Barriers to Youth Abuse in AHG

Discussion in 'General Suggestions' started by john redcorn, May 16, 2021.

  1. john redcorn

    john redcorn strangers like me VIP Emerald

    Over the last few years, youth organizations have adopted a lot of new and novel practices for interacting between leaders/counselors and youth participants safely.

    If youth are going to stay involved in the community and the ones thereafter, introducing some of these barriers to youth abuse would be in the best interests of everyone involved.

    The meat of these policies involve avoiding any one on one contact between a youth and an adult. In scouting, a recent policy that’s been adopted and become a big player in preventing abuse is having at least two qualified adults in any email or text with a youth participant. There’s a few good videos on this theory, but that presence alone helps deter any bad activity. If discord is still going to be a focal point of interaction, this super easy to incorporate and use to keep both the youth and the adult safe. Ideally, this would happen between any sort of community related dms (staff to player, staff to staff, player to player), but it should really be considered from the staffing aspect at least, since a position of power can lead to issues.

    Another aspect to consider is how minors are involved in content policing lewd sprays on the staff team right now. Expecting a minor to issue corrective action on gore/porn is something that can spark issues whether it’s allowed or not. That’s more of a grey area turning into a red flag with how our culture is adapting. It’s straight up illegal however when you consider that the youth are expected to store the images as evidence on their computer/cloud and access them again if needed

    Evaluating and thinking about how everyone can be safe and have fun should be a priority. Our community’s rich history of conduct should be reason enough to make history harder to repeat
     
    Last edited: May 16, 2021
    • Like Like x 3
    • Winner Winner x 2
    • Dumb Dumb x 2
    • Funny Funny x 1
  2. Mr. Rogers

    Mr. Rogers Lil Tokyo VIP Silver

    ayo he not wrong though like there aint no reason some kid and some adult need to be in a private discord call like ever. Like yeah just doing that alone don't mean shit but obviously we can't trust the degenerates that pass through here.

    also fuck needing to post evidence for shit like that just ban people and say "fuck off your banned" if they try to appeal don't type some like 18 paragraph response to somebody who's clearly just trying to waste your time
     
    • Dumb Dumb x 1
  3. RyanHymenman

    RyanHymenman Conscript the women and kids Administrator VIP Silver

    How young are we classifying as a kid, here? And how do you propose we go about verifying age in a discord? And lastly, this is the SGM Forums, if you wanna make a post concerning AHG, you can do it at https://afterhoursgaming.gg/
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  4. john redcorn

    john redcorn strangers like me VIP Emerald

    Anyone younger than the age of 18 is what’s legally consistent for mandatory reporting. Age Verification can be done via the forums when you link your discord and assign a role meant for underaged users, that gets removed whenever they turn 18

    I like it here
     
    • Funny Funny x 1
  5. RyanHymenman

    RyanHymenman Conscript the women and kids Administrator VIP Silver

    As for this, AHG is looking at implementing a storage system that would store evidence on the server itself. Sprays would be part of that
     
  6. john redcorn

    john redcorn strangers like me VIP Emerald

    That's better than what it has been, but all that content would still be accessible to a child staff member and is hosted on your servers, which have historically been removing such images and links from the platforms to keep it inaccessible from children, so they may participate in the community. If sprays are going to be part of the deal, having a staff reivewed system where a player submits a spray, and waits for approval (by an adult) before it can be used or a store of buyable "curated" sprays that don't involve user upload are both options that might make it more "safe" for children to participate in staffing the servers

    Outside of the servers, having a child police porn/gore/NSFW goodies on discord/forums is also asking for trouble, since they would still need to store evidence in some capacity, unless they have the ability to see deleted content, which one again leads us into the same issue of "hosting NSFW" content for children. Unless you had some age role on the forums and discord server that would prevent children from seeing said things that is
     
    • Disagree Disagree x 1
    • Informative Informative x 1
    • Dumb Dumb x 1
  7. Indy226

    Indy226 Banned VIP Silver

    What qualifies a staff member?
     
  8. john redcorn

    john redcorn strangers like me VIP Emerald

    Unless you make them take any form of youth abuse preventative training, nothing. However, having two adults involved in any private communications lessens the likelihood a situation where abuse can occur, we can point to a few former situations where this would of helped a ton. For staff related matters, the best practice would to be include two adults on the staff team.
     
  9. RyanHymenman

    RyanHymenman Conscript the women and kids Administrator VIP Silver

    Im just gonna say, a tag on underaged people is not gonna happen. If you are worried about exploitation, that is gonna put a target on their back. Yes, I want to prevent child grooming. Ive thought about that idea before, twice. Both times I realized later what repercussions labeling minors can have
     
  10. Cash

    Cash I staff the proper way Banned VIP

    I don't see how you're going to enforce adults to only DM underage alongside another adult
    Unless every minor reports instances of it occuring, there's really no way to enforce it
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  11. john redcorn

    john redcorn strangers like me VIP Emerald

    If w
    Using a forum integrated system for determining one's self reported age (whether its private or publicly set, staff should be able to see it) to determine when and how to handle one on one related staffing matters (reports, appeals, staffing interviews). If three people in a dm is deemed too much of a hassle, uploading a self reported chatlog to some staff thread/database to keep track of what was said to whom might be a more realistic approach. Think something admin extension requests, but just a copy and paste of a discord chat.
     
  12. Cash

    Cash I staff the proper way Banned VIP

    I don't think most of the cases evolve from "oh hey why did you do this ingame" rather than them just dming on their own time, what you're essentially asking staff to do is have 0 privacy which won't happen
     
  13. john redcorn

    john redcorn strangers like me VIP Emerald

    That's a decent point about report interactions @Cash . Let's think about where we've went wrong in the past before, and correct from there. A good number of the youth protection violations that have surfaced in recent years have involved staff on staff/staff on former staff. @Mr. Rogers point on discord calls is something that might help inspire a better staff policy and avoiding 1 on 1 minor on adult actions when possible, that or require them to be in a public/moderator accessible channel. I still think a hard copy on dms between a minor and an adult staff member would be a good thing to have to help prevent further abuse. Could just be one of those things that go to a forum thread for leads and never looked at again, but it's a barrier.
     
  14. Nathan776

    Nathan776 Administrator Administrator VIP Silver

    If you think I or anybody else is going to take the time to post every little thing we dm, you are most definitely mistaken. I'm also not going to sit around and wait for 2 mystery adults to come around and assist me with talking to somebody because they are under the age of 18. Not only is this practically unenforceable, its completely unrealistic. Some conversations remain private as a person chooses to confide information that they would rather not have shared, others are just purely staff related questions and discussions. If 2 people are in TTT should an adult instantly join to prevent them talking in in-game chat just in case one is an adult and one is a child? Can an adult have a child on their team? Real life situations play out completely different as opposed to those that take place on digital platforms largely due to the ease of enforcement. If you get in the way of two users via discord, they will look for other services to communicate on - often with worse logging systems in place than the ones we currently use. While I don't particularly like discord - when dealing with specific issues relating to other users - they have often responded within 2 days and performed a review of the people in question.

    Creating user groups based on age helps to make users a target for other people. This is a very bad idea and just puts people at a greater risk than normal. If a Predator joined they would know exactly what people to look for.

    It's not that we are not taking measures to prevent "youth abuse" - just that those presented are unlikely to help or will more likely hinder such a process.

    A couple of the measures we are looking to introduced is limited/logging more accurately users who are within our discord. Currently on SGM users are easily able to access discord even if they have been banned in the past. Apparently Discord IP bans them but usually this doesn't prevent alternate accounts being created. Realistically if a user who has been banned wanted to, they could just make another discord account and be practically put into the same position they were originally. I'm sure (as an account will often reveal themselves after a couple of months) that quite a few permanently banned users still are within the discord.

    The spray system as discussed is going to be changed in a way to help moderators and retain evidence. While I am not privy to all the details of this - it is unlikely such evidence would be shown to moderators as we really don't want to provide them with a gore and porn library. This will remove any need for moderators to save screenshots of the image onto their computer.

    With AHG having 3 owners, information is a lot more easily accessible as it relates to the servers. If we require any information regarding Player activity, who is playing with who and who is chatting with who - I'm sure it will be much more easily accessible. In the future it may be possible for this information to be more easily relayed through the use of Discord bot or similar so this information could be available at real time. I know we plan to use a discord bot to gather this information in minecraft.

    Jabba effectively will still be playing his part in GSU alongside both Temar and Pierogi. GSU consists of a large group of servers which are sharing information frequently to help to assist in the prevention of Pedophiles etc within GMOD communities. Through this we have already banned various people who present a risk to children. In one instance through a collective effort we managed to identify a user who was trying to share child porn on other communities and blackmail them. We managed to identify ~60 alternate accounts of the user (Around 20 of which me and Jabba identified & helped to establish further links for). GSU also helped in the removal and banning of rape sweps on servers in GMOD. We frequently will be taking steps to ensure we listen and provide information to GSU where possible and will be banning users which are referenced within the group.

    While I understand there is a lot of concern that goes into child protection (and rightly so) we are taking a lot of steps to help prevent this where it is possible. I do feel the need to express that SGM hasn't been the only place to have issues with such a topic and this is a frequent thing in many communities, both on GMOD and in other games. The main thing I think we need to strive for is an approachable administration. If somebody raises an issue (with regard to child protection), the issue is dealt with both professionally and timely by the administration. I think Jabba in the last year has taken greatly to this role and has taken action extremely quickly when necessary after collecting relevant information. It sounds silly to say but the fact that throughout the last year or so that we have had to deal with some of these people is a good thing - it could show that the issue is more widespread (hopefully not) or we as an administration are being effective in the prevention of this unlike some other game communities.
     
    • Winner Winner x 4
    • Like Like x 1
  15. john redcorn

    john redcorn strangers like me VIP Emerald

    Server population would be too hard to control as a variable there, would be more or less seen as "public grounds", especially as there is no way to confirm age in that setting. As I said to Cash, the scope I proposed to start off with may of been a bit too broad for it's own good, we should hone in on where we have fucked up in the past and find ways to make it more secure. That said, there should already be a barrier to abuse present with a new server, as the server admin should have a hard copy text chat in the event something does go awry. The points on logging and all of that is interesting enough.

    Yeah, this is out of the question.

    This is encouraging.

    Yeah, it's an issue across every youth community in america, its encouraging to hear we have been happen to neuter recent happenings. I know we could of done a little more in the past to put more barriers to abuse up. In my personal life with my program, my volunteers have gotten really good about two deep communication leadership with our youth (even under the limited carpooling availability due to covid) and our materials have all been recently updated due to help us prevent further scenarios in our nationwide program. Honestly, the whole heavy handed approach to this was to hopefully construct a dialogue here of what real life youth organizations are doing, and what might be beneficial to consider. I can offer some materials/resources for Youth Protection Training if anyone is interested. I might even be able to modify down the IRL bits, and just communicate the online aspect of everything, if we think it's something that would be beneficial to have even if only one or two people look at it.
     
  16. Nathan776

    Nathan776 Administrator Administrator VIP Silver

    I'd be down to see some materials related to this. I remember when I was 16-17 I was a young leader for my local scout group in the UK. Looking back at it, it is very easy to see why small youth groups can seemingly get bad reputations and I'm fairly curious to see how they have updated some of their policies and procedures in recent years. Maybe something could be of use in AHG, or some strategies used for dealing with specific situations could be mimic'd. It'll be interesting to see how a much larger organization handles some issues.
     
  17. Santa Claus

    Santa Claus Best Member VIP Bronze

    pokeben clearly dislikes this suggestion maybe you guys should keep an eye out on him just in case
     
  18. Santa Claus

    Santa Claus Best Member VIP Bronze

    I've copied the staff team list and made GREEN names "safe" and RED names "caution"
    I have no data on the names left white.

    Lordyhgm
    Nuno
    Fear
    My Dime Is Up
    Fiz
    Reda-Lex
    Pokeben10

    Shadow
    Cathal
    Hosi (if this is acno, safe)
    Titan
    littlememe
    MONKMAN
    Night
    Pierogi
    Salem
    SavannahBanana
    FrogDoggo
    Chewie
    roy
    JesstheMess
    Jabba the Slut

    j3kawesome
    Moleman
    Orion
    PwnageKO

    Kamoflajh
    Sable
    Ashes Relandi
    Panda With a Gun
    Heli12345
    Floof
    Scotty
    Cole
    Voca
    ori with a gun
    danstorm
    Aquast
    Klutch
    RyanHighmen

    Kythol
    Espurr
    Wubby
     
    • Funny Funny x 1
  19. Pierogi

    Pierogi Special Properations Administrator VIP

    wtf does this even mean
     
  20. MEHEEZY

    MEHEEZY Supporter

    it means you're a p-p-p-p-p-p
     
    • Informative Informative x 1