Back in the day, you’d worry about a stranger hanging around your kid’s school or the boardwalk. Now, weirdos and predators don’t even need to leave their house to make contact; they just need Wi-Fi.
In towns along the Jersey Shore, teens spend hours online. They’re scrolling, texting, playing games, and meeting people they’ve never seen in real life. It all seems pretty harmless until someone starts asking personal questions and sending inappropriate photos. Before you know it, there are threats to leak private messages and pictures and you don’t even know it’s happening.
Digital grooming and sextortion are everywhere, and most of the time, no one talks about it until something happens.
It sure doesn’t help that teens don’t always know what’s safe and what’s not.
The online world has many threats, but children and teenagers are more vulnerable to them than anyone else. In New Jersey, these risks aren’t just theoretical but built into how the communities function, especially around tourist season.
When the summer crowd rolls in, teens are suddenly surrounded by thousands of new faces, and this kind of exposure opens the door to interactions with total strangers – in person and online. If you’re a parent, this alone is enough to freak you out.
Apps like Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram all see a spike in use during these months, which makes it easier for predators to connect with local teens without anyone knowing. Schools make this problem even worse because they’re not teaching kids about this. Most of them focus on how to use tech for schoolwork, but digital safety gets little to no attention. And as you’ll probably agree, every teen needs to know about what grooming looks like, how sextortion happens, or how to report it.
Local police have their own issues. Many departments along the Shore don’t have enough staff and equipment when it comes to cybercrime, and that means even when someone reports something serious, it can take weeks (or even longer!) to get a real investigation going.
Reacting when something goes wrong isn’t enough to keep teens safe online. Prevention should always be first, which means we should be looking at how schools, parents, tech companies, and lawmakers play a role in all this.
Here’s where change needs to happen.
Kids start using social media and messaging apps long before they get to high school, but many schools wait way too long to talk to them about the dangers lurking online. By middle school, students should already know the basics and what to do if someone makes them uncomfortable online. Rules and scare tactics aren’t that useful here because students need real examples and tools to handle these situations with confidence.
Online safety should be treated like any other part of health education, and that approach can make a huge difference.
We all value our privacy, but if you have a teenager, you know they’re next-level about it. This makes it hard to talk to them about what they do online but open, honest conversations between parents and kids are more effective than strict rules and constant spying. Teens are more likely to speak up if they know they won’t be punished for being honest.
Parents need to be involved, not controlling. That might mean checking in on apps, reviewing privacy settings together, or using parental controls with the teens’ knowledge and input. The point is to create an environment where kids feel safe asking for help.
Right now, a lot of accountability still falls on families and schools, but tech companies need to do much more. Most social media platforms already have tools to report abuse, but they’re often buried, ignored, or not taken seriously.
Grooming and sextortion don’t always get flagged, especially if nobody shared any explicit content. But these platforms should be using AI to detect patterns that point to predatory behavior like repeated DMs to minors or pressure to move conversations off-platform.
New Jersey has strict laws against child exploitation online, but that doesn’t make all cases easy to prosecute. The internet doesn’t stop at state borders and neither do predators. When someone in one state targets a teen in another, tracking them down and pressing charges gets complicated.
This is why you need a legal professional. If you or someone close to you has had an experience with a predator, look for a sexual abuse lawyer New Jersey residents would use in order to get familiar with your rights, as well as multijurisdictional options for civil action.
So, how safe are our teens online? Not very. And you can bubble-wrap your kid all you want, ban TikTok, and spy on them (good luck with that, by the way), and you still can’t protect them.
You should be more focused on giving them actual skills to spot the weird stuff before it turns into an issue.
