Special Edition: The Problem of Sextortion: A Message for Parents and Pastors of Teenage Boys and Young Men

Part I

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Special Edition: The Problem of Sextortion: A Message for Parents and Pastors of Teenage Young Men

 It’s a special edition of The Briefing for the parents of teenage boys and young men. Not only parents, but the pastors and youth pastors and those who are directly concerned with teenage boys and young men. And this is going to be material I wouldn’t discuss in the way I’m going to discuss it today, in the normal edition of The Briefing. This is a privileged conversation, but it’s an urgent conversation for the parents of teenage boys and young men, and others ministering to them and who love them, and it’s that love and concern for them that leads to this special edition today. It’s about the problem of sextortion.

Now, I think we all know, and I’ve often talked about the fact, quoted Pitirim Sorokin, the great Russian sociologist, that no civilizations had a great civilizational struggle helping girls to become women. But every civilization has a civilizational struggle to lead boys into healthy manhood. It’s a dangerous road, from boyhood to manhood, it’s an essential road. And the issue right now is that there are sexual and financial predators. In particular, there are extortionists who are going after teenage boys and young men. And the reason it’s called sextortion is because sex is involved. And there’s really no way to describe this in order for us all to understand what we’re trying to protect these boys and young men about. There’s no way to describe it without talking about some things I just wouldn’t talk about on The Briefing.

But I’ve had so many pastors contact me. I have had parents contact me, I’ve had family members contact me. And even in the state here of Kentucky, we’ve had this problem, even with the suicide of a teenage boy. And now we’re talking about multiple cases coast to coast, we’re talking about a big phenomenon. The FBI and the Department of Justice are warning that this is a burgeoning problem. And it’s particularly heart-rending because these are boys who are harming themselves, even committing suicide, teenage boys and young men, because of the shame of being caught in a compromised sexual situation, and that compromised situation’s coming digitally.

And so the Christian Doctrine of Sin reminds us that sin seizes the opportunity, and that’s exactly what happens with a lot of technology. Sin seizes the opportunity. There are those who will use the technology for nefarious ends, and they will zero in on a vulnerability. And let’s just face it, when you’re dealing with teenage boys and young men, you’re dealing with incredible sexual interest, very easy sexual excitement. And quite honestly, the opportunity, sometimes even unsuspectingly for something to turn sexual, which doesn’t even start off that way. That’s something fairly new to this.

When I first started hearing about this, commonly, the way this came about is that you had boys and young men involved in some kind of chat in a chat room digitally, and in the beginning at least, it seemed that a lot of that might have begun in a at least slightly sexualized context. And I mean, the digital world’s out there and these things can happen, and especially without supervision.

And the thing is, is that then you would have a sextortionist, you would have a criminal, an online criminal, which by the way, may have been posing as a teenage girl. All the time, it’s not, it’s organized crime coming from digital teams tn the third world, that’s where a lot of this is happening. Offshore, away from the United States, you have people in the digital world that are seeking to entrap teenage boys and young men. And originally a lot of it kind of started in a somewhat sexualized context, but that is now we are told by law enforcement, no longer the case. And as a matter of fact, it turns out that one of the avenues of vulnerability here is teenage boys and young men in say, gaming situations online, and/or athletic conversations. Sports fans’ chats and other context where they identify an online presence as a teenage boy. And the greatest vulnerability here are boys aged 14 to 19. So, that’s really what we’re talking about, is their target audience.

And here’s what they’re doing. They’re shaking them down for money. They get them into a situation where they’re in danger of being embarrassed, horrifyingly embarrassed, and then money’s required of them. The FBI is putting out reports saying that for instance, these sextortionists are then barraging these boys and young men with massive numbers of texts, demanding more and more and clearly leading to panic. What they get out of this is money. That’s all there is, money. And if they can get 50 or $100 out of a kid, and in some cases much, much more, when you’re running one of these operations, you multiply it by all the kids and all the people on this team, you can make a lot of money. And it is horrifying.

I think we need to speak explicitly here, and I think dads and pastors and others who were boys themselves, I think we just need to say honestly, we can understand how this can happen. Now, we are as Christians a people who know that sin is sin. We understand what sin is. We also understand that sin is deceptive, and that sin is progressive, and that sin entices. That’s made very clear in Scripture. It’s one of the central themes in the book of Proverbs. It is a clear biblical teaching. And here’s the thing, the last thing we want to do is say that sexual sin is not sin. The last thing we want to say to boys and young men is, “Hey, the rules are off.” That is not what we’re saying.

We are saying, now what we’re talking about here is organized crime and we will deal with the sin and we can deal with that. We can deal with that honestly. In the power of the gospel, we know exactly how to deal with sin. We know about repentance and just putting this before the Lord and the promise that “if we confess our sins, he’s faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to us from all unrighteousness.”

And a part of what that requires is also the passage of time. And the urgency, and the reason why I’m talking about this when I normally wouldn’t, the reason this isn’t on a normal edition of The Briefing, is that I need to speak to dads here and to all those who formerly were boys and just say, you remember how fast all this can happen? And especially when you understand some of these boys are getting into this, not because they say, “Hey, I’m going to sit down and have a sexually explicit conversation,” but because it starts somewhere else, but just as sin seduces, the next thing you know. It’s this and then it’s that, and then it’s that, and then it’s that. The process of sexual excitement takes place, and the next thing you know, the boy is sending a nude photograph of himself or of strategic parts of himself to these sources. And the next thing you know, they’re sending it back and demanding payment or they’re going to make it public. And this is where boys are panicking.

And this is a very strange situation because the most vulnerable boys and young men in this situation may well come from two-parent Christian homes. That is what is just so strange about this. It is so strategic that sending that kind of picture and the threatening to exposure in some situations wouldn’t be so devastatingly frightening as it is to a young man in a Christian home, as it is to a young man who’s going to have to explain this to his dad, going be humiliated with mom, and is going to have to talk about this even perhaps to authorities.

And as adult Christian men and as parents, we know we can handle this. We know that in the gospel we’re able to handle this. We can call sin, sin, and then we can also look at a boy in the face and say, “We’re going to call this what it is, but this is not what you think it is right now. Your shame right now is an indication of the warnings that should come about all sexual sin.” But in this situation, a dad understands how this happened. It’s not an excuse for it, that’s not to say it’s not sin. But the last thing we want is for a boy to harm himself because of the threat of disclosure. And as a matter of fact, what we need is knowledge for Christian parents to know that you’ve got to talk, and here dads, you got to talk with your boys. You got to talk with your sons. And pastors, youth pastors, you need to have some kind of way of communicating this to the boys in your ministry and especially to the parents so that they can deal with it.

But there are single moms out there, there are situations in which there isn’t a dad. Some man, Christian man, needs to step in and say, “Hey, tiger, this is what’s going on. I want you to know about it. And if you get this kind of contact, I want you to know early on how to recognize it and shut it down. I also want you to know that if you get in a situation where there is a photograph, number one, you are not the first adolescent male to get in this kind of trouble. Number two, Christ is able.”

In other words, you just put your arm around this kid, the last thing you want is for him to harm himself. You’re not going to say, “Hey, this is no big deal. Have at it again.” You’re not going to say that. You’re going to say, “Look, okay, this is an urgency, it’s an emergency.” But you’ll notice you can do so as a father. I think every father I know would want to do this with his son to say, “Hey tiger, this is serious, but that part we’ll deal with later. Right now we’re going to call 911. If necessary, we’re going to call in the feds. And number two, do not let anyone hold this against you.” Do not.” 

Because quite frankly, as you would understand, this is to some extent an empty threat, but it’s an empty threat that doesn’t sound like it to a teenage boy in crisis. Someone sends him back the picture and says, “If you don’t give me this much money, if you don’t go to Walmart or somewhere and you buy this cash card. If you don’t do this, if you don’t meet this guy here and give him this money or give him, the more commonly, a gift card or some kind of transferable unit of finance like that, then we’re going to expose you. We’re going to put this out on the internet.” And there’s some obvious things about this that a teenage boy and just an absolute trauma and anxiety and fear and panic, he’s not thinking about this. I mean, there are obvious things like, who’s going to recognize the picture? I mean, in other words, you just look at this and you realize that this is an exploitation of young males in a situation in which they’re going to panic, panic, panic.

And here’s the problem, young males have the ability to hurt themselves when they panic. And that is the last thing we want. That’s the last thing parents want. That’s the last thing Christian leaders want. And frankly, we just need to make very clear that we understand how you can get in this situation, and just like in any other sinful situation, what you need is to stop and get out and get help. And we just need to make them very knowledgeable of the fact that help is here.

We also need to tell them just right up front, “This is why is unsupervised access on the internet in the digital world to these chat rooms and all the rest, it’s just not wise.” And I think there are too many parents out there, and here I want to speak, maybe single moms. God bless you, single moms of boys and young men. I think you could be in a situation which is pretty easy to be persuaded, “hey, this is just about soccer. This is just about basketball. That’s all it is.” Well, maybe it isn’t, maybe it isn’t. But unsupervised life in the digital world, it’s just very, very dangerous. And so I want to speak to Christian parents and to Christian leaders saying this should be full evidence of the fact, more’s going on here. And the digital world, you always knew it was dangerous, but you thought people had to go somewhere dangerous for it to be dangerous. That’s not true. The danger is coming for your kid, the danger’s coming for their heart.

And so I just wanted to talk about this and be very clear that we as Christians can face anything like this and we should, and we need to just reach out. What we want these boys to know is right and wrong, good and evil, sin. We want them to understand what it is, repentance and forgiveness. We want to prevent this from happening. When it happens, we want to deal with it rightly, but our first imperative as Christians is to try to prevent this from happening, to put rules in place so that this doesn’t happen, to put protections in place.

And by the way, this means that parents, you need to be in regular conversation with your teenage boys and with young men, and that includes college-aged young men. You need to be in constant conversation with them, especially a walk and talk with dad, just periodically to say, “Hey, how’s this going?” And you need an opportunity for a kid to say, especially in a relationship he trusts, and particularly with dad or with another Christian man, he really trusts to say, “Hey, I think I’m in trouble here.” And at that point, we really don’t panic. We do the right thing. We put our arm around the kid and we pray about this and we deal with it. And in this case, it means, call 911, call the police, deal with it.

The real danger here is that teenage males can make absolutely deadly decisions in panic. And the sad thing here is that oddly, ironically enough, the greatest panic may come to the kid in a two-parent home with Christian parents. He does not want to disappoint you. He does not want to humiliate you. He is in a panic and in absolute humiliation trying to figure out how he can look you in the face, and much less tell you about this. He’s in panic that you’re going to be embarrassed about him. Are you? Well, maybe a little bit, but in the sense that you’re Christian parents raising a boy to manhood, a teenage boy, a young man in a very difficult age. And you know what? I don’t think there’s any parent of a teenage male who isn’t going to have an embarrassing moment. You want an embarrassing moment that doesn’t turn deadly. And so I’m just encouraging you to have this conversation with your sons.

I think the most important thing you can do is in biblical terms, consistent with Scripture and our understanding the gospel, is lay out their reality. And furthermore, explain why you set the rules you set. And by the way, be serious about that, please. This crisis shows us that just a little bit of attention to this isn’t enough. This is not something you can solve in one conversation and then say, “Well, we’ve done that. Let’s move on.” This is one of the reasons why parenting, true Christian parenting and the successful raising of boys into men, it’s always more demanding than people think. And isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it wonderful? I get to be president of a college and a  seminary where I see these young men grow in faithfulness, grow in holiness, grow and service to Christ in deployment, to Christ’s glory all over the world. And some of them may well have had an embarrassing photograph in the past. That’s just something that’s a part of their story and a part of their struggle and a part of the glory of Christ in keeping them close to himself, all through that process.

The difference between harm, self-harm and something else is often a matter of seconds or just a few minutes for the adolescent male. Unfortunately, they are quite competent sometimes at harming themselves. And so just keep that in mind, head it off up front, have a candid conversation. It also gets down to issue of privacy and the use of the web and other things. But the bottom line in that is really parental involvement in the lives of sons. It’s so easy in this society to get so busy and so distracted, or frankly, to buy into the lives of the age and think, he’s got his own private life. No, he doesn’t. Not in that sense, not in a Christian home. 

And so, I hope this is encouraging in all the right ways. I really do mean to sound an alarm, but it’s not an alarm like, “what are we going to do now?” It’s an alarm like, here’s the situation, here’s the biblical worldview. We understand that sin is sin, we understand that it is seductive, we understand that temptation is progressive. We understand how this thing can happen, and we understand that Christ is sufficient. And so I just mean to encourage you. I hope this encourages pastors and youth leaders, especially as you’re dealing with parents, to help parent boys through this process. And I speak especially to parents, and I speak as a parent and now as a grandfather. From the bottom of my heart, I just want to urge you to understand this and to deal with it and have a conversation while there’s time. You say, wow, that can be embarrassing. Well, of course it can, but that’s your responsibility. And if that embarrassment keeps you from having the conversation, what follows that could be an embarrassment that kills.