How one mom saved her teen from online groomers
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Colorado mom Dana Grueser is still trying to piece together how her sweet son ended up on a locked ward screaming at her for being a Nazi and begging for his phone. “Yeah,” sighs Dana. “It’s a lot.”
At this point it has been two years since that dark time. When her son Ari was 14 and starting high school, Dana says, his friend group fell apart. He and his girlfriend broke up, and his parents separated, too. Dana encouraged him to go outside, but he said no one else was out there. He started spending more time online.
Dana wasn’t too worried. She’d set up parental controls. And yet, she would later learn, Ari got to the point where he was eluding all the safeguards and spending 12-14 hours online a day.
Online he made new “friends,” who urged him to do things like carve pentagrams and upside down crosses on his chest.
The FBI recently issued a warning about these “violent online networks,” that work to establish trusting relationships with kids, especially ones with issues like depression or eating disorders.
Once they’ve gotten a kid to do something humiliating — say, mutilating themselves on camera — they can threaten to show this to the kid’s friends or families.
As for why the gangs do this, the FBI lists sexual gratification, criminal extortion, social status and/or the desire to sow chaos.
The first few times Ari cut himself he was so upset afterward that he told his mom. But when Dana reported the cutting to his therapist, Dana says the response was, “So many kids are self-harming that we don’t necessarily raise it to an ‘emergency level’ unless they have a plan to commit suicide.”
So her son kept cutting himself. Even after Dana locked up all the knives and scissors, he used the wire from a spiral notebook. His political rants were all over the map.
One Saturday as Dana drove Ari home, she asked him, “Where are you getting this information and why are you feeling this way?”
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