I think some of them work. What I find with young people is that they are genuinely interested and curious. They want the information. They are talking about some very complex ideas. They don't like to be talked down to. They don't like things to be dumbed down. They are immersed in these systems. These systems are extensions of their brains; they're more like prosthetics to teenagers. And so when adults step in and are condescending, or panic-stricken, I don't really think it does any good.
I believe that asking children to be honest, but also being honest back in a respectful way, is the most effective thing to do. For example, whether children seek it out or not, they are being exposed to pornography, but no one is talking to them about pornography. And that is a big deal because the thing about those images is that they are consumed and they, then, affect the way people think.
The interesting thing to me is this. I honed in on pornography, because it is the elephant in the room in a lot of these conversations about consent, representation, and sexual exploitation. It kind of exists at a nexus of those things. I'm going to make a leap here, because we haven't talked about this. The pervasiveness of pornography online is now being incorporated into the way algorithms are assessing language, and that's important, because it's contributing to the normalization of language that we know shames teenagers, especially teenage girls.
So the most gendered slurs you can think about, which teenagers use in their daily life, aren't even considered harassing in most cases. But that's the kind of thing kids need to talk about, and sometimes the media is created by them very effectively. I think there are lots of people on YouTube who are quite young and they do that well, but sometimes it does require that adults openly discuss very difficult subjects, and I find that's the greatest impediment. Time and time again, what I find is not resistance among children, but resistance among adults.