Internet help

Dear NAS38635,

As well as the useful advise our community users have provided, you may also like to contact our Autism Helpline team who can provide you with information and advice . You can contact the team via telephone on 0808 800 4104 (Monday to Thursday 10am to 4pm, Friday 9am to 3pm). Please note that the Helpline is experiencing a high volume of calls and it may take a couple of attempts before you get through to speak to an advisor. Alternatively, should you prefer to send a message, you can do so via their webform:

https://www.autism.org.uk/services/helplines/main/questions.aspx

Kind regards,

Ayshe Mod

I've been thinking (worrying) more on your post.  Regarding the searching towards girls and not women, only you can guess the depth of the issue?

If you were supported by a local autism group they might be your first port of call? 

Don't forget you can always have a talk with your GP?  Book a double appointment so you are not rushed.  This is a safeguarding issue primarily for your son because he is vulnerable (as are the people he might be watching).  If the GP feels it necessary, they might be able to suggest/involve other services.  My understanding is that GPs will be sympathetic and will involve other services/professionals that are sympathetic (usually a wing of social services). 

My understanding is that although he is an adult (18+) he is still eligible for all sorts of support, help and education until the age of 25.  I think it is very important though that you explain his legal position.  He could be led down all sorts of dark and illegal trails with internet click bait.

Maybe a simple DVD player and a range of DVDs (Amazon have loads of porn DVDs, I see) might suffice? In his bedroom. Private time.

NB: I am really not promoting porn and loath the idea of supporting the porn industry by buying DVDs but I would do this if I needed to protect my son.

This is a serious issue.  I was just thinking that it might be worth getting back to basics or behind the issue with some TED Talks.  I agree with putting computers in communal areas. Unfortunately, we have had to lie about this in the past and say a computer has 'broken' to get it out of a bedroom area and back into a communal area.

Just a thought, how about some TED Talks about sex to try and get back on track?  You'd need to see if they are appropriate first ~ https://www.ted.com/topics/sex

NAS38635 said:

and the search is starting to go towards girls rather than women.

...As well as DongFeng5's very detailed advice... considering the quote above, this may be going off from Porn and onto something strictly Illegal... I am not certain if it can be discussed here, but it may going onto so-called Paedophilia... Viewing or keeping Pictures of children undressed is the illegal part. I am not all that good at Internetting either, and so all I could find about it was this:

www.relate.org.uk/find-your-nearest-relate

"Relate"... is a charity which offers Family counselling. But the first step should be to mention ALL of what you say to your own GP, since they will know of local services relevant to where you are and should know something about yourself and your family anyway. Again, I apologise for replying yet not offering more help, for this "Illegal" topic is a very obscured topic upon the Internet.

The problems with filters/controls are:

1) You start blocking the nasty stuff, but then you have to look at the nasty stuff to know it's nasty

2) so you delegate to parental controls on your router, but as fast as they list a new nasty site, others will be created. 

3) despite a perfect (impossible, see 2) list of nasty sites, he regains access by getting his web traffic via a proxy. So you block the proxy, only for him to find another...

4) Now you've realised that trying to blacklist the stuff you don't like is futile, so you take the while-listing approach. He can only see sites which are deemed safe. 

5) He wants to look at something blocked by default, which is otherwise safe. This happens a lot, and the need to continually bless access to every little site gets tiresome, particularly when each website gets some of its assets from numerous other addresses. A prime example of this is the VAST set of addresses which Google Chrome feels the need to access as a matter of routine. 

6) Many parental controls are buggy. Mac OS X is an absolute joke. You tick boxes, only for it to forget your settings. Also see 5). 

7) Suddenly, you realise that some of the innocuous-looking sites have hidden doors into pornographic areas. The sites you've been approving are merely the facade. Block everything, then go back to 4) and look in detail at all the sites before approving those you are confident of. 

8) Even though you've been blocking his access at layer 2 by filtering his requests from the relevant source MAC address, you belatedly discover that he's bought a £20 WiFi card with some money he's scrimped from loose change lying around the house, or an odd job or two he's done outside the home. The cheap wifi card presents a different MAC address to the router, bypassing the filtering. 

9) You remortgage your house to spend on the best filtering available worldwide. Then you find out he's been using a cast off smartphone from someone he knows. He's been getting his web fix in pubs, cafes, supermarkets...

Song said:

parental controls

...Thanks, Miss Song, this is another Term which I meant, but forgot.

I can only agree with DongFeng above, if he is developmentally as a thirteen year old you need parental controls at the very least on his internet. 

Keeping his pc in the family room is a great idea. I

I would also try and find out about the wedgies, is he being attacked in this way somewhere?

I support this answer, since it is extremely perspicacious... I would not have connected "wedgies" with trying to find out more about Bullying, because the person is Male, and then goes on to look at Girls/Women, connected with Porn, which is a different direction.

To NAS38635... I would have suggested the supervision, though. And the restricting - AGE RESTRICTION - it is called, to certain sites, and if you are in charge of the Internet, there should be settings to restrict the age rating to below 18 which might eliminate access to a lot of Pornography.

Sorry I cannot help more than that, I sort of have a similar problem, but the Internet I use is not my own...

I don't see that you can give someone with a developmental age of 13 access to the internet by himself in a safe and responsible way. You wouldn't let him go hitchhiking or backpacking, right?

In our society many people don't properly mature until their 20s these days. 

The only long term option is to actually sit with him whilst he uses the internet. Move the PC into the main family room, and use a block of some kind to prevent access when you are unable to supervise.

Videos about wedgies are presumably because he is being bullied, or has been threatened with an atomic wedgie because he has been identified by his peers as different.