As some of you know, I have two young teen daughters. No one said parenting was going to be a walk in the park, but it sure isn’t easy raising girls who were born into a social media age that is completely unlike the era in which I grew up.
In those days, communications was limited to a rotary phone with the very long cord, notes passed in school, knocking on someone’s door, and the post (in other words, MAIL). I remember when we first got cable, and a wireless remote control. I remember the thrill of watching a movie that we could rent at the store, and watch as many times as we wanted. I remember how awesome it was to record music and television shows. I remember sending my first emails and being amazed at the speed of which information could suddenly travel.
Today, it’s Netflix and texting and Snapchat and Twitter. Much more of the communicating that’s done is faceless and anonymous. Although I refuse to live my life in fear – afraid for myself and afraid for my kids – I do believe that it’s important to help our kids understand what kind of things they might run into out there in the world.
Sidebar: I never talked to my daughters about the #YesAllWomen articles and discussions that happened awhile back. But maybe I will, because there’s so much truth in there that it hurts. (If you don’t know about it, you can read about how it started right here.)
This was one of the stories that was floating around my social networks this morning: Woman catches man taking creeper shots. Ugh. Go read it.
As the mother of two young teen girls, this makes my skin crawl. THIS guy is the kind of guy I’ve been warning my kids about. I don’t know if they really believe men can be so gross, so close to home. And I’m not sure if men truly understand how this kind of thing makes women feel, and how frequently it happens.
Just last week I was working at my local coffee shop. There was a gaggle of tween girls sitting at a nearby table. I love watching young people in the wild. They are in their element, it seems, and it makes me happy to see them so happy. Wrapped up in their little social cocoon, happily talking and laughing, blissfully unaware of everything that is going on around them. It looked like they were working on an assignment, as their conversation was mostly centred around a laptop and I could overheard snippets of academic chatter over the sounds of the coffee shop.
I happened to be sitting at an L-shaped bank of seats. I was facing outward, towards their table, on one half of the L. On the other half of the L, there was a guy, sitting alone, facing outward as well. He looked like he was in his late 30s. He didn’t have a coffee in front of him, just a reusable water bottle. He was seated right across from the girls’ table. Every once in awhile he held his phone up in a certain way that made me think he might be taking a photo. Of course, I couldn’t be sure, because I didn’t have a clear view. I watched him, hoping to catch him in the act. He eventually caught me glaring, gave me an odd smirk, and put his phone down.
This isn’t the only time I’ve seen this happen. It’s happened before, at a local beach, and I was so angry I had to speak up: not just to the men who were surreptitiously taking photos of a group of young teen girls, but to the girls themselves. I told them what was happening, and that it was NOT ok.
There have always been creepy guys among us, but we live in different times, and the unfortunate reality is that the rise of smart phones makes this behaviour a lot more common.
This is why I’m asking you, if you see someone taking sneaky photos of someone else and you’re in a safe place, you must call them on it. If those were my girls at the coffee shop the other day, I’d want someone to look out for them and protect them from photo-taking creeps. Wouldn’t you?
