Bullying has become such a prevalent problem in society that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has proposed a $500 million dollar program to combat the issue in schools. However, families do not have to wait until the next presidential election to address bullying among their own children.
There are countless companies creating apps and services that promise parents assistance in keeping tabs on their children, to learn whether or not they are being harassed by their peers. Once such company, called TeenSafe, provides paid solutions as well as free apps for both Android and iOS devices. The company is accredited as one of the first compatible with iPhones, which has helped it stand out in this space, according to TeenSafe’s co-founder, Scott Walker.
“Having the first solution for iPhones and having a brand that parents could recognize, TeenSafe has become popular and successful,” Walker told iDigitalTimes. “We have helped over one million families.”
The idea for TeenSafe came about in 2009, following an incident of bullying involving Walker’s youngest daughter. The teen began attending a new high school as the family prepared to move into a bigger home in a more affluent neighborhood.
After just one day at the school, the Walker and his wife became concerned as she began to withdraw. Walker researched and discovered a paid service that allowed him to monitor his daughter’s smartphone and discovered that she was being being harassed after she broke up with a popular boy who attended the school. She’d dated the boy over the previous summer.
“The cheerleaders, the football team, the whole damn school turned on her. You're a bitch, you should kill yourself,” Walker told iDigi. "The kind of text messages we saw were so horrifying to a parent, I can't even explain it to you, the feelings that you get.”
Walker began collaborating with others in the tech space to develop a solution and crack the code behind iOS compatibility for such a service. Apple’s smartphones are known for having onboard parent controls, but TeenSafe aims to provide an alternative. After launching 2011, the company gained notoriety for its iOS option.
Statistics on bullying are extremely sobering, especially when more and more reports detail the suicides of teenagers as a result of bullying, particularly cyberbullying and bullying via mobile phones. Sixty-four percent of children and teens who were bullied did not report it, according to a study conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences.
“No matter how close you are to your kids, no matter what kind of great parent you think you are, they will not share this information,” Waker said. “They keep it inside. They try to fight back, they try to do it themselves.”
Suicide is the second most prevalent cause of death for the age groups of 10 to 14 and from 15 to 25, behind unintentional injury, according to the Center for Disease Control. Not long after Walker and his family decided to cancel the sale of their home and have their daughter remain at her original high school, they learned a neighbor’s child had committed suicide. The youth had been bullied and received no intervention from school authorities about his situation.
The Teen Safe application is designed for parents (who may not be tech savvy) to be able to better understand their children’s experience, without having to delve into the seriousness of a paid monitoring service, according to Walker. Among features, parents can pause certain apps or block their features altogether. They can observe texts, browsing and other activity in which their child is involved.
Walker notes the intent behind Teen Safe is not to encourage parents to become overprotective of their children, but rather to work with adolescents and encourage them to share vital information about their safety and wellbeing that they otherwise might not give up voluntarily.
Armed with the proper information, Walker believes parents would be better equipped to have conversations with their kids that in some cases, could possibly save their lives. “The difference might have been that I got that information and my neighbor did not,” he added.
Teen Safe is available on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
