 11 to 13 years-old and young boys when they are 14 to 15 years old.

In the Australian context, Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children – a partnership between the Department of Social Services, Roy Morgan and the Australian Institute of Family Studies, showed that increased frequency of social media use was associated with elevated symptoms of depression and anxiety.

“In addition, Dr Danielle Einstein highlights that ‘depression and anxiety invariably improve when social media use is restricted’ and ‘the unhealthy, addictive element of social media are the notifications, and that is what leads to overuse. This element can cause children to ignore face-to-face interactions in the playground or after school and instead turn to online interactions. And yet, mental health at a young age is built by a multitude of face-to-face connections. The bill [to banning social media for under 16s] will improve the environment for a majority of young people’.” — Collective Shout.

The results are in: digital harm is happening. What can we do to help?

Firstly, we need to acknowledge the hard work of Julie Inman Grant. The e-Safety Commissioner has announced an imminent crackdown, forcing big tech to clamp down on restricting children from accessing porn, violent videos, and content which promotes disordered eating a self-harm.

Big Tech could change the algorithms tomorrow that would protect our children. our teens and many adults from digital harm. However, they continue to choose profits and simply don’t care. So, while we can hold hope, the reality is big Tech continues to behave unethically and irresponsibly, and our kids will continue to be harmed if they are allowed unfettered access. That access will become more difficult after December, however we need a time of transition to prepare those who are in a digital world, to know how to live a different version of the digital world.

We live in a digital age. I am writing this newsletter on my laptop several hours’ drive from my home office. Obviously, our kids will need to use technology but it’s our role to raise them to be responsible digital citizens without them being harmed so much that it compromises who they are.

Much harm online comes in the form of intentional and unintentional attacks on other individuals or groups. Some of it is relational aggression and some of that is bullying. They both hurt.

Connection IRL is the key to prevention…

Last week I sent a submission into the Federal Government’s Anti-Bullying Rapid Review urging them, among other things,  to address some of the fundamental issues within our education system that make it so much harder for teachers today to create an environment of connectedness and safety. We can’t keep doing what we’re doing.

Serious and prolonged bullying leaves scars for life.  The modern world is contributing to the problem with busy, time-poor and often economically-pressured parents, children playing less outside and with each other, and having access to social media and too much time online. Many of today’s children are couch potatoes, hurried and over-scheduled in many ways and this causes a heightened sense of stress and stressed children are more prone to being bullies or victims. Stress causes dysregulation and that means less ability to make sound decisions because the executive brain is off-line.

Children need adults to keep them safe at home and school, and maybe this is where the problem really begins. The adults aren’t there with them in their digital worlds. They are in the real world.

We are a social species and we are meant to be connected in systems like families, schools, neighbourhoods and communities to ensure the safety of everyone. We need to claim our children back from the digital world. Together we need to provide the opportunities that allow children to grow in ways that build social and emotional capacity, physical wellbeing and psychological strength.

The two biggest threats that can happen to humans are to be rejected from the tribe and to appear weak, because biologically this would mean death.

Our ancestors and we humble humans today are instinctually wired to survive before we can focus on being happy or clever. This instinctual behaviour still happens. To feel unloved and powerless means to feel rejected and weak. Digital harm is doing this every day and most parents have no idea.

Bullying is extremely problematic in Australian society. We have one of the highest rates of bullying in the world. That is a national shame.

Now bullying is so much more than cyberbullying. Digital harm has been escalating since 2012 when smart phones spread across the world. Now digital harm can happen silently – a vanished name from the group chat, a deep fake nude that can create crushing shame, streaks on Snapchat that are hurtful, and a Google doc circulated among classmates spreading gossip and truths – these are just some of the examples on how kids are hurting other kids today. Even though these examples are hurtful it is debatable whether they were intentionally designed to hurt which is a key aspect of bullying. Cumulatively the harm escalates, and our kids and our teens can carry the wounds and scars for life.

As a society we need to rebuild human connectedness.

We have stolen childhood from many of our children. Play has become diminished and disrespected. Screens have created a huge displacement effect on our kids, which is impacting their capacity to develop social and emotional intelligence. Hours of play with children of varying ages and genders in outdoor environments where potential risk exists and adults aren’t supervising every move, have almost disappeared. This used to where children learnt valuable lessons that no well-meaning anti-bullying program can teach in the classroom.

Let’s reclaim our kids one tiny step at a time. Let’s reclaim dinnertime, family puzzles, shows, family movie nights, games nights.

Let’s find windows for picnics, beach trips, barbecues with friends. Let’s find the kids in the neighbourhood and prioritise catching up. Let’s ride bikes, fly kites, build cubbies, play in creeks and climb trees. Let’s cook together, garden together, make stuff together and just be together.

Let’s collaborate with our kids on how to have fun in the real world. Get our tweens and teens to work out ways to stay connected when outside of school and yes maybe talking on that dumb phone may become a thing!

Some teens have told me they are already creating private WhatsApp groups to stay connected in more direct ways. A key area of concern is for our neurodivergent kids as many regulate while online and many find their own kin online as often social skills can be tricky.

Our main aim going forward needs to be collaborative where together with our kids, tweens and teens, we work out how to guide them to become respectful, responsible digital citizens without being harmed. We can only do it together using the power of genuine human connectedness and respect.

 

Image credit: © By milkos /Depositphotos.com