How Smartphones Are Changing “Spin the Bottle”

The University of Chicago released a stunning report about children, apps and sexual exploration.

More than half of boys under 18 who are sexually active and gay or bisexual have had sexual contact with a stranger they met on a hookup app.

In all cases, they signed up for the apps as adults. And 25% had unprotected sex.

At SaferKid, this doesn’t surprise us at all. We’ve been studying how children and teens meet strangers on apps for four years. Our research shows that this happens among girls and boys, straight or not.

Part of the problem is that Apple places the same age rating on hookup apps that they do on YouTube. So, if you restrict apps by age rating, you have to grant access to hookup apps to grant access to YouTube.

What’s worse is that many apps are used to meet strangers but aren’t listed as hookup apps. These apps have lower age restrictions and are marked as being safe for 13 year olds. Or younger.

At SaferKid, we have created our own, more realistic age rating system for all the apps in the App Store and Google Play.

If a child gets a risky one, we send the parent an alert. We also explain what is risky about the app, and provide suggestions on how to talk to the child about it.

Having studied thousands of bad outcomes from children and teens meeting strangers online, what we learned was this: If parents step in and take a child off these apps when they first get them, they can save their child’s life.

You can try SaferKid risk free on our web site, in the App Store and on Google Play.