Episode 210: The Rise in Teen Sextortion Cases and What You Can Do About It

Feeding The Mouth That Bites You: Parenting Teens Into Adulthood

Kenneth Wilgus, PhD, P.C.

Christian Parenting, Christianity, Teens, Education, Teenagers, Kids, Kids & Family, Parenting, Religion & Spirituality, Adolescents, How To, Parenting Teens, Parents

4.9 • 714 Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Recent headlines tell us about a rise in teen boys being lured into sending explicit photos and then blackmailed for money to avoid these being published on the web. Some of these cases have resulted in suicide and the FBI has sent out warnings to parents. Of course, exploitation through explicit photos is nothing new to teen girls as well. How are parents to respond to these threats? Jessica and Dr. Ken approach these issues as an opportunity for real dialogue and not another occasion for fear. Open conversation about online threats are particularly important for parents of teenagers that may appear to be innocent of any sexual interest. Adolescents need to be prepared for online threats not just protected. We cover all this and more. Dr. Ken references the resource, "Take It Down" to help fight online publishing of explicit photos: https://takeitdown.ncmec.org/ If you have a minute, please leave us a review. We love hearing listeners encouraging other listeners. You can order Dr. Ken's book "Feeding The Mouth That Bites You" here: https://a.co/d/hBnlbzI Got questions or feedback? We want to hear from you! [email protected] Music provided by the great John David Kent - https://www.johndavidkent.com/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Feeding the Mouth That Bites You, a weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world.
0:15.2	I'm Jessica Pfeiffer, and as always, I'm joined by psychologist and author, Dr. Ken Wilgus.
0:20.9	Hey, Dr. Ken.
0:22.7	Jessica, how are you doing?
0:24.7	I'm good. How are you?
0:26.6	I'm good. I'm good.
0:27.9	So you've been reading a lot and sending me articles that are so interesting.
0:33.9	Things that concern me.
0:36.1	Yes, I'd like to talk about something that you brought up.
0:40.6	One of the articles you sent to me was on sextortion. Yes. So would you kind of give us a
0:46.1	definition of what this is to explain to parents if they haven't read anything about sex
0:51.2	distortion? So if you haven't read read, there's a current FBI sent out
0:55.9	a warning in the last few months that there's been a significant increase. In this case,
1:03.4	the pattern is, sex distortion is when someone elicits you to, solicits you to give a picture of yourself, some sort of nude picture of yourself,
1:15.4	and then blackmailes you with that. I'll send this out to everybody if you don't send me money
1:20.9	or send me more pictures. This has been going on, certainly asking for nude photos of teenage girls has been going on for a long time.
1:31.8	I think we talked about that in previous episode.
1:35.3	What's newer is men posing as teenage girls, sending photos of a teenage girl, and then asking the teenage boy to send
1:49.6	photos of himself, and then turning around and blackmailing him with either needing to send
1:56.1	more photos, but definitely quickly it moves to, you've got to send me lots of money.
2:14.1	And there have been actually an increase in suicides among these boys that have been extortion using by getting them to send images of themselves.
2:20.2	Yeah, the article that you sent to me was just incredibly heartbreaking as a parent because it seemed so plausible.
	...

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