Parents are shocked by an experiment that shows how easy it is for paedophiles to use social media to lure children.
After hearing the story of a Los Angeles father who witnessed his 12-year-old daughter being kidnapped by a man he’d met on social media, online prankster Koby Persin decided to test how easily he could convince a group of strangers to meet in person.
“That’s when the idea that people need to be educated came to me,” Persin told Yahoo Parenting. “I always get my ideas from real life, so I wanted to spread awareness and made this video.”
In the video, 21-year-old Parshin is seen interacting with the three teenage girls through Facebook, with their parents’ permission.
He spends three or four days in contact with each woman before proposing to meet in person.
With the cameras rolling, he meets the three girls, but the girls’ parents are also there, and they react harshly to their daughters’ willingness to meet a stranger.
A girl named Mikayla agreed to meet Coby Persin at the park. She was going to meet a 15-year-old boy.
The mother and father yelled at the girls, screaming about the dangers of going out with strange men and how they were scared to see their children make bad decisions.
To find subjects for his videos, Persin said he posted ads on Craigslist seeking parents whose children spent a lot of time on social media. He informed each parent of his intentions, and in each case they agreed to allow Persin to recruit their daughters.
Persin said none of the parents expected their children to agree to an interview.
A young girl named Juliana agreed to invite a new friend she’d met on Facebook over to her house while her father was out. When he found her, she broke down in tears.
“I asked the parents, ‘Have you told your kids not to talk to strangers?'” he explains. “And they all said yes.”
Parsin said he contacted several girls who were unlikely to fall for the scam and so he did not pursue the relationships.
As for the three people who did meet him, Persin said they quickly realized their mistake.
“There’s one girl screaming for her life, she’s so scared she can’t even talk,” he said, pointing to the last girl in the video, who gets into his van and is immediately grabbed as if she’s being abducted.
“Maybe at that moment she realized, ‘What was I thinking?’ She realized she’d done something wrong.”
Jenna was heard screaming for her life after agreeing to jump into a car with a stranger she met online.
The video has been viewed more than four million times since it was uploaded on Monday, and has struck a chord with many concerned parents.
While Persin believes “the world needs to see this,” Lenore Skenazy, author of “Free Range Kids,” says the video is primarily a scare tactic.
“This reinforces the idea that all children are at risk from strangers all the time, which is not the case,” she told Yahoo Parenting.
“I think it’s worth having that conversation with your kids and letting them know that you can talk to anyone you want, but you can’t go out with anyone.”
Skenazy said facing every scenario as a potential danger can be “totally paralyzing,” especially because encounters like the one simulated in the video are “very rare and very random.”
But a 2013 study published in the journal Pediatrics found that such encounters aren’t all that uncommon: About 30 percent of teenage girls surveyed admitted to meeting someone in person who they’d previously only spoken to online.
Adolescent psychologist Dr Barbara Greenberg says teenagers are more likely to talk to and meet strangers online than parents realize.
“It’s not that teens don’t care about the risks,” she told Yahoo Parenting.
“But teenage girls weigh the benefits more than the risks. They find male attention really exciting, so they weigh the thrill more than the thought, ‘Oh, maybe this could happen to me.'”
To protect their children, parents should start by sitting down with their kids once a month and thoroughly examining their children’s Facebook friends.
Meanwhile, Persin said she has received numerous emails and messages from adults thanking her for the video.
“They say things like, ‘I did this when I was younger and it almost put me in danger,’ or ‘I’m so happy my daughter got to see this,'” he says.
In fact, the video has been so successful that Persin is now creating a “boy version” in which he pretends to be a woman seducing a young boy, due to be posted next week.
Morning News Flash – August 12th