The convicted offender that challenged Facebook in Northern Ireland, won his case yesterday and the company has been given this weekend to remove the page. The BBC has the follow-up story here.
As you read the rest of the article you’ll see how self-distancing conversations look a lot more like those conversations with friends I referenced earlier. Getting away from all of the “I” and “me” and fairly judging the situation quietly and calmly as if it was happening to someone else can put it into a perspective that we sometimes lose when we are thinking of ourselves, especially those of us who struggle with self-blame. Of course, then that self-blame turns to rumination which feeds into depression, and round and round we go.
There is a better way, and the examples given can help if we are willing to practice them. Especially the idea of reminding ourselves that we’ve already been through tougher, and more stressful situations and come out the other side.
Penn State scandal: How what happened in State College forced me to confront my own abuse tags: CA Protecting Our Children: Clues to Sexual Predation tags: CA Child abuse: We’re making the problem worse tags: CA Boy thought abuse was “normal” tags: CA Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
But what is the least harmful way to deal with that? What is the least harmful way to inform kids of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza? What is the least harmful way to prepare kids for the natural disasters that seem only to get worse each year?
I don’t know. What I do know is that dealing with all of this is hard and only part of the causes of increased needs for youth mental health. Our current mental health system failed many people for years when the need wasn’t this high. What we are doing isn’t working. Continuing to do the same thing won’t work. Fighting against increased funding and availability of resources won’t work. Hiding our heads in the sand and saying, “not my kid,” won’t work. This is a society-wide problem that will require societal change. I am not sure we are willing to make those changes, but an entire generation of kids will pay the price for that unwillingness.
I shared this story about former professional baseball player Mel Hall across some of the social networks last night, but the more I read it, the more I am convinced that if you want to see grooming at it’s finest, go read some of the stories included in that piece. From a distance it might…
The tech world is alive with news that Google has helped locate and charge a predator based on scanning their email for child pornography images. Obviously, this is a case of a stupid criminal, if you’re going to share illegal images, using a cloud service provider that already admits to scanning email contents for keywords…
