Kids are not necessarily safe just by staying at home anymore. Once they go online through their phones, they are already at risk in meeting and being preyed upon by online predators. Dr. Tim Jordan interviews expert Nate Lewis, CEO of The Innocent, about how to keep your daughter safe from these evildoers lurking around the internet. They discuss how parents must set the right boundaries for their children when accessing websites or social media platforms to decrease the likelihood of becoming victims of online predators. Nate also explains how elders should become role models for kids when it comes to using mobile phones and accessing the web.
Resources:
For more information on this topic from Nate Lewis, visit his website at www.theinnocent.org or on social media at @theinnocent.usa
Good article and video on this topic: How many strangers are in your teenager’s bedroom article, Katherine Martinko: www.Fbi.gov/itsnotagame video on online predators; Learn more at www.fbi.gov/itsnotagame
Read Dr. Jordan’s chapter on when kids are ready for smartphones and social media in his new book: Keeping Your Family Grounded When You’re Flying By the Seat of Your Pants, revised and updated edition https://drtimjordan.com
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Watch the episode here
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How To Protect Your Daughters From Online Predators
Guest Nate Lewis, Founder Of The Innocent
I’m back with you with a brand-new episode. I appreciate you stopping by here to read and get some information, some awarenesses about what’s going on for your daughters. This episode’s topic is going to be important. They’re all important. It’s a topic I don’t think we talk about enough. I think in this day and age, we get so worried about predators, but most of the predators we worry about are people walking around who might kidnap your kid when they’re walking to the bus stop.
We’ve gotten so stressed out about stranger danger, inappropriately, because the data says that kids are much safer now than they were twenty years ago when it comes to that sort of thing. We don’t oftentimes protect them enough online where they’re much more likely to be a victim of predators, if you will.
I decided this this week to have an expert come on to help out with this topic of how do you protect your daughters. How can you educate your daughters? How to know what’s going on to looking for signs? Is my daughter safe online? Is she being safe? I think sometimes we mention it, but we don’t really talk about the nitty gritty of that. I asked an expert to come on to give us more information that I can give you.
The expert is Nate Lewis. He’s the Founder and the CEO of a company called The Innocent, which he can talk to you about more than I can. Nate has dedicated his career to tackling the child sex trafficking, exploitation, sexual abuse inside our borders. He has lots and lots of experience in anti-trafficking initiatives worldwide. He’s traveled a lot. He brings expertise in how to face child sex crimes right here in the US. The goal of this company, The Innocent, is to prevent abuse and to safeguard vulnerable kids from online sex predators, which is obviously a very noble cause. Nate, thanks so much for being on the show.
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Nate Lewis, Founder Of The Innocent
Tell me briefly, how did you get to this as your career? I always ask my guests how’d they get there. You could probably talk two weeks on this.
It’s interesting that I would land here. I probably can’t skip over the fact that this probably has something to do with it. A week into my twelfth birthday years of age, I was abused and I buried that and tried to get past that. I moved through life. I went to film school and went into Hollywood. I actually moved to LA and then I was kidnapped and taken a gunpoint by some gang members. My freedom was basically taken. I got out of that situation, obviously, but it caused a lot of trauma to me personally, both of those experiences. I went on into the movie world. I worked all over the world. I worked specifically with a guy Jim Caviezel, who many know from the Sound of Freedom.
It was him who introduced me to what trafficking looked like. I started to doing some research. I met the gentleman that he played in the movie and then I was able to work as an executive and really travel the world, seeing it from the perspective of actually being on the front lines a little differently, some online, but mostly physically going into dark places around the globe.
Working with aftercare, looking at facilities, vetting them, empowering them, funding them in best practice, learning all that stuff. It was the people of the United States and were like, “What are we doing here?” I started analyzing and talking to my law enforcement friends and just listening to why, like where are the gaps, the red tape, the processes, all these things? It’s usually funding and training. Why don’t we just allow the people to fund their local law enforcement in their own communities to get the training and the equipment that they need to be proactive in these investigations.
I was like, “This is what we’re doing, hon.” My wife’s like, “This sounds amazing. I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but let’s do it.” Really, our mission is to protect and preserve the innocence of children in America. We do that lots of ways, but it’s from sex trafficking, online exploitation, and just sexual assault in general. My team is equipped of active-duty law enforcement that have these years or decade of experience in these specific crimes.
I have a task force officer with a federal agency. I have sergeants of different units. I have retired police who is a ICAC forensic investigator, like trainers. We’re going into communities building task forces. That looks like this. We take 5 or 6 departments from a community, and we take their top investigators. We’re not teaching them how to do investigations. They already know, but we are teaching them how to specifically go into the darkest areas and work these specific crimes to be proactive and go out and hunt these predators online, build a strong case, and hopefully get the best prosecution because we’re teaching them how to really build the strongest case. That’s it in a nutshell.
One part of what we do and how I got here was really the listening to the people. “What are we doing here? Let’s do something here.” I said, “All right, let’s do it. Let’s go.” We do a lot more than that. I’m really getting community involved. TheInnocent.org is our website. You can click on the community link, and we’re soon going to be training and equipping the people to make impact. We got the law enforcement side done. Now it’s how do we get the people educated and the equipment and the training that they need to really be impactful and then start holding people accountable in their own communities.
I need to hook you up with my youngest son. He’s in the documentary-making business. He’s been working for a company called Jigsaw Productions. He’s a producer, so yours might be a good topic.
That would be cool, for sure.
His newest podcast comes out on HBO. It’s called The Dark Money Game. It’s a two-part documentary on dark money.
Let’s connect.
Most Vulnerable Kids To Online Predators
Okay. I’ll connect him with you. This may sound like a dumb question, but which of our kids tend to be the most vulnerable? The girls I see and work with seem to be the most vulnerable to online predators, the ones who are lonely, depressed don’t have very many friends. It seems like those are the girls who I see who are the most vulnerable. What do you see?
We see it across the board. I will say that the predators, it’s just like in the wild. These predators go after the weakest prey. The most vulnerable, I guess, is a better way to describe that. Usually, they’re lacking a father figure or a male presence in their life. There’s no threat there to them, number one. Also, they’re missing something. They’re looking for that attention or that peace that’s missing from the male perspective in their life.
They can come and approach that from different angles. Maybe the girls like posting about, like, “I hate boys,” and here’s the night in shining armor showing up to rescue her. It looks different. I think that it’s really important for parents and for children to know you don’t have to be alone. You don’t have to be depressed, actually. You just have to be on the internet. That’s really who it’s happening. I don’t want people to think like, “It’s a good thing I’m not lonely.” No, it’s going to happen. If you are online and you’re on social media and you’re a young girl, you’re probably already been contacted by somebody if your account’s open or if you haven’t, you soon will be.
You aren’t even aware of it. I read an article by Katherine Martinko. I had her on the show. There’s a video that goes with it. It’s called How Many Strangers Are In Your Teenager’s Bedroom? Have you seen that video?
I know about it. I preach about that all the time.
It’s like anybody but we have such a low level of awareness of how often our girls and boys are being targeted.
[bctt tweet=”Parents and children do not have to be alone or depressed. You just have to be on the internet.” via=”no”]
Here’s the thing. We lock our doors. The children go to their room. You think they’re safe. First of all, as a parent, set a rule on a boundary. No phones in the room. That’s not because the red flag that they have access to the world and what’s out there. Not only that, to me, what’s scarier is the world has access to them. I can trust my child more than I can trust strangers.
We can have these conversations and navigate, but don’t let phones in the room and then have a real relationship and a safe place for them to talk to you. That’s another part of all this. It’s exactly right. People have gotten confused that they think that their child’s safe behind locked doors in the room. Literally, they know that if they have that phone in their hand, that’s the most dangerous place for kids these days.
How Online Predators Use Social Media
Because I work with girls, and this show is Raising Daughters, but these things apply to boys, too. What are the most common ways that predators get to them? Certain sites, certain websites, certain social media sites.
It’s mostly through social media. We’ve seen it on marketplace. A young girl trying to sell her bike, or a mom selling her bike with pictures of a young kid, and the person thinks it’s the girl selling a bike and starts messaging her. It happens everywhere. Here’s what I would say. Where we spend the most time, other than the darkest places, it’s just sale for sex sites to a common person. How is this going to happen? Potentially, we can talk about all the pieces that will come from it, but they’re going to groom your child. How do they get access to grooming? It is through these social media platforms.
For the young children these days, their identity is connected with the number of followers, popularity, friends and all that stuff. They want to this big, huge net of people that think they’re important. They have an open account. These individuals will sneak in through a friend suggests them. Here’s this the weird crazy thing. I’m trying to figure out why this is being allowed, and we know this. We go undercover online as young girls.
Why are these platforms suggesting grown men and introducing them to young girls? Very young, like 11-year-olds, 14-year-olds, max. As soon as that young girl, us, clicks accept, because I’m trying to increase my popularity score, now the algorithms turn on and they start promoting more profiles like this one, which has zero followers maybe, but following 2,500 people. The people they’re following look very similar to this girl.
Now they’re going to suggest 5, and then you’re going to accept those, and then you’re going to suggest 10, and then you’re going to accept those, and it’s going to be 100. It’s going to be hundreds. What’s happening is they’re now getting directly into their inbox. Within a minutes, seconds, and we have all this film too, they start messaging all kinds of messages, whether it’s like, “You are so beautiful. I run a modeling agency. What do you think about making $350 an hour?” Most teams are like, “What? $350 an hour? What do I got to do?” It slowly goes from there. What we’ve seen, and I hope that this is what really stops your children, from having an open account and letting this happen, because this happens, first message is a photo of that grown adult private area with the words, “Rate my,” fill in the blank.
Our mission is to protect and preserve the innocence of children. That’s a layer of innocence that just got stolen from your child who shouldn’t ever see that at that age. That’s part of what people think, like, “Is human trafficking really happening?” You have to know what human trafficking is. That’s the tip of the umbrella. Underneath all that are all the statutes that you can be arrested for that fall under that, child exploitation being one of them. This is where it’s happening predominantly. This is why I said like, you don’t have to be alone, a loner and feel depressed. You just have to be on social media, and you have to be an attractive young girl, or sometimes not attractive. You just have to be a living.
Here’s the other thing. It’s not just girls. I’m glad that you pointed that out, because what’s happening right now that we’re seeing, these predators will make female accounts and lure the boys in and get them to send photos and then bribe them. “I’m friends with all your friends now and your parents, and I got all these photos of you. You need to come up with $10,000.”
One of the cases, you could Google this one, this boy that this happened to was embarrassed, couldn’t get the money, and he ends up committing suicide. These are the type of things that are happening because of the infiltration. What I would suggest as a parent, look at this as like driving a car. When your child’s going to become sixteen, there’s a lot of things your child has to do to get a driver’s license.
You have to actually drive a car. You have to actually take tests. You have to take actual physical driving, you have to practice a lot. You’re going to put them in a car with wear seat belts and hopefully airbags. They have to be situational awareness, constantly looking for somebody who’s running the light and do all these things. If you look at it like that, how do we train our children to navigate the internet and social media?
What are they looking for? What are they looking out for? Being on awareness, having this situational awareness. What are some of the safety things? Maybe you as a parent say like, “Let’s sit down and look what this looks like together, and practice driving on the internet and on social media,” because that’s really what it comes down to. The hard thing is, as parents, we know how to drive.
However, as parents, we don’t know how to navigate the digital world, quite like the younger generation. This communication, there’s a missing link between internet, social media, phones, what age. The reality is, parents, at some point, your child’s going to get a car, and your child’s probably going to get a phone, and they’re potentially going to get social media, and they’re going to be on the internet and have access to it. Let’s educate them on how to navigate this world safely. That’s what I think is really important for parents.
Let’s talk about that. There is an education that we’re going to be able to share here very soon throughout a different organization we’ve been working with. We’ve implemented into some schools and got some feedback, and it’s pretty powerful. I think it’s be effective for parents, children, teachers, school resource officers, and across the board.
We’ve got to start educating ourselves. It’s a really good place to start as community members. Where do we identify and understand and stop being ignorant to the fact that like 37 million teenagers in America are on social media, predators aren’t going to go out and expose their identity to the millions of cameras and their license plate and do this in public? They’re going to start where they’re hiding their identity, literally hiding their identity online.
Even their ips. They’re trying to do all kinds of things, and they’re going to try to steal photos and trade them, or get certain things, build these relationships and eventually, potentially say, “I can’t drive. Let’s meet up. My uncle or aunt will pick you up.” That person who’s running that account will actually meet up and pick them up. These young kids who believe in things like the tooth fairy and Santa Claus believe this relationship is real.
They believe this is real. They fall for it. I can’t tell you how many cases that we meet and talk to these young children, and we’re trying to say, “Don’t go meet with them.” They’re like, “No.” They’ve done this. They’ve built this relationship. They build trust, they build a relationship. These children, you can’t tell them that that person’s not a child that they’re going to meet, that they’re not in love because they’ve taken that undeveloped brain and manipulated it. They’ve done it in a way that no boy who’s fourteen could ever do.
[bctt tweet=”Be a role model for your kids. If you are constantly on your phone or posting on social media, your children will start mimicking you.” via=”no”]
I was going to say, I think they’ve been softened. The girls have been softened up a little bit because they’re being pushed by the boys they actually do know to send photos. I ran a weekend retreat for middle school girls, and a bunch of the girls said that guys in their school had requested photos. It’s not unusual for them to get those requests. I guess it becomes a slippery slope.
That’s where parents need to educate their boys. A boy sending that photo, that’s not legal. You can’t do that. That’s exploitation, especially if it’s adult, it’s a whole other level. That’s where parenting has to come into place. These are the things that we need to have conversations with our kids about. This is navigating the digital world. We didn’t have to worry about that as kids, sending photos. This is a new time that we live in, and we have to accept it because it’s not going to go away.
How Parents Can Keep Their Children Safe Online
We’re talking with Nate Lewis. He is the Founder and CEO of a company called The Innocent. He’s been working for a long time and keeping our kids safe from online predators and educating people and educating law enforcement, etc. Give the parents who are reading some concrete ideas, some safeguards that you can put into place now that will help keep your daughters and sons safe.
Number one, I don’t care where your relationship is now, you have to have a goal in mind of where you want your relationship to be. First and foremost, you need to have that real relationship. You need to have a safe place for them to come to and have these critical conversations with. You have to start there because everything else that I’m going to say won’t be as effective if you don’t have that relationship with your children.
Be a role model. If you’re constantly on your phone, you’re constantly posting and you have an open account, and people are still in your photos of your own kids, because you’re so proud to post them, they’re going to follow that suit too. Start mimicking what you want your child to be as well. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is what we’re seeing very recently, which is very dangerous for children and for parents, is disappearing messages on most platforms. Now, you can enable, in your text messaging through that platform, and set a timer on messages to disappear. I don’t know why in the world we would need that other than to hide stuff. Why do we need that technology? We’re hiding something. We don’t want somebody to see something. That’s why you would have them disappear. Keep believing that they disappear forever.
Here’s the reality. Parents probably don’t how to access those disappearing messages. Now, you don’t know what communication’s being had, who they’re talking to, what’s being sent, what photos are being sent. Please, just set some boundaries. I know this is tough as a parent, but there has to be some guidelines.
You’re doing it for the protection of your children. Get that feature turned off so that you can actually see them. As a parent, if you’re paying for the phone and for the service, you own that property. You are the owner. You actually can set the rules on anything that they do on their phone. By law, you have access to do whatever you want on their phone.
Is it an easy process for them to turn that off?
Five seconds. Go on Google or ChatGPT and it’s just a setting inside of the forum. In that, they can set it for 5 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute. After the person reads it, the counter starts to count down, that message disappears.
They go on Google and look for disappearing messages?
Yeah. How do you disable disappearing messages on all these platforms? That’s where Snapchat became super popular in the beginning, because anything that they did, they thought it disappeared. I’m not going to get into all this, but these technologies, people started screenshotting it, so now they have technology to tell you that the screenshot was taken. They know it’s going to disappear. Why are we trying to hide the stuff? Why can’t we be transparent about what you’re doing and the activity online?
I’m so glad you said that was number one. If you have a good relationship with your kids and there’s trust built up and all that, then it is easier to have the conversations that about how if they’re going to allow their kid to have a phone or social media, you can say, “I don’t want to see that you’re deleting messages and you’re deleting things. If I see that, that’s a red flag for me. It tells me you’re hiding something.”
It does. Here’s the thing, I’m not trying to tell people how to parent. I’m only coming from a process of reality of the things that I’ve seen. These are difficult things and you’re going to have your own way of how you parent. The reality is, I know success rates come from the parents who, when that child comes to you for the first time to share, they’re not going to get in trouble. You have to create the safest environment for them to continue to come forward to you with information.
Don’t shame them or guilt of them for that behavior because some of it probably was their fault, but sometimes it wasn’t. They already might be embarrassed, feel shame, and they don’t need you to add to it. They need you to be there for them and meet them wherever they are. Just meet them wherever they are, right there in that moment.
I know sometimes that goes away. If you’ve set boundaries and you’ve set rules and you have to follow through with them, I understand it. Listen, one, start with the conversation, but creating that safe place for them, where is the safest place for them? Hopefully in your home so they can come and talk to you. There are some other things that I think is important for parents. Now, this can become a little Big Brothery, and I know kids don’t like this. It feels weird to everybody, including the parent. There are apps like 365 Live or whatever that is. There’s Bark, there’s Canopy, A lot of these new apps that you can monitor or even get alerts on identifying what your children are doing and monitoring the restrictions.
They need to get more advanced like the Hollywood ratings, like rated R, PG 13, PGG. I think eventually we can get to that. We can start filtering through like what level of content. Content needs to be labeled as, “This is PG 13, so only my phone can access PG 13.” We’ll get there. It’s somewhat that, so it lets the parent know.
[bctt tweet=”If you have an open social media account with hundreds or thousands of followers, you might be surprised at the people you have allowed into your private life.” via=”no”]
The one tricky thing, parents, please, when your phone updates, like you have the software update or update things and apps have to reload and upload and you got to upgrade, just make sure that all the settings continue to change because sometimes when it updates, the settings don’t update. You might lose some things. I would say monitor it regularly to make sure. If you trust your child until you can’t trust your child too, you know because you want to build that trust and you want to trust them, and you want to tell them that.
However, as soon as you start seeing behaviors that you can’t trust, then they’ve lost a little bit of your trust and you need to continue those conversations. There’s a lot of other things. Really locking down private accounts, like social media accounts. It’s so hard. I know children, kids, if you’re reading, I understand it. I get it. We’re all consumed by how many followers we have and how popular we are, how many likes we got.
The reality is what I would challenge you as an adult and as a child, if you have an open account, you have hundreds or thousands of followers, start going through there and looking at who’s following you. Really, truly look at who’s following you. You might be surprised at the people that you’ve allowed in to your private life.
Some of them, look at who they’re following and see the kind of material they’re following and who they’re following. That’ll give you an idea of who’s looking at you. You don’t even know, from the dark, from the corner and you may not even know who’s following you around. It’s almost like a stalker. You don’t even know you have a stalker. Those are things are super important. If you don’t really know them, maybe you just block them, unfriend them, whatever it may be. Lock your account down. Please lock your account down because the only way people can get in is if you let them in if it’s locked down. It’s like you literally have to like run a vetting on them.
“Are they cool? Are they good enough? I don’t know.” Parents have had this happen. Friend requests from interesting accounts that were just formed. Have we all experienced that? Yes. Children experience it way more, and I’ll share one story just to put this into perspective. This is from a 24-year-old at an event. She was the youngest one there because it was an event to raise awareness, raise funding, we’re a nonprofit.
We’re trying to keep it G-rated because we don’t want to steal their innocence, like granny in the front row. She’s appalled. She probably doesn’t know what social media is. She was just appalled that this stuff has happening. I’m like, “You don’t even know what is out there and I’m not going to try to share with you.”
It was about an hour in and this 24-year-old raises her hand. I didn’t know she was 24 at the time. I asked her and like, “Do you have a question or a comment?” She’s like, “I wasn’t supposed to be here tonight. My dad couldn’t come, but I came instead. I think the most shocking thing to me tonight is hearing the gasps in the room because this has been my life for the last ten years.”
This is how she grew up. This is the society, this is life. This is normal. Being on social media, being on internet, and people direct messaging you and asking for photos like you had mentioned earlier, that’s normal. Why is that shocking to people? How could that be shocking? How many children I talked to who just got rid of social media because they were tired of getting barraged by unknown people, strangers?
You mentioned stranger danger and people being afraid of stranger danger. I wouldn’t say stop being afraid of stranger danger. It just looks different. Only 2% of children who are trafficked are actually kidnapped and taken. That is a very small number. You have to be aware of stranger danger. It just looks way different than it did when we were kids. There are strangers out there and they are dangerous, but you just got to understand how they’re coming in and finding your children.
We ran a weekend retreat I’ll never forget. It was on Saturday evening. These are middle school girls. For some reason, we got on the topic of their experiences being harassed by boys already. Being groped in the hallways of school, having all these requests to send nudes, etc. Much less, some of them had gotten people who did they didn’t know asking for things. I remember this one girl who’s very empathetic. She just feels everything. She starts bawling and crying. I’ll never forget she was crying and crying. She said, “I don’t know why we have to experience this. We’re just kids.” It just broke our hearts. I was like, “You’re right.” This is a twelve-year-old kid who’s being asked to swim in an adult world and they’re not ready for it.
It’s exactly why we exist, for what you just said. These kids shouldn’t have to live like this. It’s unacceptable. We can’t accept it as a society. Finding the ways and the avenues to really attack this. One, we figured out law enforcement, we’re booked out. We’re training task force all across America how to go out and be proactive to prevent this. Now it’s educating, equipping the people. Letting the people actually get loud about holding accountability to whatever their politicians.
The sentencing is the sentencing. It’s a suggestion. There are people that need to hold those sentencing accountable. Now it’s time to really educate and equip the people on this because we have to, especially as adults, we’re almost obligated as adults to protect and guide these young children. Not always from like, the guy that’s going to find them and hold them down and molest them. What’s happening to our children online? We have our obligation for our children to know how it happens and to prevent it and protect them and talk to them about it. There’s a lot of work to do.
My wife and I came up several years ago with a list of readiness signs for phones and social media, emotional signs social signs, responsibility signs. Things not just for the parents to look for in their daughters to say, “She might be getting ready for that,” but also to show their daughters and say, “This is what we’re going to be looking for.”
Seeing if you live these out, and if you can live out most of these over months of time, then you might be ready to have the next level of expertise. When parents say, “What age should my daughter get her phone,” or they want an age, “What age should my daughter do on social media?” I say, “I think for any of those things, high school, but only with a really good track record.” It’s not just an age or a grade. In my experience, girls aren’t ready for that stuff until at least high school and with a good track record of showing that they can take care of themselves in all these other ways offline. If you can’t take care of yourself offline, in real time, then you’re going to get swamped online.
Risks And Rewards Of Being A Helicopter Parent
I don’t love promoting being a helicopter parent, but what I do think is important when you look at risk versus reward, what’s the risk of being helicopter parent? What’s the reward? Everything that you’re mentioning, I think as an individual and as a parent, that’s absolutely great. The problem is most of these kids not just physically abused, but when you start looking at social media and phones, it’s not happening in your home. It’s when they go to a different home. I would suggest as a parent, make your home the home that kids come to. Set rules so when they come in the house, everybody’s phone gets put down on the banister or wherever you find a place like, “This is a phone-free zone.”
You can actually have real conversations with your friends and real relationships. We also don’t have to worry about what are you doing because so many parents, so many kids, I can’t tell you how many their parents did everything they could. They could shut them down, don’t give them phones, or if they did, it’s just to make 911 calls or whatever it was. Guess what? Their best friend has one.
You did great. Guess what? As soon as they leave your house, everything you’re doing at home goes out the door with them. I think that having that and even having these conversations with other parents of your friends. This is why the community piece is so important and then when somebody takes this education that it’s going to be out, it’s a pretty extensive education.
[bctt tweet=”Parents have an obligation to teach their children how the Internet works.” via=”no”]
Maybe they share it with their kids’ friends’, parents as well. They have to be on the same page with the parents too. It’s like, “We know the dangers. This is the realities. This is just the truth. Can we all be on the same page? When they’re hanging out, they don’t need the phones.”
“The mom can call me. If they need to get ahold of me because it was an emergency, Mom has a phone. Mom can call me. She has my number.” You got to really start looking at this from different angles. Phones in rooms, that has to be the first one. You can’t have a phone in your room at night. There’s no good things happen in your room on a phone at night. Let’s just say that.
I don’t think the things you’re talking about are examples of helicopter parenting. I think they’re examples of parenting.
Thank you.
Giving your kids experiences and giving your kids opportunities and giving your kids freedom, etc., when they’re ready. You prepare them all along the way, and before they’re ready, then you set boundaries. In my mind, that’s not helicopter parenting. That’s just knowing kids and knowing what they can handle and what they can’t.
It’s a popular word to use. People are so worried about being a helicopter parent because what that means, or what their kids are telling them or whatever. They’ll bring that to me and be like, “I don’t want to be a helicopter parent.” My next thing is risk versus reward. That’s fine. You don’t have to be a helicopter parent. You don’t even have to be a parent. What’s the risk that you’re taking? There’s a lot of that risk.
Get In Touch With The Innocent
I do worry. I think there’s a line that parents cross it into helicopter country when their daughter goes off to college and they’re still following them around all day. That I don’t like. We’ve been talking to Nate Lewis and he has a lot of experience in helping law enforcement and organizations and parents protect their kids from online predators and sexual exploitation, etc. Tell parents how they can get ahold of you or how they can find your information on The Innocent.
Yeah, so TheInnocent.org is the website. There’s lots of areas. I would say the most effective form of communication from us to give you trends and things is our email newsletter. Just because through social media, which we’re on social media because we have to be, because everybody else is @TheInnocent.USA. Everything we do stays inside of the America and our borders. We’re really targeting this here locally. If you sign up for that email newsletter, we can guarantee it’s going to be delivered to your inbox. They’re not going to shadow ban us from your inbox. That’s a great way.
They’ll find that on TheInnocent.org.
On their main page. Going to scroll down. It’ll say Subscribe Here. Put your email address in there, and then you can sign into that and we’ll keep certain things. There might be even links to videos. I’ll share videos from time to time or there’s a bill that you could potentially sign and petition. That’s really a bill to protect children and maybe hold their predators accountable and maybe enhance some of the sentencing or whatever may be.
Potentially, there’s a lot more coming. There are ways right now too, where you can go in there, click on the Community link, and then in your community, you can start spearheading some efforts in your community. Now that’s about to become really robust when this education comes out. We’re building out this handbook.
I get asked all the time, “What can I do?” We’ll do like a step-by-step thing. First and foremost, the very first step, get this education, go through it, take it, get really educated from professionals in this realm, like professionals that has taken years to build. It’s as an extensive twelve-hour training. You at least have a space to start from. From there, it’ll be step by step. Now engage others because in that training, you can also become a trainer. It’s more like taking that 12 hours and boil it down to 1 hour so that you can present it to your community and then get your community fired up so that they can go to city council meetings.
Where do you start looking into what’s available to the public on these cases and what’s going on? You can start really getting educated in your community, how this happens, where it happens. Potentially, at some point, start a fundraiser. On our community link right now, you can put in some information. We can build you a website with a QR code.
This funding can stay right in your community. It’s really getting the people together to bring our training, to build a task force in your community with law enforcement from all 5 or 6 departments in your area, their top investigators, to get assigned roles in these online sting undercover operations to go out and proactively hunt these predators and get them off of your streets and away from your communities and away from your kids. That opportunity is available right now there as well.
Here’s the thing. We’re 100% funded by the people. Why I started this was for the people. Give them an avenue to make impact in America. If you could just do $10 a month as a protector, we call it a protector. If you can do more, that’s fantastic. Why is that important? If you take 100 people times 10, that means that every month, four departments can get one tiny piece of entry level equipment to go out and do this.
If we can get more people to do that, we can potentially get into 1 or 2 states every single month building task forces in these states. There’s more technologies and stuff that we can provide to make them efficient and effective. If somebody, “My $10 won’t make a difference,” then it won’t. If everybody says, “My $10 will make a difference,” then they actually follow through with it, we actually can make a difference.
That would be another thing I would encourage. Just it’s right there, the blue button Donate, $10 a month and really we’re going to make sure that you see. If you follow us on social media and some of the updates we’ll share and the impact through email, you’ll see the results of what we’re doing. The quotes from the officers of the training we’re providing them and the agencies.
From small areas to the second largest sheriff’s department to an Attorney General’s office over the highest populated state, there’s a lot of things that we’re doing and so we’ll keep you educated on the impact that you’re making and then hopefully, we can do it right there in your community and you can see the results in your own community firsthand, to be honest with you. That’s what we hope to do. We’ve done that. We hope to do that for you.
How Parents Can Become Role Models
One of the things that, that gives me hope that we’re going to get through this learning curve when it comes to things like smartphones and social media, every time there’s been a new communication device that came along, there’s always been a period of how to figure this thing out. It doesn’t hurt us. I see signs like what you’re doing and you’re gathering people.
Jonathan Haidt’s book that came out about The Anxious Generation and keeping phones out of schools. Slowly but surely, I think grassroots-wise, people are waking up to, we need to do something. We can’t wait for the government to do it. We can’t wait for social media sites to do it, God forbid. It’s going to have to come from us as not just as individual parents, but also as parents coming together and saying enough.
A lot of this education for the kids is super valuable for the parents. We talk about kids. The first hour of your day, you don’t get access to your phone. You have to walk into your phone without stimulation. Parents, I promise you, I do this every single day. At least an hour. Sometimes 2 or 3. It’s because I get up super early and nobody needs to talk to me that early anyways. It will change your life. Just one hour.
The first hour of your day. If you do not touch it, other than to look up maybe what time it is or turn off your alarm, if you focus that one hour to spend with your family before they go to school or whatever, when you have that moment not on your phone, I’m telling you it’ll change your life. Your kids will see it. They’ll know it, they’ll feel it and they will copycat you because monkeys see, monkey do, honestly. Try it. Parents. That’s for you.
When girls come to our weekend retreats or they come to our week-long summer camps, the first thing that happens at the check-in table is, “Where’s your phone? Where’s your watch?” It’s like, okay. It is like they have to take up anyway, and so they hand it over. The ones who’ve been before are, they don’t care. The ones who are new are like they have to have their phone. What about their streak? All that stuff.
After just a day or two of being with their peers and everybody is focused on each other and nobody’s looking at their phone and all that, after a week, I ask the girls every time, I’ll say, “Did you miss your phone?” All of them will say, ‘Not a bit. Actually, I felt great to take the pressure off. It was so nice to have a week without having to worry about all that.” My hope, and I think it’s probably yours too, is that once we get them to experience that, they’ll want to replicate that when they go out to their regular world.
Imagine, you’d said for a week, they were like, “I didn’t miss it. I actually really enjoyed it,” that’s been going on for thousands of years. Human relationship has occurred not through texting for thousands of years.
How do we survive that?
We’ll get back to that at some point where kids aren’t messaging their dad who’s in the living room with them, “I just sent you something on Instagram.”
We’ve been talking to Nate Lewis and his website is TheInnocent.org and you also get look on there. Also, his email newsletter is @TheInnocent.USA. Did I get that right?
Yeah. That’s our, well that’s our social media handle. You can go through there and follow us on there. On the homepage, just scroll to the bottom right down there, it’ll say sign up right there. It’s super easy.
Thank you so much for your time and your expertise. I’m so happy there are people like you out there who are buying the good fight. I love the fact too that it’s not just about social media platforms are bad. It’s more about we need to preserve our children’s innocence. I think that’s a good way to frame it. I appreciate your time. I appreciate what you’re doing.
It’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Good to talk to you.
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Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words
That was an interesting and important conversation to be more aware of. Not just the sense of social media is bad, but like, what can happen? How can you prevent things from happening, especially online predators and all? I also have a link to that article and the video called How Many Strangers Are In Your Teenager’s Bedroom? It’s a really good video. It’s an eye-opener. The article post is a good article to read as well.
We can’t get enough education and our kids cannot get enough education to take care of themselves. One of the things that we can all do is we can push off the date when we let our kids get on social media. Girls in middle school are just not ready. Even if they’re ready, the ocean they’re swimming in is 99% of them are not ready. It’s really hard for them to keep their head above water and to do the right thing. I think we need to wait until they’re in high school, at least, with a good track record.
I sure appreciate you coming by here and reading this. By the way, my new book, Keeping Your Family Grounded When You’re Flying by the Seat of Your Pants came out. You can look for that on Amazon or wherever you get your books and also on our website. There’s a chapter in there. I redid the book. It’s a twenty-year-old book. I redid it and I added 4 or 5 new chapters. One of the reasons is the world is a different place now than it was twenty years ago. One new chapter is about technology and social media, which I think you’ll find interesting, with more information about this topic. I will see you next time. Thank you so much for stopping by.
Important Links
- The Innocent
- How Parents Can Take Back Their Daughter’s Childhood with Katherine Martinko
- How Many Strangers Are In Your Teenager’s Bedroom?
- The Innocent on Instagram
- The Anxious Generation
- Keeping Your Family Grounded When You’re Flying by the Seat of Your Pants
About Nate Lewis
Nate Lewis is the Founder of The Innocent, a nonprofit focused on combating child sex trafficking, exploitation, and sexual assault in the United States. With experience as an Executive at a global anti-trafficking organization, Nate has led international and domestic anti-trafficking efforts in collaboration with law enforcement. His 16 years abroad and travel to over 40 countries have deepened his understanding of human trafficking, informing his work at The Innocent. Nate’s leadership and global perspective drive initiatives that create safer communities and position him as a key advocate against child sex crimes.