torrid said:
The groomers have had to go back underground.
I've revisited this thread this morning with a cup of coffee. I still stand by my thesis, based on the two year bump in the charts on page 1, that this is a Covid lockdown related increase. If I'm reading the article in OP correctly this was a survey of "Freshmen." I'm assuming these were college Freshmen. If the survey was conducted in 2025 and these are Fish, they were 13-14 years old in 2020; maybe some still 12. So they spent 13-15/16 locked away without access to their age group peers. Without their classmates all going through puberty together.
Now the reason I quoted this post. These kids, sports jocks, band dorks, theater kids, artists, hicks, rockers, poets, and every other clique you can imagine in a modern HS were all segregated and locked away. We all spent our HS years in one or more of those circles, we all had interactions (even brief) with the other circles. It was life, it was part of growing up.
So where did these kids turn? They turned to Social Media. They turned to Reddit (and other cesspools) and the groomers undoubtedly found many of them. What was (maybe is) still going on in video game chats, discord, other platforms that I don't even know about as a type this?
I hypothesize another benefit of getting the cell phones out of the schools that we might still see in years to come. Back in August we all heard numerous comments from people in the schools saying kids were between classes and at lunch with peers and not sitting solitary with their heads in their devices. They're building friendships and personal bonds (some life long, some surely brief but equally important). That means when they get home they have personal connections to fall back on. So they're probably less likely to seek places like Reddit for council when they have their friends and peers from school.