Observations, the words of advice, from a school instructor here, on the news of the teen riding up all the way to the top of the island to meet someone she met off of the online games, off of the Front Page Sections, translated…
As school started, the biggest wish for all the teachers is that all the kids come to school safe and sound, and yet, there are, always, those cases. The children who are still in vacation mode, are okay, what worries me is like the girl in the news, that worried her parents, and her school instructors so. I think this is a good time, for me, to teach students how to keep themselves safe, to help them realize, just how, dangerous the online world truly is, how to, gain that sense of danger when they’re, interacting with someone online.
for all we know…this can be, WHAT we’re, talking with online…
First of all, the online world is, unreal, the photos you see on those profiles, may not be the person, the identities, the age, the occupation, even the sex, all of these, can be false and made up. I understand that most teens cared too much about their privacy, that they wouldn’t, tell their parents about the contacts they’d made online to the parents, but, I’d told my students, that they need to have, at least, two close friends in class, who can offer you the helping hand when you need.
And, if you’re, meeting out with someone you met online, do NOT go there alone; and if you must go, do have a companion. Especially, this, is too dangerous, I kept warning my students, that with a computer screen between them and someone else, do NOT trust whoever’s on the other end so easily; other than the first-time parents who saw their fetus on the sonograms will believe what they’re seeing would, everything else, IS fake!
What saved the adolescent female from after being taken, was how she’d stayed calm during her time of being taken. But, if before it happened, you can have that sense of awareness, that sense of danger, that careful, then, maybe, she would’ve, avoided this, accidental trip in her life.
In the end, I’d left a final thought for my students, when a stranger gives you an uncalled for gift, they may have alternative motives, there’s NO free meals in this world, don’t fall for whatever the contacts are offering to you, what you wanted to own, and go and meet up with them. There’s, this lacking in training our teenagers on safety online, other than instilling the academic knowledge, helping the students to gain that sense of awareness of the dangers lurking around them, is a must too!
And so, this is still due to the teenager’s “invincibility fable”, that nothing CAN and WILL happen to me mindset, that’s, made them easy victims, because they don’t have the foresights yet, and because they need to touch that fire to get burned to realize: holy @$%^ this is hot, but sometimes, getting burned means, you lose, everything that is what you used to be, like this young teenager who was, taken, who went up north to meet someone unknown, and even IF the man didn’t do anything to her yet, she’s still, damaged in the psyche by the experiences to a certain degree.