watching porn and paying for sex will fix you

Made this, this morning.

Google Trusted Contacts.

that’s it, that’s the answer.

what this does is allow you to set up a list of people who are able to request your location. when they do so, you have five minutes to either refuse or grant the request. if you don’t respond within five minutes, the request is automatically accepted, in case you’re hurt or otherwise unable to get to your phone. your trusted contacts can also see how recently you used your device.

in other words: if someone genuinely wants to know if you’re okay, they can check the app and see that you’ve used your phone five minutes ago, and that can be the end of it. if they want to be doubly sure, or it says you haven’t used your phone recently, they can request your location. if you want them to know where you are, or you can’t answer, they’ll have your exact location within five minutes. if you don’t want them to know where you are, you click deny, and they still see that you got the request and responded to it, meaning, again, they know you’re okay. this is safety with accountability: you can’t track someone’s location without their consent unless they fail to respond to the notification, and you can’t do it without them knowing about it.

if you want to track a friend or loved one for genuine safety reasons, set this up. it gives you all the access you need if your concern is actually for the other person’s well-being, rather than a desire for control. (it’s not out for iOS yet, but Google says that’s coming soon).

a world where parents are an order of magnitude more dangerous to children than “adults grooming them on the internet”, and giving parents unchecked powers of surveillance is for that reason alone more likely to put kids at risk than to keep them safe.

I live in this world:

a world where the psychologically debilitating effects of surveillance are well-established and well-known, yet adults do everything in their power to invade young people’s privacy and then ask dumbass questions like “why are kids so anxious?” and come up with answers like “it’s probably because of selfies”

I live in this world:

a world where invasion of privacy is recognized as an integral part of emotional abuse, but parents still get away with it because “they’re just doing it to keep them safe uwu~”, despite the fact that this is the same line the goddamn NSA gives us and most of us don’t take that sack of lies from them.

abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions often have a idea of themselves as Good People, and are consequently incapable of recognising or acknowledging when they've hurt someone else. instead, they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the Bad People box so they can freely abuse them while maintaining their moral high ground.

i read ross greene a lot when i was working with "difficult" or "behaviourally challenged" children. his refrain is "kids do well if they can" - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.