Teens learn scary lesson after being lured into meeting a stranger
Parents have been left shocked by an experiment that showed just how easy it is for a pedophile to pick up a child using social media.
Online prankster Coby Persin decided to see how easily he could convince teens he didn’t know into meeting him in person, after learning about a Los Angeles father who witnessed his 12-year-old daughter being abducted by a man she met on social media.
“That’s how I got the idea that people needed to be educated,” Persin tells Yahoo Parenting. “I always get my ideas from real life, so I made this video because I wanted to spread awareness.”
In the video, 21-year-old Persin, with permission from each teen’s parents, connects with three different girls via Facebook.
He communicates with each girl over the course of three or four days before suggesting they meet in person.
With the cameras rolling, he comes face to face with the three girls. But also present at those meetings are the girls’ parents, who react harshly to seeing their daughters so willingly meet a stranger.
The mums and dads yell at the girls, screaming about the dangers of going off with strange men, and about their fear at seeing their children make bad decisions.
To find the subjects in the video, Persin says he placed a Craigslist ad looking for parents of kids who spend a lot of time on social media. He told all parents his intentions, and in each case they agreed to let Persin try to lure in their daughter.
None of the parents actually thought their kid would go through with the meeting, Persin says.
“I asked the parents, ‘have you talked to your kids about not talking to strangers?’” he explains. “They all said yes.”
Persin says he communicated with a few girls who seemed like they wouldn’t fall for the hoax, and therefore didn’t pursue those connections.
As for the three that did meet him, Persin says they realised their mistake immediately.
“There’s one girl who is screaming for her life, she was so scared she couldn’t even talk,” he says, referring to the final girl in the video, who got into his van and was immediately grabbed as if she was being abducted.
“It probably struck her in that moment, ‘What was I thinking?’ She knew she did something wrong.”
The video, which has been viewed more than four million times since it was uploaded on Monday, has struck a chord with many concerned parents.
Despite Persin’s belief that “the world needed to see this,” Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids, says the video is largely a scare tactic.
“It reinforces the idea that every child is in constant danger from strangers, and that’s not the case,” she tells Yahoo Parenting.
“I think it’s worthwhile to have a conversation with your kids and tell them that they can talk to anyone, but they cannot go off with anyone.”
Facing every scenario as a potential danger, Skenazy says, is “completely paralyzing,” especially since encounters like the ones simulated on this video are “so rare and so random.”
But a 2013 study published in the journal Pediatrics found that these kinds of encounters aren’t all that rare. According to that research, about 30 percent of teen girls surveyed admitted to meeting someone in real life who they had previously only spoken to online.
Dr. Barbara Greenberg, an adolescent psychologist, says that when it comes to teens talking with strangers online and wanting to meet them, it happens more than parents probably think.
“It’s not that teens don’t care about the risks,” she tells Yahoo Parenting.
“But what happens with teen girls is they weigh the benefits more than the risks, and it’s really exciting to get attention from a male. So they weigh those thrills more than ‘oh, this could happen to me.’”
To protect kids, parents should start by sitting down with their child once a month and combing through their Facebook friends.
For his part, Persin says he’s received a number of emails and messages from adults thanking him for the video.
“They say things like ‘I did this when I was young and almost put myself in real danger,’ or ‘I’m so glad I can show this to my daughter,’” he says.
In fact, the video has been so successful that Persin is currently producing the “boy version,” where he poses as a woman luring in young boys, to be posted next week.
Morning news break – August 12
