Planting Salad

The problem wasn’t what I had access to. It was that I didn’t have access to a safe adult I could actually talk to; someone I could trust to help me without immediately cutting me off from everything and everyone. I remember getting messages from strangers on Skype. I didn’t even respond. But when my parents found out, they banned me from using it entirely. That meant losing most of my contact with friends outside of school. So what did I do? I went behind their backs. And once I was hiding, I couldn’t tell them when something actually dangerous was happening, like when I started being groomed. By the time things escalated, I was already alone with it.

I think about an episode of Scared Straight where a girl was dragged through a prison because she’d been talking to adult men online. She wasn’t doing that because she was reckless or malicious; she was lonely. Her parents weren’t present, she was being bullied at school, and these men gave her attention, told her she was pretty, told her she mattered. She was already being harmed. And the adults in her life responded by terrorizing her. Humiliating her. Calling her a slut. Telling her she deserved it. Breaking her to pieces.

What lesson does that actually teach? Not “this is dangerous, come to us.” It teaches: If you get hurt, we will hurt you more. Do you really think that makes her stop, or does it just make the predators look safer by comparison? They might as well have driven her straight into the jaws of those predators with torches and pitchforks. Because when every path back to safety is lined with punishment, kids don’t run away from danger. They run deeper into it.

If you want kids to be safe, stop treating them like problems to control and start treating them like people worth protecting. Stop ripping away their autonomy the second they make a mistake or encounter something risky. Stop teaching them that honesty will cost them everything.

decided to make a little masterpost of all my resources. if you like, follow me on neocities / buy me a coffee!

First Steps

How to create your first website

Common Questions

Common Mistakes

Code Quality Guide

Troubleshooting Guide

Neocities Tips

Beginner Tutorials

How to load the same layout on every page

CSS Positioning/Layout Tutorial

Cachebusting

Tools etc.

Layout Generator

Widgets for free Neocities accounts

Cheatsheet

Helpful Sites

Self-study Checklist

Coding Quizzes

Code Snippets

My VSCode Setup

List of Cliques

Advanced Tutorials

Git Tutorial

node/npm tutorial

Webpack Tutorial

Eleventy (11ty) Tutorial

Google Sheets API Tutorial

I know HTML, CSS, and JS. Now what?