(Pregnancy Help News) Females ages 13-21 are living in a TikTok world and may be clicking into dangerous territory, according to Feminists for Life President Serrin Foster, and she believes girls deserve so much better.
Feminists for Life has started an online platform to help teen girls get past the frequent ugliness of social media and the lures into sex trafficking.
The new platform is called Girls Deserve Better.
The website, which launched Oct. 13 on [the] International Day of the Girl, has four major areas for support and information: self-worth, mental health support, healthy relationships, and sex trafficking prevention. Girls Deserve Better is also on Instagram with many of the resources.
Examples of the articles found in each category include: “Find Friends Who Value Who You Are” (self-worth); “How to Reduce Your Screentime” (mental health); “How to Say No to a Boy Without Hurting His Feelings” (relationships); and “Watch Out for the Five Types of Traffickers” (sex trafficking prevention).
Foster said the “Girls Deserve Better” efforts have been in the making for many years, but now was the time to launch.
“I started addressing college students 30 years ago,” she said. “A few years ago, we began talking about reaching younger teens with our rich pro-life feminist history with our original research. We also wanted to reach them in a different way than Planned Parenthood does.”
“It became more urgent with predators like Jeffrey Epstein but there are so many others under the radar,” Foster said, referring to the recent arrest of the hip-hop rapper and producer known as Diddy.
The Covid shutdown and all of the virtual learning, working, and communicating made it easier for traffickers to prey on teen girls online. “Last year we also read the troubling reports of increased suicidality in teen girls which are attributed to Covid isolation coupled with negative self-image messaging on social media,” Foster said.
Feminists for Life Public Education Coordinator and Editor Joyce McCauley-Benner worked on the ground with teens who were trafficked by different kinds of pimps, Foster said.
“It is shocking how often this happens in America,” said Foster.
“They are not everyone, but they are everywhere,” McCauley-Benner said.
McCauley-Benner also explained how teen girls end up at Planned Parenthood with women who fail to protect them, but instead accompany them for abortions.
“We don’t want them to experience sexual, physical, or emotional abuse,” Foster said. “Nor do we want them to suffer abortions.”
Girls deserve better, she said.
READ: Our first feminists never wanted abortion
The new platform’s Instagram page was launched first and has reached hundreds of thousands of teens, said Foster. Often the only way to reach the teenage girl is through her phone, and Feminists for Life decided to jump into the social media world and create positive information and images to offset the dangerous imagery and opportunities they are clicking on daily.
“They are hungry for positive messages in a TikTok world, “Foster said.
For those girls who are not permitted by their parents to have a login with a social media platform, Girls Deserve Better offers the main website as a resource.
So where does one begin with creating content teen girls will even peruse? Feminists for Life interns created a focus group and conducted surveys. The top four topics of concern are the four currently highlighted on the website.
Foster said pregnancy centers across the nation are encouraged to introduce their young clients to the platform. They can also have their clients take the Girls Deserve Better survey so that more input will be used for future content.
Centers can obtain the surveys by emailing Foster at info@feministsforlife.org or info@girlsdeservebetter.org.
“Parents and counselors will find that the Girls Deserve Better information complements — rather than contradicts — what they want to teach teen girls,” Foster said.
“We have seen each of them as a whole person, not just reproductive body parts trying not to reproduce,” she said. “We provide strong models from the suffrage era but look for this to grow. And we will have courses that they can take as well to enrich their lives.”
“After all,” Foster said, “it starts with a vision of what they might become and then helping them get there. There will be so much more as we continue to develop the site.”
The site also contains information on historical feminist, pro-life women.
“Whether a teenage girl sees our message of the day in Instagram, or their parent has signed them up for the new Instagram teen feed with parental controls, or they go straight to the website for live feed, parents can be secure knowing we are here to Empower and Protect, Inform and Inspire their daughters,” Foster said in a press statement for the platform’s launch.
“Girls deserve better,” said Foster. “Girls are not here for the pleasure of others. We want to help them grow into strong women with so much to contribute to this world.”
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at Pregnancy Help News and is reprinted here with permission.
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