Photos and videos that “turn your stomach.” This is what the mother of a minor from Astillero (Cantabria) said after discovering on her son's phone images of extreme violence (mutilations and beheadings) and other recordings of brutal sexual assaults, some involving minors.
These photos and scenes spread through a WhatsApp group followed by a hundred minors. A chat of schoolchildren with real “savages”, repeat the families who have viewed this material.
How many conversation groups between minors – many of them under the age of 14 – are there with identical videos and photos? There is no answer to this question, but you do suspect that there may be dozens, if not hundreds, based on other similar episodes discovered in recent weeks.
And most of these cases would not have come to light if mothers and fathers had not “spy” on their children's phones.
In Almendralejo (Badajoz), dozens of girls have been “undressed” with artificial intelligence. The mother of one of those minors discovered it when she looked at her daughter's phone.
In Palencia, photographs of a sexual nature of one of their classmates spread like wildfire among students from the same institute. A 15-year-old girl having intimate relations with another student. Without the permission, of course, of the minor, whose mother was also the one she reported.
A dozen schoolchildren were also “undressed” by one of their classmates in Ayamonte (Huelva). Images, in this case, altered with Photoshop and spread in a school chat.
These sexual images are spread like never before, but the most worrying thing, experts agree, is that victims and executioners now coexist in the same groups through which the content is spread.
And that reinforces the pact of silence – no one wants to be identified as a snitch – between the protagonists. The question, having arrived here, falls of its own weight: should we now control more the content of the daughters' and sons' phones after verifying that they are the protagonists of those images, increasingly violent, that run through their channels? ?
It is not a new debate, that of control, but the rules of the game do change within the limits of the control of these devices. If years ago spying on your children's phone was a dilemma posed to detect if they were with bad company or fooling around with drugs, now a porn enters the scene in which they are the protagonists.
Úrsula Perona, child psychologist, is clear. Control of children's technological devices, and even more so in the face of this new reality, "is not only recommended, but very necessary." At least, she continues, “until they turn 15 or 16, so that no one can say that we violate their right to privacy.”
Perona considers that these minors “have to understand that these devices are going to be controlled” and clarifies that in no case is this “spying.”
The problem, most of the time, is not so much in the control of those children's phones as in the "lack of training of many parents about this technology and its risks," says Abel Domínguez, child and adolescent psychologist. and director of Domínguez Psicologías. Not even "it is clear what age from which these devices should be left in the hands of children."
Regarding control, Domínguez points out that “each family must draw its own red lines” and shares, with Perona, that in the event of the slightest suspicion of information harmful to these minors on the devices provided by the parents, “there is no need to hesitate when it comes to to look at the content.”
