Teen tech tormentors: what's a parent to do?

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - When Boston University sophomore Kendrick Sledge was 14, incessant phone calls alerted her parents to her relationship with an abusive and controlling older boy, who would threaten suicide or a return to using drugs if she tried to break up with him.

There were also offers of gifts. Only the fear of getting in trouble with her parents prompted Sledge to turn down his offer to buy her a mobile phone.

"Thank goodness I didn't take it. It would have just become a private line for him to torture me," said Sledge, now 19.

Today's uber-wired teens aren't so lucky, according to a recent survey of 13- to 18-year-olds conducted for apparel company Liz Claiborne Inc.

One in three said they get as many as 30 hourly mobile phone text messages from a boyfriend or girlfriend wanting to know where they are, what they're doing or who they're with.

Nearly one in four reported hourly contact with a partner via cell phone or text messages between midnight and 5 a.m.

Computers also are used as tools to control, harass or humiliate, the teen respondents said.

Just over 70 percent said rumor spreading by boyfriends or girlfriends on mobile phones or online social networking sites -- such as News Corp.'s popular MySpace.com -- is a serious problem. Nearly the same percentage of teens said sharing private or embarrassing pictures/ or videos via cell phone or computers represented serious trouble.

Where Sledge's parents couldn't help but notice their home phone ringing off the hook -- nearly 70 percent of today's teens surveyed said their parents have no clue that the high-tech gadgets they provided in an effort to keep their offspring safe were being used by peers for psychological or physical warfare.

That's something Sledge and others are working to change.

Sledge is a member of a teen task force set up by Liz Claiborne, which partnered with the National Domestic Violence Hotline to create www.loveisrespect.org, a national teen dating abuse helpline launched earlier this month.

The importance of such efforts was underscored this week after a federal judge in Texas dismissed a high-profile lawsuit brought against MySpace by the family of a teenage girl who was sexually assaulted by a 19-year-old man she met on popular social networking site.

One New York City mother got a chilling first-hand view of the problem after her teenage daughter's friends posted a picture of her in a bathing suit on MySpace.com.

Her daughter found it funny and tried to brush off her mom's concerns, begging her not to call the other parents, even after the post attracted responses that appeared to come from adult men.

The concerned mom, who asked not to be identified, said she pulled down the MySpace posting, only to find that her daughter opened a new MySpace account two months later that included enough personal information for anyone to physically locate her.

"Perfectly good parents who have a lot of communication with their kids are having problems with this. It's very scary. Teenagers cannot assess risk. Getting into serious trouble happens to other people and not to them," she warned.

"OPEN SEASON" ON TEENS

A variety of surveys have shown that most kids have suffered random acts of cruelty at the hands of so-called friends.

Teens, who tend to favor IM and texting over e-mail, are vulnerable because they don't have the experience to know the difference between healthy behavior and harassment. When something goes wrong, they often feel isolated and are reluctant to turn to parents or other adults for fear of losing mobile phone or computer rights -- or being banned from seeing certain people.

"It's open season on kids," said Brandon Watson, chief executive of privately held IMSafer, a company that monitors conversations on AOL, Yahoo, MSN and MySpace IM programs and flags dangerous, inappropriate or threatening words, IM jargon or themes and alerts parents who subscribe when it detects a potential threat. It also offers a forum for parents at IMSafer.com.

Lori Hahn, a computer savvy mother of three teens who keeps up with IM acronyms, said she signed on with the company after stumbling upon a chat session in which her 13-year-old son was talking with an adult male, whose picture came up in the IM window.

"We had a conversation about it. He hadn't been aware that talking to strangers on the Internet wasn't a fine thing to do ... He was just naive," she said, noting that IMSafer sends her flagged exchanges with a few other lines of text to put the conversation in context.

"I'm not going to leave it to chance. I don't think I hover, but I try to keep them safe. They're the only kids I have," Hahn said.

Since no technology offers a bullet-proof solution, technology and anti-violence experts say parents have to get involved.

Sledge suggests that parents who suspect technology-enabled abuse stay open to having a conversation about what may be happening, rather than running with the instinctive response of forbidding their child from seeing or communicating with his or her abuser.

"Sit down with your child and say, 'I'm concerned, you seem to be acting different. Is something wrong?'," said Sledge, who noted that parents can also use the new teen helpline.