Left to Their Own Devices is brought to you by Children First Canada. This episode contains references to child sexual abuse and self-harm. Please take care while listening. This is the world of Roblox. Well, more accurately, this is a game called Adopt Me that you can play inside of Roblox. You collected pets, and then you could trade them with other people. You see, Roblox isn't just one game. It's millions of them. There's, like, role-playing games or simulator games. There's, like, pretty much everything that you can think of. Someone's probably made it into a game on Roblox. On Roblox, kids can create their own games, which, unsurprisingly, leads to some pretty weird stuff. Like, there's games and it's called, like, Bathroom Simulator. And I'm like, oh, who wants to play that? Apparently, lots of kids do. In 2020, Roblox told The Verge that more than half of Americans under the age of 16 were on the game. I'm not going to lie. I don't really get it. In addition to Bathroom Simulator, there's another game where you go around picking up dog poop. And another where you just walk on a treadmill. But kids adore Roblox. And for years, one of those kids was Nat. I would sit up till like 5 in the morning some days and literally just be playing Roblox the entire time. Part of the appeal is that Roblox combines video games with aspects of social media. You can talk to each other through the game. And if you're in a game and it's 50 people, you'll see all of those people's avatars as well and can talk to anyone. So it combines that communication and social aspect with a video game. And then I feel like you're getting both hits of adrenaline at the same time, which makes people stay on it as long as they can. Sound familiar? Given everything we know about social media, it's not surprising that a game that has adopted some of those design features has hooked more than 100 million kids. I started playing, like, non-stop. By the time Nat was 11, she was on Roblox all the time. And I'd play with, like, my siblings and my friends from school. And that was pretty much it until other people started adding me and I'd start accepting their friend requests. and that's when things kind of went wrong, I'd say. This guy messaged me and he was like, hey, check out this website. And there was a link to it and it took me to this app called Anti-Land and it was like a chat bubble with a cat face with a bandit mask. And it said install because there was no description. Like usually if you see Tinder on the app store, It's like Tinder online dating platform. But it didn't say that. It literally just said anti-land and like social media. So I downloaded it because I was like, oh, social media. Oh my God, I love it. The app asked for Nat's age. So obviously it let me in because I said my birthday was like 1955 or something like that. And then I saw all these messages coming in from like completely random people. I didn't know who they were, and they were all probably 40 or older. Before she could fully grasp what was happening, Nat had found herself in an adults-only chat room. They were, like, very explicit texts from, I mean, men, obviously. Obviously. Some of them would just be like, hey, or some of them would be, like, describing something disgusting. In her still-developing 11-year-old brain, Nat didn't realize the gravity of the situation. I used to be, like, super insecure when I was little. Like, I literally hated how I looked. Like, I hated everything about myself. I didn't like that I had a deep voice. And then all of a sudden I go on this app, and then I get all this male attention that literally I've never had before. It's just like, I don't know. Like something I've been craving for so long and then I finally get it. Even if it's from a stranger. Like in my head, it didn't matter that it was from someone I didn't know. Or it didn't matter if it was from someone that was 30 years old. Like it was still male attention. They'd say, oh, are you okay if we talk about this? and I mean, I guess I just like accepted it with like open arms and I was like, okay, yeah, sure, let's do this. At that point, I literally sent photos to probably almost everyone that messaged me and it was just like the male attention of guys going like, oh, you're so beautiful, oh, you're so pretty, blah, blah, blah. That like made me keep doing it. Nat told some of these men her actual age, that she was only 11. Most of them didn't care. Within just a few weeks, Nat had gone from frolicking in the open world of Roblox to being trapped in a chat room full of anonymous older men. It was just through Roblox that somehow stuff went sideways, which is weird because usually that's through social media and not through a kid's game. Look, there's a whole story to tell here about how gaming platforms are being weaponized by predators. But we've already spent a ton of time on this show talking about the ways online spaces are being used to exploit children. And I think, at this point, you probably get the picture. The thing is, as heartbreaking and as infuriating as those stories are, they also aren't the norm for most kids. But something else happened to Nat in that chat room that is the norm for young people today. It'd be like, hey, here's a video I think you might like. She was exposed to pornography at a very young age. I'd literally sit in my room all day and watch porn when I was, like, 11. And Nat is not alone. By the age of 11, one in four young people will have consumed pornography. And this pornography is often violent pornography. The fact of the matter is, porn is now a regular part of kids' lives. This is not something fringe. This is not something that some kids are doing sometimes, or bad kids are doing, or the neighbor's kids are doing. this is something that your kid is probably doing on the regular every day in your house. So what happens when an entire generation learns about the birds and the bees from hardcore pornography? I'm Ava Smithing. From Paradigms and the Toronto Star. This is Left to Their Own Devices. Episode 9, The Worst Sex Ed Class Ever. I remember I got grounded from my phone at one point. And I was so connected to this app that I ended up downloading it on the family iPad. And so my mom was going through it and found that app. When Nat's parents finally realized what was going on, they lost it. Like, she screamed and yelled for my dad. And then they came in and both, like, started talking to me and yelling at me. But then I think after a bit, they realized that it wasn't necessarily my fault. The app was deleted, and the phone, for a time, was taken away. I was missing that hit of people saying, oh, blah, blah, blah, or sending pictures or receiving pictures and stuff. So I started getting more into watching porn after it happened because it was just something to fill my time with. I feel like the weird thing is that I didn understand how sex actually worked until I was exposed to those videos and so I think it was like a fascination kind of like oh wow that how that works And yeah, I mean, just like kid fascination. Like you're obsessed with everything when you're little. From the teenagers that we've talked to, a lot of them are just genuinely curious. You know, like what does sex look like? This is Susie Dunn. She's the director of the Law and Technology Institute at Dalhousie University. And so they're often looking online and they're curious to figure out what sex looks like. Susie stresses that the way Nat was introduced to pornography is obviously unusual and criminal. But the fact that she was shown porn even when she wasn't looking for it, that's something that Caitlin Regehr, another researcher in this space, has seen as well. I did a project here in the UK. Caitlin is a professor at University College London and the author of a new book called Smartphone Nation. And as part of that project, we were speaking to kids about their access to pornography. And the vast majority of young people would articulate that the first time they saw pornography was not through them actively searching for it through a search engine. but rather they were experiencing something that we call porn push. And that is to say that the pornography was being pushed to them by way of things like private messenger on Instagram, that they were being pushed this pornography, and that was how they first encountered it. Caitlin was hearing from kids that they're getting porn sent to them in their DMs, from peers, from predatory adults, even from bots. And it didn't stop there. These kids also reported seeing more and more sexualized content in their social media feeds. Remember, these algorithms are built to capture our attention. And if you're a 13-year-old boy, nothing captures your attention quite like sex. The old term sex sells. That is not new, but what we are seeing is kind of a heightened version of that by way of these algorithmic processes. And that you become increasingly desensitized to it, and so things have to become more extreme. and more extreme content, when you are microdosing, that is to see you are consuming, it's not just one post one time, but rather you are accumulatively consuming huge amounts of this content on a day-to-day basis that normalizes these ideas for you. So the thing that was extreme previously is no longer extreme. So you need to be pushed towards something even more extreme. Eventually, this leads to kids seeking out porn directly. Unless they don't have a phone or access to the internet, they're probably exposed to porn. Sarah Flicker is a professor at York University who studies youth sexual health and well-being. There's literally zero barrier. You have the internet in the palm of your hand 24-7. If you want to be aroused, you can just like... Sarah says it's easier for kids to access porn than it's ever been before. Pornhub has more traffic than Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter combined. Which means kids are watching a lot more of it than they used to. So in the U.S., 71% of American teenagers reported intentionally viewing pornography in the last week. Here in Canada, a recent study found that 88% of boys and 39% of girls reported ever having viewed pornography by the age of 14. And more than half of 14-year-olds reported using it once a week or more often in the past three months. Sarah is no prude. She's the kind of mom that leaves a bowl full of condoms in the family bathroom. I'm not someone who thinks that all porn is a problem or all pornography is bad. If what teens were accessing online when they were going looking was like loving, caring, thoughtful, mutually pleasuring experiences, I might be all for it. The challenge is, I think, a lot of the porn that's out there is driven by profit, is driven from a male gaze, and perpetuates really violence and violent behavior. According to Sarah, the issue isn't that youth are watching other people have sex on the internet. It's that most of what they're watching is pretty problematic. A content analysis of Pornhub content found that one in eight titles showcase sexual violence, with verbal aggression being present in about 50% of scenes that they reviewed, and physical aggression in 88% of the scenes that they reviewed. For obvious reasons, doing research in this space is a little bit tricky. It's not ethically possible to conduct randomized control trials. Like, I can't take a group of teens and be like, you guys get an hour of porn a day and you guys get nothing and we'll see what happens in three years. You could never do it. That means it's hard to draw causal relationships between porn consumption and the effects it's having on young people. But Sarah says the correlations she's seeing are pretty concerning. We know that rough sex is also on the rise. And among sexually active college-aged women, 65% of women report experiences of choking. With 25% saying they were first choked between the ages of 12 to 17. Like really young. My daughter's 12. Look, she's almost 12. I would be absolutely devastated if in her first sexual encounters someone tried to choke her. So the Children's Commissioner report from last year, and the Children's Commissioner is a very important figure in the UK, has linked that consumption to a rise in domestic abuse within youth relationships. Caitlin Regehr is equally troubled by what she's seeing in the UK. So that means the link that is being drawn there is that young people are increasingly consuming more and more violent pornography and that is informing the way that they are having sex. And that is something we should be profoundly concerned about. Another trend these experts are noticing is that even though young people are consuming pornography at younger and younger ages, they're actually having sex much later and much less frequently than other generations. And some of the research has suggested that this is because people are too intimidated to engage in kind of the age-appropriate, you know, 16-, 17-year-old sexual practices because they feel like their body doesn't look like a pornographic body. Here's Susie Dunn again. Not that we're trying to say, like, it's, you know, we should be encouraging teenagers to all be having sex with each other, but it's an interesting stat, you know, that as these young people are getting more sexualized and getting more exposed to pornography, they're actually engaging less with each other in dating and in sexual experimentation. This, in a way, feels emblematic of how my generation uses technology more broadly. It's a lot easier to stare at your screen than it is to navigate the discomfort of the real world. Dating is not easy. It's like never easy, right? This makes sense to Sarah Flicker. It's a challenge to find someone that you feel comfortable enough with to be intimate with and vulnerable with. So is it easier to hide in your room? Like, maybe. It may be easier, but that doesn't mean it's healthier. It probably affected me from when I was 11 to 13. So, like, a long time. When Nat became one of those kids who hides out in their room watching porn it took a real toll And it made me so withdrawn from like literally everyone Like, I wouldn't talk to people or I wouldn't go out and hang out with my friends because I literally just wanted to sit in my room and watch videos all day. And I think the worst part of that is that's something that you'll always deal with, too. Like, it's not something that goes away. Just like if you had a heroin addiction and someone gave you heroin five years later, you'd be doing it all over again. So that's something, like, I definitely carry with me. And, like, that's something you'll never forget. Like, you'll never forget, like, a part of your life where you were completely addicted to something. And I feel like I lost, like, two years of my life growing up because I was, like, forced to, in a way. Last December, I left D.C. We're on the way. And headed out to Harrisonburg, Virginia. It's a Sunday, slow Sunday, and we're in Virginia, so extra slow Sunday. Not too much going on on Sundays here. Harrisonburg is a sleepy little town nestled in the Shenandoah Valley. And we're going to turn in now to Ott Street. And I came here to meet up with my old friend, Harrison Haynes. It's so good to see you. How are you doing? Doing good. How are you? Nice. I like this. The copper is definitely charging there. It's got a cool story. Okay, well, I'm excited to hear about it. Should we go inside? Let's do it. Okay. So what is this like? This is the oddage. This is a Kai Alpha Christian History guy's house. Amazing. There's six of us here. This is Mike's room. This is the downstairs kitchen. What up, Jim? How was church, man? Good. Yeah, come on. This is our ratchet downstairs. Harrison is only 22, but he's got an old soul. You called me wise once, which was like, it went straight to my head. I do think you're wise. I don't think I'm wise. He's lying. Harrison is very wise. He's soft-spoken and thoughtful and spends a lot of time pondering life's big questions. He also has a healthier relationship with technology than almost anyone else I know. My phone wakes up after me, goes to sleep before me. I parent my phone. I put it to bed like an hour, hour and a half before I go to bed, just like you would with your child. I'm obsessed with you. But Harrison wasn't always like this. His journey to get here was long and tumultuous, and he almost didn't make it. I've had a really turbulent relationship with technology throughout my life. My relationship with technology really started when I was like 11 or 12. I played thousands of hours of video games, watched like tens of thousands of hours of YouTube and videos on my phone. What role did those video games and videos play in your life? Honestly, probably an escape. I think a lot of my life I was dissatisfied with. You know, I wasn't making friends at school. I was struggling with my parents and my family. I didn't feel like we were really close. And, yeah, I just stepped out of my life a lot and stepped into the life on the screen. Just like with Nat, Harrison's love of video games eventually led to something darker. I really started playing just by myself. I played with my brother. Sometimes the neighbors would come over and we would play Minecraft. But as I got into middle school and those friendships started to die and the relationships with my family started to pull away, I started to explore playing with strangers online. Did you develop relationships with any of those strangers? Yeah, yeah. Part of my story is interacting with a stranger who would become my best friend. For the sake of the conversation, we can call him Adam. Adam was the older brother that I felt like I needed, the mentor that I wanted. That friendship, that gaping hole of friendship that nobody saw, that nobody cared about, that nobody even wanted to get near, he got really close. For the first six months of our friendship, it was completely normal. It was just, you know, are you going to be on the game? Yeah, I'll be on the game. All right, let's play. and he'd ask about my day and that was really it for the first year or half of the year. And then, you know, it slowly started to pick up. He asked for my, my iMessage. And at that point, you know, all the stranger danger rules were out the window because he's not a stranger anymore. You know, he's, he's my friend. He's my only friend. He feels like family. Right. How old were you? When it all started, 12. Yeah, sixth grade. After a while, Harrison's relationship with Adam spilled out of the gaming world and into the rest of his life He would text me at school He would text me at the dinner table He would text me before I went to sleep And for the first while it was innocent You know, it was, how was your day? You know, what are you doing? And then it slowly began to, like, sink in He would ask, you know, what I was doing, why I was doing it, why wasn't I on the game. So he said that like he was feeling lonely, he was feeling depressed, he was feeling suicidal. And all that time that I spent with my family, it felt like, you know, I spent my time with my family and he would just pull me away. I remember the hardest part of my journey was I really liked this girl at school. I just thought she was so pretty and she was so funny. And I really wanted to pursue things with her. Harrison told Adam about this girl. He knew that I had this crush. I asked how I was going. He was getting defensive over me, really, which was strange. and I didn't understand. And so he started to tell me that I was something I wasn't. He told me that I was asexual or I was bisexual or that I was gay. So he started sending me pornography to fix my sexuality. And that really kick-started a pretty downward spiral for me. The way that he was describing a normal relationship with pornography was multiple times a day. was in the morning when I got home from school. He would send me videos at night. I thought that there was something wrong with me. I thought that I was different from everyone else and that it was a problem and that it was something to be fixed. It was something to be solved. It was an issue to be conquered. And so I began consuming pornography to fix my broken or seemingly non-existent sense of sexuality. eventually because I just wanted to be normal like everybody else. How did it end up affecting your relationships? Oh, it was horrible. I mean, it was the reason why my relationships ended. I really struggled to understand my own sexuality for a long time. I felt like a broken vessel, like nothing was working. I had several relationships where porn got in the way of emotional intimacy. a lot of times that I wanted to be with my friends, I would get stuck in the cycle in the morning or in the afternoon. And it just felt like it never let up as hard as I tried. I think every day was a rock bottom. You know, every day was like, oh, today's going to be the day that I don't watch porn. You know, I'm 15, 16, 17, and I just can't get out of it. Would you call it an addiction? In high school it was horrible I mean it was I mean like I could have admitted myself It was it was awful So people who are looking to target young people online will go on these games and they'll often try and develop a trusting relationship with the person. Susie Dunn, the professor from Dalhousie, says Harrison's experience, like Nat's, is a familiar one. The thing that's so sad about it is that they finally get this validation of love and affection and relationships and then it's a poisonous thing. So then later on in their life, it also stops them and challenges them from being able to engage in really normal and healthy loving relationships. So it's like they're robbing them even more of this capacity to avoid this kind of chronic loneliness that we see of this particular group of young people. For both Harrison and Nat, The aftermath of their abuse and the porn use that stemmed from it lasted well into their teenage years. From grade, I'd say, seven to grade nine, I actually came out as gay because, I mean, it had to play a role of some sort because I'm not actually gay. But that's what I went by for two years because I didn't want anything to do with men at all. in my eyes like after being exposed to that the only thing that I thought guys were interested in was sex that's pretty much what I grew up believing right because like ages 11 to 13 are such prominent like years of your life that if you're if you're forced to start believing something else and that's what you're going to believe for a long time. So, I mean, I just completely avoided it altogether. As legislators begin to grasp just how ubiquitous porn has become for young people, some of them are starting to do something about it. 21 U.S. states have implemented age verification laws for websites containing adult content. A state lawmaker is now shifting is focused to pornography in Oklahoma. He wants to make it totally illegal in our state. He calls it pure cancer to the soul. GOP Senator Mike Lee is focusing on what really matters. He has proposed a bill dubbed the Shielding Children's Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net. The United States Supreme Court has upheld a Texas law that requires pornographic websites to conduct age verification of its users. But the jury is still out on whether or not those will work. Many foreign-owned porn sites aren't complying with the laws. And teenagers are getting around the ban by downloading VPNs, which let them appear as if they're accessing the sites from a different country. Others worry that these bans could be used to censor non-pornographic content, including information about birth control and sexual identity. Still, Caitlin Regehr says that this kind of regulation is worth pursuing Rules matter You know, I think that there's sometimes a discussion of Well, like, kids will get around these things Yeah, they will, of course, they always have But rules are how we kind of structure our society Susie Dunn, on the other hand, isn't so sure There's that generational gap where so many people did not grow up with that access to pornography. And I don't think they recognize that a lot of their kids are looking at pornography and they just want to maintain that abstinence-only education, which is the same thing we used to do with physical sex and it never worked. That's what led to high rates of teen pregnancy, that, you know, like it never worked. Like this abstinence model for digital sexual education is just ineffective. So the efficacy of these laws is up for debate. But there was one thing that all three experts we spoke to agreed on. As wildly uncomfortable as it might be, we need to start talking to kids about porn. What I recommend we do is that we have discussions with young people about this. I use the Marvel analogy. I like to think of superhero films. and that we know that those are pretend and you tell young people that that's pretend so that they don't jump off of rooftops. And I think what we really need to be doing is framing pornography as a performance and doing that very clearly and saying that it is not reflective of the vast majority of healthy, consensual, loving, supportive relationships. All the research that I have done, all the research that I've read, the best thing that you can do for kids is make sure that they have trusting, loving relationships with nonjudgmental people who have their back. If we don't talk about it in schools and we don't talk about it at home, then Pornhub gets to be the only source of information and education that these kids have. And that is an unmitigated disaster. This terrifies me. It terrifies me both as a mother of a daughter and what this will mean for her growing up and dating in this world. And it also terrifies me as a mother of a son who, God forbid, he learns from watching this that this is OK to treat partners this way. I think it really starts with that night. Before we go, I need to tell you how Harrison's story ends. I'm almost 14. School's hard. Relationships are hard. My family's difficult. And I have no sense of community. And I decide that I'm going to take my life. I had planned this suicide for multiple weeks. It wasn't really serious until it came up to the day. And everything just hit me. It felt like the weight of 1,000 pounds was on my shoulders. And I decided that it was it. I was done. I prayed for the first time in my life and I told the universe you know when you're a kid and you're like God if you're real show me a sign I said you know the universe if you're real and you care about me and there's something bigger for me then tell me because I don't want to leave my parents I don't want to say bye I had written them a poem and it wasn't done yet I had another line and it was like 3 in the morning and I had fallen asleep and I had a vision and a dream that changed my life I mean it absolutely changed my life That dream would set Harrison out on a new path I had a reason to be alive because I had something to discover. Ever since that moment, Harrison's been on a mission to reclaim his life, to break free from the technologies that almost destroyed him. There are thousands of generations inside of our bones that have experienced the beauty of humanity that we are missing out on, that technology is robbing us of. But he's not just doing it for himself. He's doing it for our entire generation. I don't think that this is an end-all be-all solution for the next generation, but I do think it's a healthy start. That's coming up on the final episode of Left to Their Own Devices. Left to Their Own Devices is hosted and produced by me, Ava Smithing. The show is written, produced, mixed, and sound designed by Mitchell Stewart. Our story editor is Kathleen Goldhart. The executive producers for Paradigms are James Millward, Helen Hayes, Taylor Owen, and Mitchell Stewart The executive producer for the Toronto Star is J.P. Fozo
