This article is featured in The Herald Sun and is republished with permission.
Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, a new true crime documentary that has raced into Netflix’s top 10, has been called “gut-wrenching, “horrifying”, “enraging” and “deeply unsettling”.
One expert even called it “worse than Adolescence because it’s based on a real story”.
It tells the real-life story of the cyber bullying of Michigan teenager Lauryn Licari and her boyfriend Owen McKenny, who were sent aggressive and abusive text messages from an unknown number for two years.
As many as 50 texts a day tormented the pair, claiming Owen was going to break up with Lauryn, was cheating on her and was sexually dissatisfied with her.
“He will be with me while your lonely ugly ass is alone”, one text to Lauryn read. Another said “he wants sex, bjs n making out, he don’t want ur sry ass”.
Some texts even told Lauryn to kill herself: “kill yourself now bitch”, “his life would be better if you were dead”, and “DEAD #bangbang #suicide”.
Catfishing is the term given to the creation of a fake persona in order to extort, harass or deceive others online.
The messages, which called Lauryn by her family nickname of “Lo”, and referred to the clothes she’d wear, appeared to be from someone in her inner circle – mostly likely a jealous classmate.
The real perpetrator, who we are choosing not to reveal here, is nothing less than shocking.
With school holidays underway, we ask experts what they make of the true crime documentary. Should you let the kids watch it?
Dr Zena Burgess
Australian Psychological Society chief executive
Whether parents or caregivers should let their children watch a documentary about a teenager who is cyberbullied is highly subjective for each individual, and the child’s age, maturity, and emotional readiness should be considered.
Parents or caregivers might like to watch the documentary first to ensure the content is appropriate for their child and prepare to answer their child’s questions.
A documentary like this may help raise awareness about the seriousness of cyber-bullying and open up important conversations about online behaviour and safety.
Rather than simply letting a child passively view the content, parents or caregivers might find it helpful as a starting point for meaningful discussion by encouraging questions and talking openly about the emotional and psychological impact of cyber-bullying.
Parents and caregivers can also guide their children toward age-appropriate resources to learn more about cyber-bullying, including how to recognise it, how to respond safely, and where to seek help if they or someone they know is affected, including school staff and support roles such as their teacher or a school-based psychologist.
Psychologists, including school-based psychologists, can provide support to children experiencing bullying, whether it’s physical, verbal, or cyber-bullying.
Using evidence-based techniques, psychologists help children process their experiences, develop coping strategies, and build resilience.
Jodie Benveniste
Psychologist and author of teen wellbeing fiction
This documentary could be used as an educational opportunity and a way for parents and teens to have important conversations about cyber-bullying and online communication.
If your teen is interested in it, you could watch it together or separately, then chat about what was scary, what was heartening and how you might deal with receiving unwanted messages.
This show also has the added complexity of the victim’s relationship with the perpetrator, which can also spark conversations about trauma, connection and healing.
And the impact on the greater community can lead to discussions about trust and speaking up.
When watching a documentary that’s based on a true story, it’s still important to see it as a constructed story rather than the ‘ultimate truth’.
The documentary maker has chosen to tell the story in a particular way and from a particular point of view. You could discuss with your teen – whose story was told and who didn’t seem to get a say.
Dr Susan Hopkins
True crime TV expert and lecturer in education at the University of the Sunshine Coast
One positive of this popular documentary is that it may lead to more victims of catfishing coming forward and raise general awareness that more needs to be done about this form of digital abuse and misuse of technology.
While it does shine a light on the problem, it doesn’t offer any real sociological or psychological insights into why this happened in the first place or how to stop it.
It also doesn’t offer much explanation about why it took so long for law enforcement to identify and stop the perpetrator or what could be done to stop this happening again.
The documentary leaves too many unanswered questions to be useful. It could have offered more expert information on the psychological impact of catfishing or a more educative response on how to deal with the digital deceivers in our own lives.
In this way, the show comes across as more voyeuristic and exploitative than educational. There are multiple layers of exploitation here – the perpetrator exploits the victim, apparently for attention or as a way of meeting their own psychological needs, but the film exploits all players and turns them into entertainment.
This show helps raise the profile of the issue of catfishing. However, I don’t think it adequately portrays the true devastating emotional and sometimes financial impact on vulnerable people of online impersonation scams.