After three years of not seeing them, today I headed way out to the middle of no where to see my brother and his family -- wife and kids. His in-laws also showed up, as did my dad and my other brother.
Last time I saw one of my nieces, she was 11. More than just 3 years have passed since I last saw her because last time she was a kid, now she's a teenager. It's a whole different world for her now. While chatting with her, I asked her about what's new and if she's on social media.
No sooner did I ask for her Instagram ID, I knew I shouldn't have.
My niece has a bit over 1,200 followers on IG but her posts get around 300-400 likes and 80-100 comments. I was instantly curious about who was liking her pictures and who was commenting so I scrolled down and checked them out.
Having launched the Lil' Sistas Project in the Philippines and seeing how easily those young girls are victimized and lured, I have a big concern about older guys, men, commenting and liking my niece's pictures. Now I don't think what happened to the human trafficking survivors will ever happen to my niece but then again those girls never imagined being in the situation they were in either. My niece, all my nieces, live in a small country side city that only has about 1,000 residences, so you know they're small town. Small town girls with small town thinking.
Growing up when I was a kid and them growing up in the day of age we live in now, where social media is huge and everyone is so easily accessible because of it, it made me super uncomfortable to see random older guys commenting on my niece's posts. She's only 14 but in some pictures she looks older, more mature and more developed than she actually is.
"This is why I can't have a kid", is all I could say but I must have said it a billion times.
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