Published on 12, July, 2020
I've noticed a few parents of teenagers are about and I thought I should share this.
Autistic teenagers are at high risk of being groomed on the internet. I want to say particularly girls but I have no evidence of that.
I know this because I was a victim of grooming as a teen. I didn't fit in with other girls and my parents didn't have a clue about the Internet, no ones parents have a clue what teens get up to online even if they think they do. I'd come in from school and chat to my school friends on Microsoft messenger (later MSN messenger). My mum thought I was just talking to people from school, applying to colleges and doing extra school work. I started adding friends of friends who I didn't know because they'd be included in group chats and seem nice.
I didn't realise my friends didn't always know these people. I ended up chatting to someone who I thought was my own age. We arranged to meet and he turned out to be a few years older (old enough to be creepy looking back, I was about 15, he was 20s). He made me think that I'd just misunderstood the conversation around his age. He was really nice to me though. He made me feel wanted and attractive which as the awkward, autistic teen who crept about on the edges of her peers social group he basically was telling me everything I wanted to hear.
I couldn't meet him often because my parents were really strict but he would feed me lies that I could use to get out the house. How it worked I don't know because I'm a terrible liar.
At first we'd meet in town but then he planted the idea in my head that I'd be seen somewhere where I shouldn't be and he encouraged me to go to his house as no one was home. The encounters got increasingly sexual and he eventually tried to coerce me into having sex. At this point I tried to push back (religion, god, virginity all important to me at that point) and he assaulted me. I wasn't raped, he beat me up because he was so angry that I didn't comply.
He used my social awkwardness and naivety as tools to get me to agree to what he wanted. What's important is that these are still tools being used on girls now. I'm a volunteer for a girls youth group and I have seen so many children saved from these grooming situations and some who haven't been. They were all lovely girls who were just a bit too shy, a bit awkward and in most cases coddled or had parents who their groomer could say wouldn't be supportive once he had them in his grasp.
I am convinced that my autism was a direct factor in what happened, I lacked the social awareness, the "street smarts" and basically fell victim to the first person who gave me a bit of attention. It took a big event for me to realise that I was in a lot of trouble and even if my parents were going to kill me I'd have to talk to someone about it.
I'm fine but your teenager might not be. This isn't a post to tell you to monitor your teen more or anything like that because that's insane. It's a post to warn you that one day your teen might need to open up about a huge shameful secret and you need to understand that their brain chemistry and structure has made them vulnerable to this.
The point I’m making is that if parents get so paranoid about ‘online dangers’ or their children being ‘sexualised too young’ that they try to keep them away from anything sexual they may end up doing more damage than good.
children need a bit of independence away from adult supervision as they approach their teens and beyond. Deny them that independence in the name of protecting them you may actually end up hurting them in the long run.
I befriended young girls online on the days of instant messaging; but NEVER Groomed one of them.
Guys who seem nice online to teenaged girls and want to meet up with them, are I would say, acting on their hormones. I would not meet up with anyone online, I would not privately chat with someone who I did not know well in real life, and even if I did know them in real life, if they were being weird, I'd just cut contact to them. What I mean by being weird, is if they are pressuring you onto webcam, and making exploitative remarks, gestures, and so on, that's really crossing the line. So in those cases, you are free to disengage and they will lurk elsewhere.
But like many human beings, sometimes I'm just a very clueless and naïve, because I don't expect that kind of behaviour from people, so I made a method of "storytelling" my situation to myself at the moment something is happening that does not seem right, and by doing so, I am less oblivious and more aware. I mean whenever you try to tell the situation to someone else, everything always becomes painstakingly obvious to the point that you feel embarrassed for not noticing it earlier, so I made it a habit of storytelling things to myself at the moment things are happening, so that I become aware. I call it 3rd person storytelling. It's gotten me out of a few shady situations.
I'd really hate to think that guys just talk to girls hoping to hook up with them, but it's likely that's what a majority of guys would do.
Forgive me but I want to add an opposing perspective.
I was very sheltered growing up. From sex at least. As a young boy the ‘talk’ amounted to, “penises go in vaginas, semen comes out and makes women pregnant, men can wear a plastic cap to stop the woman becoming pregnant.”
for years I thought men were fastening something like a shower hat around their penises before sex. My mind had so many questions. Does it fasten behind the balls or is it so small it sits on the end.
my parents weren’t sex negative. They just acted like it didn’t exist. If an episode of startrek I recorded got too steamy they’d literally wipe the tape before I got it.
Because they hid sex from me, when my hormones hit I felt I had to hide my interest in it from them. Not just them from everyone. When boys my age started talking about sex I wouldn’t join in. I could never seem to admit to finding girls physically attractive even though doing sexual things with said girls occupied a huge part of my thoughts.
I’d have girls friends come up and say ‘hey you’ve been hanging around X lots, do you like them.’ And I’d deny it even though I was madly infatuated with said girl. I’d sit across a table from girls in the skimpiest outfits thinking of nothing else but what the rest of them looked like. And after my parents would say ‘isn’t such and such trying some daring outfits.’ And I’d pretend in hadn’t noticed.
And this wasn’t just till I was 12-13 it went on till I was around 18-20. Only by the time I was off to uni did I have the confidence to actually admit to others that I found girls hot and would quite like to have sex with some. Unfortunately by that point I was 2-3 years older than most of the girls around me and had none of the experience of negotiating sexual attraction they did.
My point is wrapping kids in cotton wool for fear of them being exploited can backfire spectacularly.
Thank you for saying this. I was also groomed online, though mine never reached over into offline, just stayed online with different men for years and years. I'm looking for other people's experiences to feel a little less abnormal. Trying to heal even now, decades later.