“I actually ended up getting on a train, but my friends stopped me,” she said. Rachel told me that she thought about going to another city and killing herself. She asked the boy to report the account to Tumblr. He included a link to a Tumblr page that contained dozens of folders of pictures and videos of several girls, all in similar poses, many of them crying. Then one day she was in a taxi when a boy who lived near her sent a message asking if she was all right. The next day, Rachel (a pseudonym) checked her social-media accounts every hour, waiting for the pictures and videos to surface. Rachel pretended that everything was fine. Later, her mother came in to say good night. She cut off the correspondence and sat on her bed “in a state of shock,” she said. The videos became progressively more explicit, Rachel told me, until the man asked her to do something so revolting that she refused. He then had her take more photos, this time naked, and take videos of herself stripping and masturbating. He first instructed her to brighten the lighting in her room, and to take photos of herself in her underwear. Panicked, she complied with his requests. Immediately, she recalled an episode from a few years earlier, when classmates passed around a photo of her in her underwear, which precipitated months of bullying and a bout of depression. Then he sent a link to her mother’s Facebook account and the names of other family members and school friends, threatening to forward the picture to them if she didn’t follow his instructions. The man who sent the text forwarded a nude photograph of her, the source of which she couldn’t figure out. “I was a complete mess, I didn’t trust anyone, I was in complete self-destruct mode.” “I had a really unstable home life, and I didn’t have good support around me,” Rachel told me recently, while sitting on her bed in a fluffy white bathrobe. She had just returned home from a party and was in her bedroom. Rachel lived with her mother, stepfather, and siblings in a midsize town in the United Kingdom. One night in 2017, a fifteen-year-old girl named Rachel received a WhatsApp message from a number she didn’t recognize. When using a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo check the safe search settings where you can exclude adult content sites from your search results Īsk your internet service provider if they offer additional filters īe responsible, know what your children are doing online.This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. Use family filters of your operating systems and/or browsers Other steps you can take to protect your children are: More information about the RTA Label and compatible services can be found here. Parental tools that are compatible with the RTA label will block access to this site. We use the "Restricted To Adults" (RTA) website label to better enable parental filtering. Protect your children from adult content and block access to this site by using parental controls. PARENTS, PLEASE BE ADVISED: If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to keep any age-restricted content from being displayed to your children or wards. Furthermore, you represent and warrant that you will not allow any minor access to this site or services. This website should only be accessed if you are at least 18 years old or of legal age to view such material in your local jurisdiction, whichever is greater. You are about to enter a website that contains explicit material (pornography).