The Cyber Effect (21 page)

This becomes problematic when that ten-year-old boy comes home from school and turns on the computer to participate in one of the multiplayer online role-playing games so popular with boys. They are geared for teens and adults, but this makes them seem slightly forbidden, and therefore all the more deliciously exciting, to a younger child. And there are so many games released each year that it can be difficult for parents to stay on top of the content, what's appropriate and what's not.

Multiplayer games have a strong culture—the games can have almost a cult following among fans, to the point of becoming a subculture with its own social rules and slang. A “grind” is a term for any repetitive, time-consuming activity in an online game, and a “griefer” is a player who intentionally provokes anger and irritation, and so on. There are rules of conduct for how to invite new members to join an adventuring party, how to divide the spoils of victory, and how to behave while playing in a new group.

Boys are the predominant participants of multiplayer games due to the focus on shooting and violence, which is particularly attractive to young males. But in the age group of four to twelve years old, a boy can be quite vulnerable, particularly to people who want to take advantage of him. Boys under thirteen routinely play violent shooter games with strangers online—sometimes repeatedly with the same strangers, a percentage of whom are not there just to play.

In my forensic work in the area of cyberbehavioral analysis, one of the things I do is create or build virtual profiles based on available digital evidence. Much like forensic psychologist Georg Sieber and his
imagined scenarios of the 1972 Munich Games, I look at what could be possible online. I am a profiler. But the problem is a predator is a profiler too.

And when I use the word
predator
, I am not narrowing this to just pedophiles. It could mean an individual with other motives—profit, extortion, or political radicalization. All of these types of predators have the same modus operandi. They seek out victims, attempt to engage and build trust, and then exploit them.

While a ten-year-old boy is playing his online game, he is hemorrhaging vast amounts of information into cyberspace, even if he's obeying his parents and has not given his name, age, or any other private information to strangers. In exchanges over the Internet, even without use of a webcam, the boy's tone and pitch of voice, as well as use of language, are good indicators of his age. Has his voice deepened yet? Accent and dialect provide more information. The length of time he plays uninterrupted by a parent is another indicator. How late is he allowed to stay up? These hint at how strict or lenient his parents are, at least in terms of the Internet. The pattern of the boy's playing will also tell you the habits or “pattern of life” of his household—when dinner is served, what happens on weekends, what time the parents go to bed. This would help to geolocate the child—that is, find out where he lives.

A predator is hypervigilant, particularly for any information about levels of supervision in that household. The microphone designed in the game to capture the player's verbal input becomes the listening post—in your home—for a predator.

If the predator begins playing regularly with the boy over time, he can figure out where this child lives. Eventually, he can determine or estimate the child's level of social isolation. If a predator is invited into the boy's platoon or group, he can also establish whether the child has friends who consistently join him—another way to determine the boy's level of social isolation. If he's a loner, he could be more vulnerable. The boy's emotional stability can be judged by how he reacts to engineered scenarios in which he is put under pressure during the game—a way to test his resilience. Is the boy upset easily? Is he volatile? Is he reckless? The predator is harvesting data through game play. He will
try to figure out if the boy is home alone, or what time of day the parents are likely to be gone. All of this information is available to a potential predator before a one-on-one personal conversation begins with the child.

A young boy can be influenced, brought along slowly, by complimenting him on his exceptional playing style, giving him a support network, and asking him to join a permanent team.

In a multiplayer game online, when more than one predator comes to play a game, sometimes as many as four or five predators, it is called a “wolf pack.” While they are circling your child, they will all act like they don't know one another. But they do.

Now imagine if you looked out your window and saw your ten-year-old boy outside playing ball with two or three or four adult men you'd never seen before. Wouldn't you be a little concerned? Wouldn't you go outside to see what was happening—or call your son inside? That's what effectively is happening online. And yet you are less likely to be worried because, after all, your boy is sitting in his bedroom. He's quietly playing his game. He's at home. He's safe. Right?

As a cyberpsychologist, I believe that the lack of supervisory visibility and presence of authority online could be linked to many of the undesirable, inappropriate, and self-destructive behaviors we observe. I would argue that this cyber effect explains a lot of the negative online behavior of children and adolescents.

Law enforcement is aware of the risk in online gaming sites. In the environment of a violent shooter multiplayer game, friendships and loyalties are built over time. One of the powers of the cyber environment is its ability to deceive and delude—and attract vulnerable individuals into strange communities where their desire for acceptance becomes an obsession. Not only do your children encounter strangers online, but they also can find themselves doing things they'd never do in real life, due to the online disinhibition effect.

Children in the eight-to-twelve age group are especially vulnerable to environments where there's a lack of authority. They are just beginning to form their sense of self. They are beginning to bond more closely with peers—while pulling away from their families and their parents. As their friends and schoolmates gain more power and influence
over them, a child in this age group feels more pressure to conform. Now take that urge into cyberspace, where behavior of any type can be amplified and escalated. The peer pressure may become greater, even though the other people there aren't physically present. Sometimes they aren't even real.

Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier of Waukesha, Wisconsin, were ten years old when they became fans of Creepypasta Wiki, a website devoted entirely to horror stories. Kids of almost any age love the paranormal and ghost stories, horror movies, and scaring one another. A
creepy pasta
is a short scary story, like the ones that kids tell one another at a sleepover or around a campfire.

But the immersive nature of the Internet creates a cyber-campfire that is more haunting than a real one. On the Creepypasta site, kids are asked to write their own creepy pasta. The interactivity of posts and comments—the aliveness and immersive nature of the Creepypasta Wiki community—can fire the imagination more powerfully. A warning on the website informs parents that most of the content is fine for kids thirteen and older. But what girl of ten wouldn't want to see something that was deemed fit for one who is thirteen?

Geyser and Weier became enthralled by a menacing phantom called Slender Man and the legend growing up around him. There were scary “photographs” and drawings of Slender Man, and accounts of actual “sightings.” Tall and thin, Slender Man wore long black robes similar to an angel of death and was often pictured lurking in forests behind unsuspecting children. Once he'd captured them, he was said to impale them on trees, remove their organs, and drive them to madness. In reality, he was the fabrication of Eric Knudsen, a young husband and father in Florida who had entered a Photoshopping contest on the Something Awful online forum in 2009, hoping to win a prize for designing the best “paranormal image.” For the contest, Knudsen created two black-and-white photos of a tall faceless monster in a black suit who stalked children. Eric called him Slender Man. Before long, this character became a focus of fan fiction and a horror hero.

Geyser and Weier believed he was real. They spent afternoons, evenings, and weekends on horror sites, reading posts and comments about
Slender Man that described new “sightings.” Sometime in early 2014, when they were both twelve, the girls decided to become his “proxies.” They believed they would prove their worthiness to Slender Man—and he would appear to them—if they killed someone.

After months of plotting, the girls chose a victim, a schoolmate and twelve-year-old girl who considered herself their friend. Lured into the woods for a “camping trip,” she spent a day and a night with Geyser and Weier before the Slender Man proxies attacked her while playing a game of hide-and-seek. She was stabbed in the arms, legs, and torso nineteen times before she was left for dead.

Not quite dead, though, she was able to crawl to a nearby road, where she lay on the sidewalk in her blood-soaked black fleece jacket. A bicyclist found her and called 911.

When arrested, Geyser and Weier confessed in lurid detail, creating a global news story that fueled only more folk-horror interest in Slender Man. As the story in
Newsweek
put it, “Slender Man is now a facsimile of the Puritan devil: He is everywhere, every day, a specter of our anxieties about raising children in a world where technology reigns and the lines between reality and fantasy grow dimmer.” This is a real problem for young kids who are still trying to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

How frequently are twelve-year-old girls arrested for attempted murder? In 2012, there were 8,514 people arrested for murder and nonnegligent homicide in the United States. Only one of them was a girl under the age of thirteen.

“
This should be a wake-up call for all parents,” Waukesha police chief Russell Jack said in a statement given out at a press conference about the stabbing. “The Internet has changed the way we live. It is full of information and wonderful sites that teach and entertain. The Internet can also be full of dark and wicked things.”

We read our children fairy tales—sometimes very grotesque ones. One neurobiological explanation for this tradition is to excite pathways of the developing brain through experiences of play and discovery. Fairy tales can also contain important cultural messages about life
that are handed down through the generations. Sitting at a campfire, a child can get lost in a scary story and become truly terrified, but soon enough the real world—whether it is the voice of the friend telling the story, or the environment around the child, the smoke from the fire, the darkening sky, the stars above—will remind the child that there is another world and another life beyond the story. But this is much less likely in the cyber environment, where immersion makes fantasies seem real.

Granted, the Slender Man murder attempt is an extreme and thankfully uncommon example, but it illustrates luridly and tragically how individuals can lose sight of the real world in cyberspace. The virtual world can feel as true—or truer. One could potentially lose moral moorings and a sense of right and wrong. By stabbing and killing their friend, the girls apparently hoped to increase their status in the cyber world. But after being tried as adults in a Wisconsin court, they are now prisoners in the real world.

Technically, the girls didn't syndicate online because they already knew each other. But apparently they did self-radicalize, in terms of becoming radical followers of Slender Man together. It is so rare for girls to attempt murder. By talking about their plans for the crime together, and how to do it, the act of murder would have become more normalized between them.

Eventually, Geyser was diagnosed with early-onset schizophrenia during a court-ordered competency evaluation. In March 2016, an HBO documentary,
Beware the Slenderman
, examined both the Wisconsin stabbing and how children can become drawn into beliefs spread via the Internet. To me, this raises a more serious question regarding the role of interactive media and those with a predisposition to psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia, which can develop as a result of interplay between biological predisposition and the kind of environment a person is exposed to.

Children are especially susceptible to their environment and can feel pressure to participate in group activities in order to be accepted. Put this together with the known factors of the cyber domain—amplification, escalation, online disinhibition—and the vulnerability of children
could become greater, the pressure from peers stronger, and the behavior of the group even more extreme. To not conform may require more confidence, and self-knowledge, and courage, than most eight- to twelve-year-old children have.

The goal of good parenting in Europe, for many years now, has been to teach children resilience. The idea is that by not sheltering and overprotecting them, children are able to find their own footing, strength, and coping skills. This is accomplished by exposing them to difficult realities, hardship, even danger. The approach has gathered quite a lot of support in recent years.

So what is
resilience
?

Resilience is described as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress—such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors.” In common parlance, we would call resilience the ability to “bounce back” from difficult experiences, to carry on with a meaningful and productive life in spite of setbacks and even tragedies.

We have all known—or heard inspiring stories about—individuals who recover from awful events and circumstances. And it is always hard to hear about the ones who don't. The stories of individuals in concentration camps in World War II, described so well in neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's book
Man's Search for Meaning
, show resilience at its extreme. And the response of many Americans to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks—the way the victims' families were able to rebuild their lives and go on, shows a similar, amazing ability to bounce back.