{"id":884,"date":"2019-05-30T17:47:33","date_gmt":"2019-05-30T17:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.familyorbit.com\/blog\/?p=884"},"modified":"2020-11-15T17:17:41","modified_gmt":"2020-11-15T17:17:41","slug":"dangers-of-snapchat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.familyorbit.com\/blog\/dangers-of-snapchat\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Explain The Dangers Of Snapchat to Your Teen"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve been following the news at all, you will no doubt have come across the term \u201csexting\u201d – a portmanteau word that combines texting and sex. Sexting is, as you might imagine, is the act of texting sexually-charged text, images, or video through an online medium, like the Snapchat app.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, sexting isn\u2019t something confined to the adult world: teens are also doing it, and in large numbers, if you believe the statistics. JAMA Pediatrics<\/a>, one of the leading child-focused medical journals in the world, studied more than 110,000 teens between the ages of 13 and 19 and found that many of them were willing to admit to sexting. Research suggests that more than one in seven teens are sending \u201csexts\u201d and that one in four is receiving them, often unsolicited.<\/p>\n

Whether this constitutes \u201cnormal\u201d behavior or not among teens remains to be seen, but there\u2019s no doubt that sexting has become much easier since the advent of the smartphone. It doesn\u2019t take a genius to work out how to use a smartphone to create home-brewed pornography and send it to somebody in your phonebook.<\/p>\n

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What is Snapchat?<\/b><\/h2>\n

What has parents most worried about is the danger of Snapchat, a trendy and unique kind of messaging service that differs from run-of-the-mill apps, like WhatsApp or Messenger (by Facebook). Snapchat developers designed the program to automatically delete messages<\/em> in a person\u2019s inbox or outbox after a set period, making them permanently unrecoverable. A teen using Snapchat, therefore, can send out sexts and rest easy in the knowledge that after a short time interval, the app will automatically delete them forever, eliminating any evidence that they sent them in the first place. <\/span><\/p>\n

The same holds true of anyone who sends your child a sext: Snapchat will automatically delete the message once both people have viewed the message and left the chat. This makes monitoring what a teen is doing on Snapchat<\/a> very difficult. Your child could be sending or receiving sexually-charged messages and images, yet you would never find out, as the program deletes them as soon as they are opened. The only evidence you could collect is if you physically take their phone, open their inbox, and view the messages yourself.<\/span><\/p>\n