Sex Detective Crosses The Line

I heard about this site on the radio a few weeks ago.  A bunch of voice actors pretending to be teens or concerned parents or possible pedophiles asked controversially obvious questions like 'when is it okay to hit a girl?', 'is it okay for my teenage daughter to text naked pictures of herself?', or 'do I have to have sex if I don't want to?'  Well, if you're not sure if it's 1952 and suspect that any of these answers might be less than a resounding 'No, you fucking savage!' the you might want to visit Crossing The Line, the new goverment website designed to inform humans on how to deal with teenage relationships and stimulate meaningful discussion.  Of course, when I say 'the government' what I mean is that Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) threw a hundred bucks at some emo work experience kid and asked him to build a website.  The parameters were simple: keep the backgrounds to bland pastel, and don't get carried away with the interactive features.

ASO 5 Webmaster - Raven Darkheart

I don't really like teeagers much.  In my former career I spent over a decade as a youth worker which gave me plenty of time to learn what there is not to like about them.  Before that I was a teenager myself and still thought they sucked.  There weren't any online answers for my teen sexuality and relationship issues, but then again most of my questions would have run along the lines of 'why do girls kiss like they're eating a Big Mac?' or 'what's the fucking story with this constant boner?'

Sharing The Line

In the '90s the government secretly created a pre-digital positronic android designed to infiltrate behind enemy lines and cause ruthless, dispassionate mayhem.  Unfortunately their creation was programmed in Linux and immediately turned into a pretentious pussy, so the military traded it to FaHCSIA for a bunch of state wards to do the same job.  That andoid is now chained to a computer in a hidden bunker and has ben redesignated as the Share The Line blogger who, in its own words is:

a writer, commentator and social media lover, who loves life, people and relationships but realises that in 2010 the boundaries within relationships are more unclear than ever before.

This thing generates the fairly harmless scenarios intended to evoke discussion from those who visit the site and let them chat about whether or not their own problems involve 'crossing the line.'  The responses posted in the comments section are then published for everyone to see.  Commentators usually manifest in 3 forms: some kid with severe literacy problems, or some parent who wants an insanely easy answer to the complexities of raising a teen, or some verbose first year Social Work student who think they can prescribe convoluted solutions to the evils of the world.

Goverment Scenario Example

So, let's see what typical teen dilemma the STL blogger 2.0 presented for the launch of this site - teen pregancy? date rape? drug-induced gang violence?

Please be all three.  Please be all three.

I found myself considering something kind of shocking the other day. I was actually on the verge of hacking in to someone else’s email. I didn’t do it in the end. But it was seriously tempting, and it would have been scarily easy to do.


I wasn’t planning to read their emails (or at least that’s what I told myself). I just wanted to see who was emailing them, and how often. It was all brought on by jealousy, I have to admit. And a big fat dose of paranoia.


They say all’s fair in love and war. But is it fair to look at someone’s email in-box if you don’t actually read the emails? Or is that crossing the line?  

Seriously?  Sounds pretty lame, but, okay, whatever.  I guess my years of experience working with teens can allow me to draft a suitable response.  For a start you talk about 'hacking', but unless you're an experienced coder with a specialisation in decryption algorithms and access to some pretty impressive resources, I'm going to assume that you really mean 'steal someone's password'.  Otherwise I might need to inform Gmail, Yahoo and MSN Live that their empires teeter on the brink of collapse due to your superhuman 'hacking' skills.  As for whether or not it's fair to read just the banners of someone else's email, well you've kinda fucked the morality bitch anyway seeing how you already stole their password and logged into their secure account, you stalking psycho.

Real Teen Scenario

Like I said, many commentators who actually fall into its intended 12-20 yo demographic tend to respond with scenarios of their own, some depressing as all hell, some uplifting tales of courage, and some clearly bizarre.  Once again I get to employ countless hours of hard-earned youth-working skills to tackle the tough issues faced by today's youth.

The uther day i ran outta toylet paiper and askd my frend for a tee towell she toold every1 at skool, is that crossin the line?

What the fuckin- I mean, who the hell makes their friend watch them go 'toylet' in a kitchen then wipes their ass with a tea-towel?  You weren't crossin the line, you disgusting little muppet, you literally shat all over it.  You're the sole justification child psychologists use to charge parents $150 an hour.

Drawing The Line

Disgusted with what passes for teen problems nowadays, I moved onto the Gallery where site visitors get to use some sort of interactive art tool to create self-expressive pictures for all to see.  I've known a few highly talented young artists in my travels so I was eager to see what was on offer.  Until I came to this...

Christ, I don't even know what I'm looking at, and the portarit titles don't help much either.  I had a look at the process.  Apparently you can upload an image of yourself then use their software to draw over your pic with an uninterrupted line to make a clumsy doodle tracing of yourself.  I'm not sure why anyone over the age of 6 would find this fun, let alone how reducing your features to a spastic squiggle boosts self-esteem, but the results are hilariously depressing.  It seems pretty much the opposite of youthful artistic expression, summing up beautifully the government's perception of teen issues.

Parents & Teachers

If you're a concerned parent or teacher who doesn't understand why teenagers carry on like a bunch of teenagers, then this is the section for you, provided you like your advice to be overly simplistic and often worthless.  I picked one of the four advice documents at random - Bullying. 

After the 3 minutes it took to read it 3 times, I still wasn't sure if they were anti or pro bully.  What I did learn was that whoever wrote it graduated from Social Work in 1987 and never bothered to keep up with current events in their field.

...know that bullies operate out of a place of low self-esteem, inadequacy and feelings of powerlessness and this can often be changed with help and understanding.

Developmental and child psychology have come a long way over the last 20 years and if there's one thing we've learned it's that the above statement is bullshit.  Bullies are are quite the opposite of insecure.  The problem isn't low self-esteem, it's artifically high self-esteem.  Throughout their life they were always praised and encouraged and never challenged by role-models on their behaviour.  They have been shielded from failure and taught to expect to assume power around others.  This inflated sense of entitlement means that they stop treating peers as equals.  The bully who robs your lunch money and takes an almost homoerotic pleasure in flushing your head is not some domestic abuse victim, he's a narcissistic, borderline sociopath spoilt into believing that other people simply don't matter as much as he does.

I gave up after that.  It's great for the government to let kids and others have their say online in a site moderated to regulate flame wars and possibly educate the masses about how rape is actually wrong and that feelings are important, but teen advice comes down to this basic understanding: teenagers are proto-humans caught in a phase where their bodily chemicals are outracing their brains.  The pre-frontal lobes take about 20 years to fully mature and that's the part that controls our ability to reason cognitively and predict the long term consequences of our actions.  I don't care how intelligent some kid is, he's doomed to be an impulsive idiot or an emotionally retarded depressive in his teens.  It's how they're built.  They are almost pre-programmed to cause problems because they literally aren't mature enough to plan effective solutions.  Teens are selfish, volatile, rebellious and sometimes outright douchebags, just like the rest of us were back then.  There's a more than even chance they will be sexually active by age 16, as well as experimenting with drugs and/or alcohol.  And there is literally nothing anyone can do to stop this without causing some major psychological damage down the track.  The fairy tale morality of childhood is behind them, while the real, experiential ethical codes of adulthood have yet to be reached.  I like to think of the hardships and trials faced by teens as a form of innoculation to toughen them up in readiness for those adult challenges yet to come.