Status: 05/11/2023 10:38 a.m
A 13-year-old looks at make-up tips on the TikTok video platform. Suddenly she is confronted with child pornography and violence. Such experiences are frighteningly normal for children from the 5th grade.
Ella obviously finds it difficult to tell what she said a while ago on their smartphone discovered. The 13-year-old student at the Hatten forest school did not want her real name published, and she did not even tell her mother about the incident. “I was looking at make-up tips on TikTok and then clicked on a video in the comments list that had just been posted a few seconds ago,” reports the student. However, there were no new trends in lipstick or mascara to be seen there. But a girl who performs sexual acts on a boy around one year old. “The girl was apparently the boy’s babysitter,” says Ella, “I was so disgusted, how can you do something like that with a small child?”
Videos depicting torture, murder and pornography
After this shock, Ella does exactly the right thing: She reports the video, and a short time later the provider of the platform removes it. The teenager does not tell her parents about what she has experienced. But the teacher who offers consultation hours for social media at the forest school in Hatten does: Thomas Hillers. “There are masses of videos circulating on social networks showing torture, murder and pornography, which end up with the children via anonymous addresses from abroad,” says the teacher. Another incident was the reason for Ella to delete her Twitter account: “I received a video from an anonymous sender via Twitter, there was a man being held on the street and his ear cut off.” Ella hears the screams, insults, sees the blood.
Execution videos don’t just come from war zones
Ella’s schoolmate had a similar experience: “I was visiting a friend. She was sent a video of a man’s throat being cut by two others.” Who distributes such videos and how can they get into the hands of children and young people? “These types of execution videos not only come from war zones, but very often from Central America,” reports Thomas Hillers. And again and again such content ends up on children’s smartphones.
Taking your phone away doesn’t help. already talking
That leaves traces. Thomas Hillers experienced that a student seemed tired for a long time, was pale, and withdrew. During a social media consultation, she then reported receiving a murder video from a war zone. What she saw there made her nauseous and disturbed her sleep. “She still had the video on her phone so the police could secure it.” Pretty hopeless that the perpetrators will be held accountable. The student got better afterwards. Talking just helps. However, such things are very rarely discussed with one’s own parents, Thomas Hillers observes: “The children are afraid that their parents will take their mobile phones away, they don’t want to risk that.”
“I’ve gotten used to it a bit.”
Ella and her friend would never actively search for violent videos, they say. Nor do they take part in tests of courage in which young people want to outdo themselves by consuming particularly cruel videos. But, says Ella, she is aware that she can get disturbing content from social networks at any time: “I don’t want to see it, but because it happens so often, I’ve gotten used to it a bit.”
The headmistress of the forest school in Hatten, Silke Müller, has written a book on the subject. It says: “We lose our children!: Violence, abuse, racism – the disturbing everyday life in class chat”.
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