When working with a young client in therapy, a counsellor or psychotherapist may identify a need to address online safety and the dangers in oversharing their personal data (verbal, textual, photos, videos).
Your client may already be encountering challenges, which could activate the need to undertake safeguarding actions when they are disclosed to you. If safeguarding has not emerged as an immediate concern, but online safety as a topic has come up in your therapy sessions, you can work with your client in a variety of ways that will promote confidence, ease worries, and provide tools and strategies.
Learning about online safety empowers young people to act appropriately for their own protection, addressing predation (grooming) risk, and the possibility they may inadvertently provide opportunities to bullies to use their information to shame, threaten, and blackmail. It minimises exposure to spammers and other criminal behaviour as well.
You might consider inviting the young person to create a fictional online profile with character details they think are safe. Then, use that profile to explain and show them how much information can be gathered up by someone with malicious intent, like creating a scenario where their location or identity could be guessed. This leads on to a discussion of privacy settings.
Ask the young person to go through the privacy settings on the fictional account. If you’ve done this on paper as an exercise, include printed screenshots of privacy settings. See if the client can explain why each one is important. Discuss their responses, and how much information (thankfully not real) they’ve shared and what could be inferred by someone with bad intentions.
You can suggest the young person consider using a search engine to find out what personal information on them is publicly available. It might be there is a newspaper photo of them winning an award, for example, or a holiday blog post written by a family member. Then, discuss how that information could be used by others, and how to minimise unnecessary data sharing. You could also explore what could be pieced together if someone were to search deeper.
Your client can explore hypothetical situations – you could prepare fictional posts – where oversharing could lead to problems (like, sharing holiday plans and then getting burgled while away, or sharing too much in a group chat that then gets leaked). Ask the young person to think through the content and outcomes, and explore what they might do differently.
Invite the young person to create digital art, zines, comics, or memes that highlight the risks of oversharing in funny or thought-provoking ways. Work together to create a set of personal guidelines or a checklist for what is safe to share online. This can be something they refer to before they post anything on social media or in chats. It can be a plain list or the young person can draw and decorate it to make a poster for the wall of their bedroom.
By engaging a young client in these activities and conversations around them, you are helping them build confidence and take control of their online safety in creative and thoughtful ways. What’s really important to reduce anxiety is getting across the message that we can all use the internet safely with a bit of thought and planning before we put anything ‘out there’.
xph therapy offers integrative counselling, which means working with multiple therapy types, including CBT, psychotherapeutic and person-centred to develop a therapeutic pathway just for you, whatever outcome you’re hoping to achieve. Get in touch in a variety of ways. See the contact page for more info.