Boys Think It Won’t Happen to Them. Predators Are Betting On It.

A scatter of sideways glances, twitching grins, half-swallowed laughs. Not cruel, not even overtly dismissive just buoyed by the comfort of assuming that this was a problem for someone else.

This is what sexual extortion talks often look like in schools. It is not indifference. It is the luxury of thinking “it won’t happen to me”.

When I told them that boys are now at increasing risk particularly boys their age, the smiles faltered but only slightly. The statistics sit like foreign currency in the pockets of young men.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said reports of sexual extortion to eSafety had increased by over 1,300% since 2018, indicating decisive action was needed.

Boys can see the numbers, they can hear the warning, but until it is their face or body or both in the message thread, it feels hypothetical. Girls, on the other hand, have been raised in a constant environment of threat. From the moment they enter adolescence, they are trained by news stories, by whispered warnings, by the unspoken choreography of walking home at night, that exploitation is not a possibility but a probability.

The real truth is that the sexual extortion of boys is rising sharply. Sexual Extortion scammers have learned what predators have always known: you target the innocent, unaware. Boys are less likely to believe they could be prey, which makes them more reckless online, more willing to engage in risky exchanges with strangers, and less likely to seek help quickly when the trap is sprung.

The boys I spoke to didn’t yet understand that deepfakes have made this terrain even more dangerous. You no longer need to take a compromising photo for it to exist. Software can build it from fragments of your face, scraped from social media posts published by their school. An hour of unremarkable online presence can be weaponised into something devastating.

The girls in the room already knew this in their bones. They have lived with the spectre of image-based abuse as part of their daily risk assessment. The boys, for the most part, have not. Which is why this is so dangerous for them now.

Predators and peers alike are exploiting that gap.

There is a cruelty in the way adolescence intersects with these technologies. At the age where identity is most fragile, where humiliation can feel terminal, the tools for manufacturing and distributing that humiliation have never been more accessible. The cost of a single lapse in judgment—trusting the wrong person, clicking the wrong link has never been higher.

"Boys in early adolescence are biologically wired to take more impulsive risks, especially to build connection and cred with their mates, often using their immature developing sense of humour. Very few are aware of the harm they can cause, especially towards girls,” according to my colleague in Ctrl+Shft, parenting author Maggie Dent.

Harm that causes a deep, profound sense of shame. Shame that it has the potential to be lethal.

And yet, in many schools, the boys still laugh. Sometimes out of mild discomfort, not out of arrogance, more out of ignorance, mainly because they cannot yet imagine themselves in the crosshairs. The conversation around sexual extortion has been painted too narrowly for too long. It is not just “a girl’s problem.” It is an equal opportunity weapon now.

The last thing I told them was this: the law might measure the damage in years of prison time, but the people on the receiving end measure it in something else entirely. It’s in the loss of trust, in the daily tightness in the chest, in the knowledge that the image, real or fake, will never truly vanish. It will just wait — hidden in a folder, buried in a cloud — ready to surface the next time someone decides you deserve to be broken.

When the bell rang, the girls walked out first, quiet, focused. The boys followed, still chatting, still jostling each other. But a few of them stayed behind, just long enough to ask a question in a voice pitched low, as if the words themselves could give them away. That is how it starts. That is the thin crack in the wall where awareness gets in.

What worried me most was not the laughter. It was how little they knew they had to lose.