The internet offers amazing things, but it also has its downsides. One of those is how it desensitizes children and provides space for child exploitation. Officer Gomez is a School Resource Officer and has first-hand experience with the ways social media and online gaming impacts tweens and teens.
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Jen: Hello and welcome to the Parents’ Place, a podcast put out by the Family Place for parents to develop skills that will strengthen families and provide tools that will help each of us in our parenting efforts. No matter our skills, we can always use reminders that help us work towards a safer, happier home. I'm your host, Jennifer Daly, the education director at the Family Place and my co-host is Sara Hendricks, a family educator at the Family Place. Every week, we will interview professionals that will provide valuable information that will make a difference when you apply it directly to your life. Thank you for joining us. Now, let's get started with today's episode.
Jen: This is part one of a two-part episode. The information shared in this episode is very important but might be too much for small children to overhear. We advise listening with headphones or in private.
Sara: Welcome to the Parents Place podcast, I'm your host, Sara Hendricks,
Jen: and I'm your co-host Jen Daley.
Sara: Words can't express how excited I am about today's guest. His name is Officer Gomez, and he's a school resource officer in the Idaho area. I'll let him give more of an introduction of himself, but I've got to say I've been following Officer Gomez on social media for a while, and he is the real deal. I stumbled across his page in my search to find resources that would help me bring a program to our valley on child trafficking and internet safety for parents, and in finding his page I feel like I've struck gold. He's right there in the thick of it. Working with students and seeing how social media and the internet affect them daily. And as a parent, it gives me a lot of peace of mind knowing there are people out there that can provide this information to help us know how to navigate all the things that trend in the schools. He has thousands upon thousands of followers and for good reason. I highly recommend his page and it's linked in the show notes for easy access for anyone that wants to follow him. Officer Gomez, it's an honor to have you on our show today.
Officer Gomez: Well, thank you so much for having me and I'm glad to have this opportunity to share some information that will hopefully help parents and kids alike. I am Officer Gomez. I am a school resource officer and I've been… I’m at my fourth school now, so I've been at middle schools, I've been high schools, I've been in big schools and I've been at small schools. I spent five years at a high school with twenty-three hundred students and that's 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grade. So that was my own little city there, but also my own little training ground. So, I was educated by the kids and the community to great detail on how these things work with social media, predators, drugs, and everything that goes along with it. And I'm happy to share that with everybody. And you'll find my contact information. You're welcome to ask me questions, and I put things on my Facebook page often so that we can help everybody out and keep everybody safe.
Sara: Yes, I love it. I love your social media page. It's such a good resource. So again, it comes highly recommended.
Jen: So, this is a topic that I'm super interested in, and I always wonder what's the most common way for predators to exploit children?
Officer Gomez: So, the most common way for predators to exploit children is on their cell phones that their parents give them. By far, that is the most common way, and it's the way of choice because predators can exploit children from the comfort of their own home, and while they're sitting right next to Mom and Dad in the car, at the dinner table, in their bedrooms. It's such an easy thing to do these days that predators don't even feel like it's a risk anymore. And especially if you get international predators or predators who are far away, they know police don't have the resources to go after them. And I myself, as a police officer, had had many reports where I've had children being exploited. But somebody in Australia or they're in Singapore or they're in Taiwan, they’re in anywhere in Africa. And, you know, even though the parents want me to get on an airplane, there's no way I have a job here. I have things to do right here in Idaho. I cannot. So definitely the most common way is through cell phones and social media, and that's something that parents should control.
Jen: That's really disturbing to me just because I have a stepdaughter that she is on her phone all the time and me as a stepmom, I really don't have much control of what she can and can't do on her phone. And so, it's just so saddening to hear that kids can fall prey so easily just through their phones.
Officer Gomez: It is, and as a stepparent, that's another challenge in it. But there's many stepparents who do it successfully. So, if you are a stepparent, you'll read some information, get some help. You know, it's usually a team thing, right? You have to talk with your partner and let's do the best we can for the kids without being in too big of a disruption to the family dynamics. But it can be done. Just you got to do it in baby steps. You got to plan it out ahead of time. And I always tell parents, Hey, look, you're playing a game against the kids and you know what their plays are. Let's plan this out.
Jen: Yeah. Good advice.
Sara: So, for me, my children are younger, my oldest is in fourth grade, and so we have not gotten into this yet. They're just barely starting to earn screen time even. They've never really had an interest in that until lately. And so, we're just barely starting to adventure into like using apps and that kind of stuff. And it's partly because of school that they use different things at school, that they want to come home and get on the internet and search up those things to do at home. And I find it super overwhelming because I'm not familiar with those things. So, can you tell us a little bit about like apps? What are harmful apps that predators use to get to children?
Officer Gomez: So, for the younger children, fourth, fifth, sixth grade, the most popular apps to exploit children is going to be Roblox and Minecraft. Those are the two up and coming that parents feel are safe because they're for kids. It's like, Whoa, there can't be predators because they’re for kids. It should only be kids on there. But I always explain to parents, Hey, if a hunter is going to go hunt deer or whatever they're going to hunt, they're going to go to the woods and hunt deer. They're not going to go to the mall to hunt deer. If a predator is going to hunt children, they're going to hunt children on children's apps. And that's what parents often don't understand that by having a children's app, it's nice that it's for children, but it also puts the kids in a perfect little prey box where predators already know, Hey, these are the kids that I want, they're going to be right in the same spot. And it's very easy for predators because they've been doing this day after day, hour after hour. They know what the kids want, they know how to go after them. Roblox and Minecraft are the two big ones for young kids. As we get older, we have Fortnite that starts to be a problem. We have Snapchat and TikTok are the worst of the worst, but also a close, you know, third on that is Instagram, which now is trying to follow in the steps of Snapchat and making disappearing images. They're making disappearing pictures. They're making things harder for parents to monitor their kids. And it makes the already hard battle much harder when these apps are more predator friendly than they are parent friendly.
Jen: I think about that, and I like I'm on Instagram, but I just scroll through things I don't know half of the things that you can do on Instagram. So, I feel like there needs to be an instruction manual for parents and all these apps. I mean, I'm a kid from the 80s, and so my technology is Atari. So, I really oh, it's just mindboggling how much these apps can do and how people interact with each other now.
Sara: So, can you dive just a little bit deeper with Snapchat and TikTok? What is it like? Why is that a predator hub? How do they get to children through those apps?
Officer Gomez: So, one of the reasons they do get to children is for the exact reason that we just heard is that a lot of parents don't understand the apps. They don't know what's going on. They can scroll through, they can see a few things, but they don't quite understand what's going on. Snapchat, in particular, has lots of disappearing messages, all kinds of things you can do with it. And kids know this and predators know this, right? So, kids know they don't even have to delete the messages it automatically deletes. So, if a parent happens to come grab the phone, they already know all those messages are deleted. They don't have to worry about it. So now that we have deleted messages, these things go out. Kids feel a little safer to send nude photos of themselves. They feel a little safer to do drug dealing. And it's a huge problem, and the kids just eat it up and they go after it over and over and over again. Tik Tok and Snapchat One of the bigger problems that happened other than disappearing messages is their desensitization to sexual content. So especially if you give young kids a cell phone at seven, eight, nine, ten, they see so much sexual content on there. And while they're seven, eight, nine, they might not care about that content. They are still seeing it. So, by the time they get 12, 13, 14, they've seen so much nudity. They've seen so much sexual content that when somebody they see or like, some ask them for a nude photo. It's no big deal because they know that half their school has already sent out nude photos. And that's just what people do. It's almost like a handshake. Hey, nice to meet you. Can I have your nudes? It's a terrible thing, and the desensitization is one of the bigger things. It's not only happening to kids, but it's happening to adults. I always explain to adults on the news these days you hear people say things that are totally disrespectful to other people. News from 10 years ago, the news anchors were without some of the most respected people around. Now they say things that I don't want my kids to hear. I don't want my kids to be like that, right? Over time, we get desensitized to things the rudeness, to pornography, to sexualization. And over time, kids get desensitized. Parents try and teach values to their kids, and parents are doing, they're doing their best. But I ask a parent, OK, how much time do you spend teaching your values to your kids? An hour a week, two hours a week, five hours a week? How much time do they get their values from social media? And most kids these days are spending between five and 10 hours a day on social media. So where are you going to get your values from? You're going to get it on social media. Same thing with texting and driving. I tell the kids twice a year. A school year. Don't text and drive. I show them this awful video. I tell them about their classmates who have died. As soon as they leave the school the message they get from every other adult near them driving is that it's OK to text and drive. I don't care what Officer Gomez said, here's what I'm seeing in real life. So, if parents spend one hour a week teaching family values and kids are spending 50 hours a week on social media, the math is easy. They're going to get their values from social media.
Jen: It's a lot of time just on social media. But then you think about, you know, you have these apps and things like that, but then you have X-Box and all of these other gaming devices that you can get online. So how dangerous are those?
Officer Gomez: They are the same exact thing. So, you know, one of the cool things I happen to see on social media this morning was the cancellation of PePe Le Pew. And then underneath that, one of the comments was, Oh, I'm glad they canceled PePe Le Pew so my kids can be safe. Now they can play their Xbox, where he burns down a hooker on the street so he doesn't have to pay her. Right? And so that's the kind of thing that we're dealing with. You were focused on these little things that don't matter. We have Grand Theft Auto. If you let your kid play Grand Theft Auto, there's no values I can teach them, ever. But let's take it a little less. Fortnite. If you look at some of the characters that are in Fortnite, they specifically make them very sexualized. Some of the female characters are crazy sexualized, right? Everything jiggles and wiggles, and this is a thing that kids get raised in this hypersexualized mode. And then real relationships aren't real anymore, right? All they're used to has this pornographic world where it's all show business when they try and have real relationships. This is a problem when they try and talk to a seventh-grade girl. This is a real problem because they don't understand it's not the same as on the video games. Right. And most kids are going to play Fortnite. They're going to play Grand Theft Auto, they're going to play Call of Duty. Those are the top three. We're killing. We're picking up hookers on Grand Theft Auto, and we're using these hypersexualized characters in Fortnite that are just ridiculous. There's no way your kids can do that and not get some value from it.
Sara: That is a really good point, and it makes me feel a little bit overwhelmed just as a parent of young children. We haven't gotten into that stuff yet, but I know that it's coming. And I imagine that a lot of kids start playing those specific games even younger than my kids are. But one thing that I know with my kids is that they play with the neighbor kids and friends from school. They'll come home and tell me of a new app that they want to try. And it's OK because so-and-so uses it. Their mom says it's OK and I have to step back and be like. But I don't know if their mom has done any research on this app to know if it's safe for kids like maybe their child fed them the same story of, well, so-and-so plays it, so it's OK. And who knows, it could be one of these apps that predators use to go after kids. And so how do parents deal with this? How do they find comfort? Because I know that if I tell my kids, No, no, no, we're not doing any of this, we're staying away from social media and from apps. And as they get older, they're going to push back and they're going to do it behind my back and then things will happen that they feel they can't tell me about because they broke the rules. And so, I just worry that they're going to get trapped, you know, and if that exploitation happens to them, they won't know how to get out of it because they feel like they can't come and talk to mom and dad.
Officer Gomez: That is a great question, and one many parents have. Usually, as I'm doing my talks, I always give them a 15-minute break halfway through. It's like anybody wants to go throw up now. You're welcome to go. But how do we keep this from happening? There's no way you're going to keep your kids away from it altogether. They're on the bus, they're at the playgrounds. People are going to cell phones. What is the right amount of cell phone time, screen time to let them have? And what is the right amount of restrictions to put on? That's a tough thing, and it's going to be up to each family. So, the best thing you can do as a family is spend family time. Teach your kids your values right. Make your kids self-worth grow by themselves. I often ask high school students, especially, you know, if they just broke up with some boy or girl and they're really feeling down on themselves and they think their life is rough. I say, Hey, what are you worth? And a lot of kids can't answer that question, but I would say 90 percent of the kids I ask cannot answer that question. What are you worth? And I'll even make it even worse. I'll say, Look, I have a dog at home. How are you better than my dog? I don't know. You're killing me, right? But that's the self-worth they have. There's no family values. There's no self-worth if you increase those. Then when kids are challenged in the in the real world or on the online world, they'll know what your values are. They'll know what they should do, they'll know what's wrong. They'll get a little pit in their stomach that says, I know this is not right, but you've got to spend time with your kids. So, you know, instead of one-hour week less, do some family activities. Let's be a model. Let's show them how we do this, and you can do that in groups. You can do that at church. You can do it, you know, join some clubs that go out and do things. I always tell parents, get some kind of a hobby that all the family can do. Picture taking, dirt biking, skiing, pedal biking, racing. Those kinds of outdoor things are nice for kids to get outdoors and get exercise. But what it really does is it gives it a parent an opportunity to be a role model for their kids and pass on their values. This is how we handle situations. This is what happens when we're challenged, when our car breaks down on the road, when we lose a race, when we have somebody who's not very polite at the fast food restaurant. These are our values. This is what we stand for. This is how we operate. That way, no matter what the challenge comes, your kids will have a way to talk about it and talk about it with you, hopefully. The other thing I always tell parents is go through news stories or go through happenings that happen in the neighborhood. Hey, look on the news, I see this kid. This happened to them. Why do we think that happened to them? Where do you think they went wrong? What do you think they were thinking? How do you think their parents would react so you can role play these things so that when it does happen, you can be much better prepared and your kids can be much better prepared?
Jen: I love that. Well, I'm just a little overwhelmed.
Sara: Well, this is good, Jen. If we're feeling overwhelmed and we deal with this stuff regularly. Imagine our listeners are feeling right now.
Jen: And I know, and yeah, it's just so overwhelming. There's just so much out there and the importance of parents in a kid’s life is, just, you can't put a price on it and parents get so busy that that goes to the wayside a lot of times. And that just breaks my heart, that kids have to deal with this. I think all the time kids just need to be kids. They shouldn't have to deal with all this other garbage. So, I just feel really overwhelmed and a little saddened right now.
Sara: So, yeah, so I want to throw in there for our listeners to the reason why we're doing this episode is because we just feel it's so important for parents to have this information and know that there's resources out there to help us through knowing which apps to use and how to keep our kids safe. Because I know for myself, once I became a mom, that all became so overwhelming to me because I know I can't keep up with the latest trends, and it's so relieving to me to know that there's people out there like Officer Gomez, who was in the thick of it and knows what trends in the schools to help us parents that we don't have to know all of it. We can turn to these resources and help us through it so that we're not feeling overwhelmed all of the time and thinking that we just have to hold our children tight and never let them out of our sight because the world isn't safe. So that's the purpose of this episode, is just to help hopefully give some relief to parents, even though this information might feel a little on the overwhelming side as well.
Jen: Education is power. So, the more we can get, the better off we are. So, Officer Gomez, what are some tactics that predators use to entice kids?
Officer Gomez: That is a great question, and it's quite easy. Number one, they pay attention to kids. Again, if you have a parent that gives their kid two hours a week of time versus a predator that gives them six hours a day of time, kids would like to have attention, right? And that's since the beginning of time. Internet or no internet. Kids love attention. With young girls, especially the predators use their yearning for wanting to be more mature. And a good example of this is I get tenth grade boys will ask an eighth-grade girl for a nude photo of themselves. And when the girl says, Hey, I don't do that, it's against my parents, my church, my religion, my everything. The boy just says, “Oh well, I thought you were more mature than that. Look me up in two years and I'd love to have a conversation with you”. And I've seen more girls fall to that line than almost anything else, right? Because they know especially young girls have been raised in a frozen world where frozen is a perfect relationship. They've watched all these movies with perfect relationships, right? Nobody talks about the bad relationships or how to get out of abusive situations. So now they want that, and now they're talking to somebody who's giving them a bunch of time. And now they're super excited. They're in love. When that boy says, Hey, I thought you were more mature than that. Look me up in a couple of years, it just destroys that, and they're willing to take a couple seconds to get naked, send pictures when they know it's against most things that they feel. The only way you're going to combat that is by talking to them about it. Hey, look, this is what boys are going to want to do. With boys, the predators use pornography, and it's super easy to use pornography against boys of any age, even adults. I see this this trick being used on them.
One good example is I get young boys 13-14 who are contacted online by a, I call them a 15-year-old hottie girl, right? How many boys are going to say stranger danger when contacted by a 15-year-old hottie girl? Zero. Right. So then hot girl after they've known each other for ever at least 15 minutes. Just hey, you're special. I don't meet people like you. Whatever goes through the whole rigmarole, I'm going to send you a picture, I want you to send me one back and the girl sends a topless picture of herself. How many boys are going to send that picture back? All of them. Then it goes on and it gets worse. And we start sextortion. And it turns out that a lot of the times it's an adult man who's just downloaded a bunch of pictures of some young pornography models, and they're using that against the kids. Right. So, they know these are the exact bait things that we need, and it's hard for kids to resist. Even when I've told them these stories, even when they see their classmates fall, they think, Oh, well, the person I'm talking to can't possibly be somebody else, right? They can't possibly be this. And I mean, these days, there's not even any qualifications for kids to become predator because they're willing to send out their nude photos in the bat of an eye and over and over and over again to people they have no idea who they are. So those are the predator tactics along with fake accounts, right for the little peeps. Seven or eight on Roblox, they just make these fake accounts that are a year or two older than the little people and they start befriending them. They start stroking their egos, they start paying attention to them. And then pretty soon, it's super easy for them to say, Hey, look in Roblox, this little widget that would take you six months or, you know, cause your mom $30 to earn. If you go on mom's iPad and Skype me without a shirt on for 10 seconds, I'll give you this widget and they do right. And those kids are not even old enough to understand any of that. All they know is, Hey, I get naked at bath time every night. Now I'm getting something cooler than a rubber ducky, and that happens over and over and over again.
Jen: I was just thinking because every time I either learn more about this, I always do go to my stepdaughter and I do say, you know, are you being safe? Are you talking to people you don't know on the places you're going? And she's always No, Jen, no, Jen. I don't do that. That's disgusting. But I feel like even though they say no, we still have to ask them on a regular basis, check in on them because those predators, they're slick, they're slimy little buggers, and they know exactly what to do and say to get these kids to do what they want them to do.
Sara: It really is quite shocking to me to hear everything that you're saying, especially with the younger children. Like, I had no idea that that's what it could look like on those online gaming apps or PlayStation, whatever that. That's how they could lure kids in to get those images and that kind of thing through that bribery of buying them a widget because mom or dad's not going to spend that money on a game, I'm sure. So that was really surprising information to me.
Jen: This concludes part one of our two-part episode. We understand the information Officer Gomez has given us might be a little bit hard to take in all at once. So, we're just going to give you a little bit of a breather. When we come back next week, Officer Gomez is going to share with us some success stories, so just know that there's some hope coming. One thing he shared with us is how important it is for us as parents to be part of our kids’ lives and to be present. This is something we fully agree with at the Family Place and we try to help strengthen families through our parenting classes. These classes are currently going and are free to the public. Anyone can come and register no matter where you live, and these classes are ongoing throughout the year. Just visit our website at thefamilyplaceutah.org to see where these classes are being offered and register. If you have any questions for Sarah or myself, you can reach us at parents@thefamilyplaceutah.org, or you can also find us on Facebook. Sara Hendricks - The Family Place or Jen Daly - The Family Place and look for Officer Gomez on Facebook as well. All links we've talked about are included in our show notes. Thanks for joining us today, and we'll see you next week for part two.
Sara: Thanks again for listening. The Family Place is a non-profit organization in Logan, Utah, with a mission to strengthen families and protect children. We call ourselves starfish throwers. If you're unsure what that means, refer back to our introduction episode where we explain it. The good news is you can be a starfish thrower too by subscribing to the Parents’ Place Podcast and liking our social media pages. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with others and help us get our message out to more people. Also, be sure to check the show notes for links to information referenced in this episode. That's all for now, but we'll catch you again next time on the Parents’ Place.
Subject Resources:
- https://www.keepkidssafeonline.org/
Contact us:
-Email us questions or topic ideas: parents@thefamilyplaceutah.org
-Record questions here: https://anchor.fm/theparentsplace
-Parent's Place FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/196037267839869/
- Officer Gomez: https://www.facebook.com/deputygomez
Music by Joystock
- https://www.joystock.org
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