Help! How do you stop kids bypassing internet / phone controls to watch porn?

[Namechangedisaster]

Just this. I've just realised that DS is accessing adult content via proxies. I thought I had iphone locked down with parental controls on the device (via Screen Time) and by the provider (all parental controls set appropriately and regularly updated and checked).

Aparently this all counts for nothing, because teens know more about tech than we do. He's accessing the entire web via proxies and this has got around all my controls.

I had NO IDEA this was a thing.

Apart from taking the phone away, what can I do to stop this? I feel absolutely sick about what he has already seen

The policy people at Ofcom who are responsible for implementing the Online Safety Act (and their EU equivalents implementing the new KIDS Act etc) need to read this thread!

Yeah I agree. Multi layers is a good approach. I find it totally crazy that so many parents don’t seem to limit their kids access to the internet. It’d be like just sending your kids into town on a Saturday night on their own.

Terrifying that there is going to be a huge proportion of an entire generation exposed/brought up with god knows what depravity online.

We already had a problem with sex related violence before all this 😟

is the phone set up in your name can you add verification level that an email goes to a parent if your child tried to add any new apps? We have this set up on our younger daughters phone we then have to approve for it to download? Unfortunately it would be no phone where is not in the lounge say with an adult to oversee

It is on Android - that's what we do. DD wants games and social media and is constantly trying to access them on a browser but we see all the requests and just refuse them.

I think that IS possible. The trouble is that with savvy teens, they'll get round your controls by using their friend's devices, finding old second hand phones and SIMs. In my experience, like with PP, parents who lock down hard (like me) end up with kids being sneaky.

It takes kids literally 5 mins to find this stuff on the internet. It's not hard at all, particularly for bright kids studing computer science GSCEs...😱

For anyone else who hasn't read all the messages here's what you need to know so we don't all keep repeating ourselves:

1/ Our phones are locked down with Safer SIMMs, broadband parental controls set to Strict, and the heaviest iPhone family controls set to on (which is how I know this is not working. We check the phones regularly).

2/ NONE of this prevents kids looking at horrific adult content via proxies.

3/I have talked to my son about porn, what it actually is, what its for, who the victims are and what it will do to him if he watches it.

4/ I have taken the phone away (OBVIOUSLY)

5/ I am looking for solutions where my kid can have a phone, just like all his friends, but can be kept safe from upsetting content.

6/ I am NOT then only parent in this position. Please read the thread.

I agree. What really frightens me is that when I talk to other parents they have absolutely no idea what their kids are doing on the internet (as evidenced by this thread, unfornately. Even in the most switched on corner of the internet, with parents who are actually taking time to think about parenting, they still think that tech bros can be trusted to keep their kids safe. They cannot).

I used to work with students just 10 years older than my boy and the stories they would tell were horrific. Their parents had no clue.

It should not be on individuals to protect children from big businesses profiting from their misery. It should be legislated for, urgently.

Honestly, I feel really bad for you
You’ve focused heavily on the tech

I think the main thing is that some of these boys and sorry it usually is boys…
They don’t see people as real. They think of them as being a character in a simulation.

I think he needs as much real human activity as possible and you need to talk to him and make sure that he sees people as people…. Really understands that he’s contributing to women being abused every time he looks at this.

Behind the scenes there are so many people, men especially, actively not wanting these sites blocked. Probably a lot of the dads as well. Probably the offcom workers who are supposed to protect children from this content let things slip.
It is like asking Trump to help Ukraine instead of Putin.

Thank you - I will have a read of this later

Apologies for not tagging, but someone upthread said that their kid found out how to use proxies to access adult sites through a YouTube gamer video, that's what happened to DS.

Seriously, who has time to police gaming channels? That's something that I thought was safe enough (albeit mind-numbingly dull).

Sadly, I think you're right. It's like asking policemen not to murder the women they are supposed to be protecting, or husbands not to drug their wives so that other men can sexually abuse them as they sleep, or rockstar comedians not to rape women in hotel rooms... or... well, there are too many examples to list.

Totally this. Lots of men won’t want a solution because then that’d stop them accessing sites.

It’s not apps though. Lots of these sites are just accessed through the browser.

I agree with making sure they see people in real life. I think if we keep them busy, they’ll have less time to be on their phone or other devices. Extra curricular clubs, Duke of Edinburgh, sport, music, cadets, volunteering etc.

@Namechangedisasteryou can’t make the internet totally safe. There will always be ways around controls. I think teaching them as best you can about the dangers, and keeping them very busy, are far more effective than trying to block certain content.

I agree - but there's a limit to how much adult-led activity you can reasonably expect a 13 year old to do.

DS competes at a national level at his main sport and trains regularly for that and for another sport he competes at at a regional school level. He's pretty busy.

It only takes a couple of unsupervised minutes for a kid with a phone to log onto an adult site they should not have access to, and see something they can never unsee.

The answer is to be MUCH more aware of where you kids are, and when, and with who. Fill their time up with supervised hobbies, sports, scouts, music, whatever floats your boat. They aren't spending hours reading shit on the Internet about VPN's and proxies if they have footie practise to get to two evenings a week, scouts another, DofE one night, a football match on the weekend etc.

Dont let them go places after school with mates - you tell them to come straight home, where you can control what access they have to stuff, computers /laptops should have passwords on. Be careful who you let them socialise with - if these other kids are given unrestricted access to phones/internet/youtube etc then they aren't suitable friends

and you restrict their phone so they only have 30 min a day on it, and block google, block youtube, block tik tok, all of it.

This is why private schools keep kids BUSY it keeps them out of trouble. Cadets, brass band, sport, volunteering, guides, dance, get your kids busy and fill up their time with fun stuff then they arent sat about on screens all the time with nothing to do but go down rabbit holes finding out stuff thats not appropriate.

Yeah but its a whole lot less damaging if they saw something inadvertently for a minute or two compared to spending hours every week immersed in completely unsuitable content online, extreme shit, manosphere, porn.

If he is using different proxies each time there are two things you can try.

Option 1 - nuclear
On the iPhone go to Settings → Screen Time → Content & Privacy Restrictions → Content Restrictions → Web Content the select allowed websites only and you can enter whitelist of allowed domains, everything else will be blocked.

Option 2 - techie
Change your router's DNS to a family-safe service such as:
Cloudflare Family (1.1.1.3 / 1.0.0.3)
CleanBrowsing Family Filter
OpenDNS FamilyShield
These services block adult sites and many known proxy domains before the page loads.

This is the thing I need, thank you. The DNS change. I have an older style BT Hub, can I do that? If so, how?

If you ring BT they will talk you through
how to do it on your router, or you could ask copilot.

I have gone with a Nothing/SafetyMode phone which is a different OS so you cant get round it with a VPN (it is the VPN, kinda). It's not perfect but it seems, early days, to be quite good - when a friend sent DS porn it was all blurred and it took a screenshot so I could see what he'd seen.
This shit is hard.

I think this is how I’d approach it. You can do all you want to lock it down and punish him and restrict him - but you can’t protect him from finding it elsewhere. You need to talk to him about consent and relationships and the reality of the porn market.

I am 46 so no phones when I was growing up and I don’t know anyone who never saw porn as a teenager. Of course it’s super different with all the horrors on the internet, but everyone found something in an older brother’s room or snuck into a video shop or passed around Playboy magazines. A friend and I found her brother’s videos when we were around 8 - I had lots of questions! It was everywhere then and more so now.

So there’s no way to avoid a teenager being aware of it, you need to help him think through what it all means and why it’s so problematic and damaging. And I’d be really keen to keep the communication open and honest as opposed to attaching too much shame to the whole thing. It’s really natural to be curious, it’s really natural to push boundaries and it’s really natural to be affected by the crazy world we live in. He will have to make the decision to walk away from this on his own on some level.

Proxies and free VPN apps are the usual way around Screen Time, and you are right that determined teens tend to stay one step ahead technically. A few things genuinely help. Blocking VPN and proxy categories at the network level works better than device controls alone, since it catches every device on the home wifi. Many routers and family DNS filters offer this. Pair that with requiring approval for new app installs, which closes off the easy proxy-app route. Treat the tech as a backstop rather than the whole answer though. The calm conversation about what he has seen and how it felt tends to do more long term than any setting, and it keeps the door open for him to come to you next time.