The news tells us very clearly: online adaptation, also called gromingis increasing. Also thanks to the inattention to privacy on social networks, almost 1 out of 3 teen gives the mobile number to people known online (Save the Children 2011 data). According to an ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking) survey conducted on 131 13 -year -old students, 90% opened a Facebook profile before the minimum limit of 13 years, imposed by the social network. At least 2 students per class have more than 1200 “friends”. 80% publish one photo a day and 60% received requests or comments with a sexual background. 90%, in case of online danger, do not believe it appropriate to talk about it with the parents, because it fears its reaction.
The new ‘virtual adaptation techniques’ have become a real management problem for the postal police, primarily, and for all the services that are aimed at preventing and taking care of the discomfort of minors and their families. The diffusion of these techniques through social networks, chats, app or forums is almost paradoxically defined with the term “To Gongom“(Lett.: Cure) and is used by potential abusive subjects, such as pedophiles or individuals who have a particular sexual/affective predilection for teenagers and minors more generally. The reference categories involve age groups which, starting from pre-puberty, reach full adolescence.
What does it mean to “adapt on the net”?
This phenomenon is partly based on the concept of ‘Psychological manipulation ‘, exactly as for the most common adaptation, which takes place outside the network; It has the main purpose of obtaining (first) and exerting (then) a check on another person, or alternatively, to cause them a big damage. It can be a simple perversion or a strategy used to obtain a dominant role in the social relationship (sexual or friend). Through the groming A report to the designated “victim” is imposed which, generally, does not realize what is happening since the strategies used by the “executioner” are aimed at achieving a single purpose, that is, to obtain as direct contact as possible, the overcoming of the emotional resistances of the “victim”, and then to establish a real intimate and sexualized relationship, without the latter, having made it well aware of the manipulations. been subjected.
The adaptator follows preferences and therefore contact subjects with certain age and sex characteristics, Usually giving way to a trivial conversation on generic topics, concerning the life of the boy or girl. Naturally does not give indications on one’s age But on the contrary, it reports that she is a few years older or even a peer, so as to facilitate the opening by the “victim”.
Try to establish a bond of trust which induces the latter/aa to confide even very private information, up to the address of the home, the telephone number, the school he attended, etc. The requests for sexual confidences then begin, Often preceded by sentimental declarations, in order to obtain an exchange of sexual images and arrive, at least in some cases, to a real meeting, also passing through the offer of small gifts, which tend to please the minor and to make him feel in some way “unique and special”. The link thus assumes characteristics of exclusivity since the gromer He does everything to not be discovered and to make sure that no one from the outside can disturb the intimacy created, ruining what he has harshly conquered.
A striking and easy to understand example is The movie Trust (2010), directed by David Schwimmer. The teenager, daughter of a young couple, is left free to navigate the internet but with certain restrictions imposed by the father who naively thinks that everything can be confided to him. In reality, the girl knows a man in chat who says she is slightly bigger than her and begins to conquer her trust until, following the exchange of telephone numbers, they meet. When he sees him realizes that the age of man is not the actual one but continues to follow him, despite his hesitation, precisely because despite everything, he trusted him, who makes her feel “important”, up to the tragic epilogue in which, in a hotel room, he abuses her, convincing her that it is a conscious choice of both.
In recent years, online deployment data have increased by far and A good percentage of teenagers between 9 and 16 years of age has been lured on the net (30% of 25,000) or in any case received contact request (Eukids, 2012). In most cases, by the boys there is no real awareness of the risk that run, especially by virtue of the psychological consequences deriving from a possible abuse (sexual and non -sex) and/or the spread of child pornographic material on the net. The vast majority of them conceives the young/adult relationship as normal, since the gromer He makes them believe they can understand things that adults, including parents, are unable to do. But the deleterious aspect refers to the possible trauma which, unconsciously, insinuates itself in their life with effects also on personal image as adults.
The first thing to do, if this should happen, which is recommended is clearly Talking about it with someone: a partner is fine (he is less judgy and more similar), an adult of reference, a professor or, if present within the school, with a psychologist in such a way as to understand how to behave. As regards the situations in which a situation of adaptation has already been structured, parents are advised that they become aware of it to contact the postal police and the bodies of competence immediately; At the same time, it is recommended to get help from psychologists and psychotherapists who can support parents, the family unit which inevitably is involved and distorted by such an event, and above all the minor, victim of the compliance or real abuse.
The risks for the minor, in addition to those immediately imaginable in the short term (social shame, humiliation, loss of trust in their abilities, fear, physical and psychological reactions linked directly to the trauma, etc.), are those related to the image of self that will tend to build in their own sentimental and sexual life of adult.
Without wanting to demonize social networks and all those tools that, inevitably, our children now use as real means of socialization and knowledge, it is undoubtedly our duty of educators and adults that of “supervising” and directing them towards a correct and healthy use of these, adapting in a modern key the mantra that our parents offered us every time we left the house: “Do not accept candy from the unknown; If someone gives you bored you, he changes his way;
