12 year old ds disturbing Google search

[SusanSHelit]

I have just checked my voicemail this evening and had a message from 12yo ds head of year (y7) about 'something offensive which was picked up by smoothwall on the school laptop while he was logged in'. In the voicemail the hoy said that no requirement for a set of educational sessions and that he assured her it was a one off.

The message didn't detail what was picked up. I obviously had a conversation with ds about this and first he said he didn't remember what he typed. Then a few minutes later he revealed that he typed in 'is it illegal to put an animal in a blender?'

Im honestly really shocked and very disappointed. I would never have expected this from him. His father and I are separated and have been for a few years and he has pets in both houses (gerbils in his dad's, a cat at mine).

I've spoken to his dad about this, we have a pretty good coparenting relationship. Ds is going to his dad's after school tomorrow as I'm working nights for three nights from tomorrow. I'm going to call the school in the morning obviously but I don't even know where to begin with this.

Ds said he was just messing about with his friends but that he would even think about this has really disturbed me. He's a good kid at home, and this seems very out of the blue. He didn't say his friends typed it in, he said he did.

He's been banned from his PlayStation tonight and I've taken his phone too. I don't know if he will be allowed these in his dad's tomorrow

Was it definitely not videos?

You’ve given a 12 year old a smartphone that you only do “spot checks” on. This school incident will be nothing compared to what he’s already accessed online in his own home under your own roof.

You need full access to his phone and his phone’s search history. You sound very naive.

I understand why the school flagged it, yes. And if it was part of a concerning pattern of behaviour then it would be a useful piece of info.

I do think people on MN are getting carried away insisting that there MUST be something terribly wrong, because I think it is highly unlikely, especially with the context OP gives. And IME of boys around this age, both my own school memories and also boys I've known as a parent or through work, silly outrageous gross jokes including cartoonish-level violence are absolutely hilarious to them, and I can totally imagine the conversation going as likelysuspect says. So to me, the scenario of boys getting carried away and ending up with a question that is pretty grim taken out of context is highly likely, whereas the scenario that one of them is actually really hoping to try this out and has confessed to their entire group of friends and the friend has agreed to help them by googling it, and none of them feels worried enough to confess - this is remote.

A scenario that a singular child has had the thought and wants to work out if they'll get into trouble and googles the question secretly, not realising it will flag up on the school system is slightly less remote and would concern me a lot more. But that doesn't seem to be what happened. It just sounds like a group of boys being silly and not considering the real life impact of the thing they are suggesting. Which, as I said, does sometimes need to be pointed out to them when they go too far.

I’m glad you were able to chat with him about it. Before I saw your update I was about to suggest that his friend may have claimed it wasn’t illegal & he was proving a point.

I remember once googling something about people eating animals that were still alive, in the hope it would be untrue…. This was at the start of the pandemic when I read something upsetting online and couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. I was hoping that I would quickly see it was nonsense so I could put it out of my head. But if someone had looked at my last search that night, they could have assumed I was a right weirdo, or worse 🥴

so do you think it means no one else is supposed to google it either? You genuinely believe it's weird to be curious about "awful things"?

My last disturbing google search must be Unit 731 - Shall I expect the police to rush and lock me up before I become a serial killer

It's absolutely your right to stay well away from painful subjects, but it's a bit of a jump to pretend no-one else can be curious about things.

I have no idea what Unit 731 is.

Okay I am never curious enough about things I consider awful (not the same as ‘awful things’ as there’s a difference which can stray into illegal territory) to bother researching them.

But as an adult you have the maturity and intelligence to do that. A 12 yo is a different prospect

Different things are different.

I presume OP has had at least some sort of chat with her son about pornography and internet use. A 12 year old will also know about privacy and boundaries. So searching porn is likely to feel obviously transgressive, and much more fair to punish.

Unless OP has been raising her son to know that researching animal cruelty law is unacceptable I don’t see how there is any parallel at all. I just don’t see how he’s anything the slightest bit blameworthy. It is a valid and interesting question,
it’s not age inappropriate, and in the absence of any other worrying signs it doesn’t signal he’s a sadist.

And so my thread isn't so wacky!!!!

Fair enough but I don’t get why someone would look into it. But then I guess we all have trigger points

Yes it is. It’s nasty and you have been vile to people.

Why have you come onto this to make a point about your own nasty thread? Running out of people to have a go at!

a 12 year old is as curious as any adult, if not more than most. I'd expect kids to do more research than most adults do, and be encouraged to do so! Didn't you when you were that age?
For most adults, it was in library rather than internet, so the information accessible was a bit different (and not that much if you knew where to look).

Of course school and parents supervise, but the concept of researching anything and everything surely is absolutely normal. "Apt Pupil" for example is a novel, not a warning about children's natural curiosity especially when they mess around with their friends.

I guess the reason this thread triggered me is I was exactly the sort of boy who would want to what the law was, why, the ethics, philosophy, etc etc.
We aren’t all that rare, and we were 12 yr olds once too.

The best analogy I can think of is perhaps if I had been a girl who just enjoyed dancing for the enjoyment of it, and being punished for being obviously a sexualised deviant.

In both cases, something entirely innocent and healthy looked at through the worst possible lens.

(I’m not trying to make any boy/girl point here, it’s just the analogy I could think of).

This is SUCH a typical jokey thing a boy would say when messing around with his friends! I am shocked it isnt obvious!

Wasn't there an art exhibition with goldfish in blenders? The artist assumed the public wouldn't turn on the blenders, but the exhibition had to be taken down as a few goldfish got blended.

It's so normal that there are even book collections in the serie "The Dangerous Book for Boys" with a title making fun of a perfectly normal behaviour with bright kids.

(why does it have to be "for boys" and is so patronising for girls, I have no idea, but the idea was good apart from that)

Takes me back to my teenage years and the advent of the internet, where one of the first viral hits - enjoyed by people of all ages - was JoeCartoon's "Frog in Blender".

And in that one you actually blended the virtual frog yourself.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-conversation-with-legen_b_6432124

So do you believe they should have unfettered access to satisfy their curiosity before they are mature enough to deal with some things?

Actually I got very angry with Amazon the other day - they had a STEM robot thing in pink and it was ‘for girls’

I believe that a silly google search is not an indication that a child is a dangerous psychopath planning to torture animals in his backyard!

The school flagged it, clearly he is supervised, but he's done absolutely nothing wrong, nothing out of the ordinary and nothing that would cause for concerns.

If a kid is flagged for researching a term used in violent porn (and I can't think of any), I wouldn't translate that as perversion or being a future rapist, just that someone blurted out the expression and he wanted to know what that meant.

In the absence of otherwise disturbing behaviour, I think this is just children messing around.

There was an infamous flash animation/game on the internet when I was growing up called 'frog in a blender'. The frog insulted you and you could adjust the blender settings!! When you look back, you think wtf, but as a kid you just think it's a laugh!! Most kids knew of it and all still grew up normal!

Exactly. My generation grew up going on Something Awful which would make that search look tame

So you would accept him looking up anything including terms from violent porn as it might just be curiosity? 😳

Minimise what? He didn't do anything.

What if she searched, "Is it illegal for my teacher to encourage me to cut my tits off".

What if he searched, "Is it illegal for my teacher to encourage me to cut my dick off"

I doubt you would get a report home about that. They want that kept covered up.

Nobody has suggested this - I'm not sure why you think people are?

I would expect a child to try to google things which they are curious about which might include things like sex/porn, which is why hopefully you put controls on your internet and/or remove access to things like browsers and google until you think your child is old enough to handle that.

I would hope schools have filters so the results won't show anything bad, or that children don't have unsupervised access to computers.

I think the difference between adults and 12 year olds is that an adult has the maturity and experience to understand that googling something like this might bring up an image that I wouldn't like to see, so I wouldn't google it or at least not in these exact words. If I was curious about the legality then I might google something like law around animal cruelty UK. But I've got probably a lot more google experience than a 12yo, and we had no filters on our internet, so I probably got some of the experience by accidentally googling something I might rather have not seen. In fact I remember at probably about this age finding a bizarre site called rate my poo, which was just photos of different poos in toilets. My friends and I couldn't understand this but found the existence of it baffling and hilarious. It only occurred to me about 20 years later that it is probably a fetish site, although it wasn't sexually explicit.

A 12 year old doesn't think as far ahead as an adult - they have a silly thought and they follow the thought. Internet dangers aren't intuitive like the danger from an actual blender would be.