I’m a 37-Year-Old Mom & I Spent Seven Days Online as an 11-Year-Old Girl. Here’s What I Learned.
Sloane Ryan
Dec 13 · 16 min read
Note: This piece contains sexual content and descriptions of child sex abuse that could be disturbing to some readers. The messages, images, and conversations included here are real.
I’m standing in a bathroom with the hem of a pale blue sweatshirt bunched up under my chin as I weave an ace bandage tightly around my ribcage. The mirror serves as a guide as I wrap and wrap again the bandages around my sports bra, binding my chest. I step out of the bathroom and find our team waiting.
“This look OK?”
I get nods in response, and as Avery art directs, I pose my arms and tilt my head towards the camera. Normally, I’m not in clothes meant for a tween girl. Normally, I don’t have glitter polish on my nails and neon hair ties on my wrist. Normally, I’m dressed, I suppose, like your average 37-year-old mom. Jeans. Shirts that cover my midriff. Shoes with reasonable arch support.
Reid snaps a couple of photos of me. She scuttles off with Avery to our make-shift command center — a repurposed dining room now covered in cork boards and maps and papers and computer monitors. Will’s brow furrows as he quickly edits.
With the help of context — clothing, background, hair styling — and the magic of photo manipulation, we’re no longer staring at an image of me, an adult woman with crow’s feet.
I move to the kitchen to give him space. We’re gearing up for the heaviest part of the day, which we know from experience will be fast-paced and emotionally exhausting.
“It’s ready,” Will calls from the command center. A few of us gather around Will’s computer screen and examine.
“Yeah, I buy it,” Brian says. Brian is the CEO of Bark, the company spearheading this project. "); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat no-repeat;">Bark uses AI to alert parents and schools when children are experiencing issues like cyberbullying, depression, threats of violence — or in this case, targeting by sexual predators. Currently, we’re covering more than 4 million kids, and we analyze 20 million activities a day. I look at Brian studying the computer screen and consider his assessment. I nod and sigh. I buy it, too.
With the help of context — clothing, background, hair styling — and the magic of photo manipulation, we’re no longer staring at an image of me, an adult woman with crow’s feet. We’re staring at a photo of fictitious 11-year-old Bailey, and no matter how many times we do this, the results are still unnerving. Not because we’re creating a child out of thin air, but because we are deliberately putting Bailey in harm’s way to show exactly how pervasive the issue of predation is for Generation Z.
The majority of 11-year-olds are still prepubescent. Menstruation hasn’t started, and they’re generally not yet wearing bras that are categorized by letter-and-number sizes. Their hobbies and interests vary, but largely, they’re not thinking about sexual relationships or sex organs or sex at all.
But their predators are.
“Thanks, I hate it,” I deadpan, quoting a popular phrase on the internet and earning a sympathetic laugh. The mood in the room is always a little bleak, and the jokes trend toward the macabre. Maybe to an outsider, they’d sound crass, but to anyone who’s been working elbow-to-elbow with us, a little gallows humor is necessary to get us through our days.
With the photo ready to go, we all move to the media room where I pair an iPhone to the big-screen TV. We settle into couches and armchairs and Nathan adjusts a camcorder on a tripod pointed right at the TV. Evidence is precious, and we keep cameras rolling to make sure every interaction involving criminal activity has a digital paper trail for our contacts in law enforcement.
enforcement.
Nathan checks the lighting, then the audio. Josh drops a pile of hoodies on the coffee table, and I tell him thanks.
“You ready?” Josh asks me.
“Yeah,” I lie a little. I’m never quite ready.
During the day, we’re all hands on deck. There are calls to be made, photos to be edited, evidence to be cataloged. But at night, it’s me at bat. The work is often — if I’m honest — lonely. Isolating. Devastating. Tonight, we’ll share the burden, and I’m grateful for the company. But I’m still the one in the hot seat.
Less than a year ago, Brian and I sat in a meeting where we wrestled with how exactly to talk to parents about online grooming. Back when "); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat no-repeat;">Bark was a much smaller team, we encountered a particularly harrowing case of an online predator abusing a girl in middle school. She was only 12 years old, and this man was grooming her through her school email account, coercing her to send videos of herself performing sexual acts. We knew people like him were out there, but it floored us to see how quickly and deftly he was able to manipulate this child.
In 2018 alone, "); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat no-repeat;">Bark alerted the FBI to 99 child predators. In 2019? That number is more than 300 — and counting. Each of these cases represents a real child experiencing real harm, and our challenge is to help parents and schools understand this new reality. But how do we tell stories without asking families to divulge too much? How do we explain online grooming to a generation who didn’t grow up with this danger? Numbers, though informative, are abstract and easy to gloss over.
I was frustrated by the problem we were facing, tapping my pen on the conference table and thinking out loud. “When parents think about predators,” I suggested to Brian, “they think about someone tossing their kid in a trunk and driving off. They don’t think about the unseen abuse that happens online. In a perfect world, we’d share a conversation from an actual predator, but that feels like traumatizing the victim all over again…”
I trailed off. We had gone in circles on this same concept.
“What if we just set up fake accounts ourselves to demonstrate to parents what can happen online?” Brian asked. I raised both eyebrows at the idea. Waited a beat to see if he was joking. He wasn’t.
That was nine months ago. Since then, we’ve created an entire team focused on the impromptu meeting Brian and I had in that conference room. We’ve formed continuous working relationships with the kinds of government law enforcement agencies that boast three-letter acronyms. We’ve had test runs, new hires, and countless other meetings. We’ve seen arrests and sentencings. We’ve provided testimony in court and invaluable information to investigations.
My own role changed to heading up this new special projects team. And to preserve the integrity of this project, this special projects team works largely behind-the-scenes and out of the limelight. We don’t appear on the company website, and our Twitter profile photos show inanimate objects instead of our actual faces. Brian and I are also the bridge between the team and law enforcement, with regular meetings and status updates, making sure we’re always working within not only their parameters, but those of the prosecuting attorneys. No one wants our hard work to go to waste because of missing evidence or even a hint of entrapment.
Last edited:
