The Understory
Transforming What We Face Into How We Flourish
Spring 2026 | Issue 26
Online Safety · Sextortion · Cyberbullying
The Night Sally Snuck Out the Window
What one girl's story tells us about neurodivergent kids, online vulnerability, and the question every parent deserves to ask.
Sally was in high school when it happened. She had been identified as autistic later than most. She was the kind of kid who compensated well enough in elementary school that no one thought to look deeper until the social and academic demands of adolescence made things harder to hide.
That particular weekend, she had a large math assignment to get through. Her father tried to help. It didn't go well. By the time she left his house and arrived at her mother's, she was near tears, tightly wound, dysregulated, and unable to name what was happening inside her.
Her mother noticed. She tried to reach her. Sally couldn't respond: not because she didn't want to, but because when she was that stressed, words didn't come. The feelings had taken over. Mom eventually went to bed worried, but with no idea what was coming.
What Sally did next made sense to her nervous system, even if it sounds alarming in retrospect: she reached out to a boy she'd been talking to on social media, someone she'd met through a mutual friend, someone who didn't go to her school. They decided to meet up. She thought it would help her feel better. She snuck out her window and got in his car.
He took things much further than she expected. In any language: she was raped.
She crawled back in through her window and didn't tell anyone for days. When she finally did speak, it was to her older sister's boyfriend and only after making him promise not to tell. He broke that promise, thank goodness. Her sister told both parents almost immediately.
Sally's story is not unusual. That is the most important and most devastating sentence in this newsletter.
Why Neurodivergent Kids Face Greater Risk Online
Sally's story is not a story about bad parenting or a bad kid. It is a story about a perfect storm: a nervous system that couldn't self-regulate, a brain wired for intense connection and social longing, and an online environment built by adults who understood exactly how to exploit both.
Children and teens with autism, ADHD, learning differences, and related neurodivergent profiles are disproportionately targeted online and sadly, disproportionately harmed. Here is what the research shows:
•Children and adolescents with disabilities experience sexual, physical, and emotional violence at significantly higher rates than their non-disabled peers, according to a global review of more than 16 million young people.
•Nearly 44% of teens with developmental disabilities report being bullied compared to about 31% of teens without disabilities (CDC).
•Students with disabilities are nearly 10 times more likely to be targeted specifically because of their disability (PACER).
•LGBTQ+ youth, youth from racial and ethnic minority groups, and youth with disabilities are all more likely to experience cyberbullying than their peers (NTIA, 2024).
•79% of autistic women report having experienced sexual exploitation or abuse, compared to 26% of non-autistic women.
•The FBI has identified sextortion as a significant and growing threat targeting minors, with victims most often first contacted through gaming platforms or social media.
Why These Numbers Are So High
These are not coincidences. They are consequences of specific traits that predators actively look for and exploit:
•Neurodivergent teens often have an intense longing for peer connection and may be less practiced at reading warning signs that something is off.
•Many have difficulty distinguishing between genuine care and manipulation, especially in text-based environments where tone is ambiguous.
•Shame and communication barriers make it far less likely that a neurodivergent teen will disclose to a trusted adult--yes, even a loving, available one.
•Emotional dysregulation, like the state Sally was in that night, can override the prefrontal cortex entirely, leaving a young person acting on impulse to relieve overwhelming internal pressure.
•Research suggests neurodivergent young people may also be more susceptible to financial scams and online fraud, because their trusting natures and desire for genuine connection can be weaponized.
1 in 5 teens reported being a victim of sextortion in 2025 — most frequently ages 13–15 (Thorn, 2025)
and
6,000% increase in AI-generated child sexual exploitation material reported to NCMEC, first half of 2025 vs. 2024
Online enticement reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children more than doubled in a single year. These are not abstract statistics. They are the backdrop against which your child opens Instagram, joins a Discord server, or picks up their phone at midnight when they can't sleep and doesn't know how to ask for help.
What New Mexico Is Doing and What You Can Do Right Now
At the 21st Annual Parents Reaching Out Conference, Jenny Bartos, Advocacy and Education Leader for the New Mexico Department of Justice, spoke to a room full of parents about what she and AG Raúl Torrez have documented traveling across this state: students regularly receiving unsolicited sexual images, being pressured to send them, and experiencing relentless cyberbullying.
This came on the heels of a landmark legal moment: a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for endangering children and misleading consumers about platform safety, ordering $375 million in civil penalties. New Mexico became the first state in the nation to prevail at trial against a major tech company on behalf of children.
The New Mexico DOJ has assembled practical resources for families. These are real tools, not pamphlets:
Internet Protection & Safety Resources →
Guidance on sextortion, online predators, social media safety, and reporting.
Scam Prevention & Identity Theft →
Resources on protecting your family from fraud, scams, and identity theft.
Five Things You Can Do This Week
- Have a direct, calm conversation with your child about sextortion: what it is, how it starts, and that they will not be in trouble if they tell you.
- Review your child's social media privacy settings together. Make sure accounts are private and direct messages are limited to known contacts.
- Talk about "red flags" in online conversations: someone asking for photos, pushing to move to a private app, or asking to keep the relationship secret.
- Ask your child who they would tell if something made them uncomfortable online. If the answer isn't you, explore that without judgment.
- Bookmark the NCMEC CyberTipline (cybertipline.org) and the NM DOJ resources above. You want to know where to go before you need to go there.
The conference also addressed the increasing risk of AI-generated deepfakes: realistic fake images and text that can be used in scams, sextortion, and manipulation of children and families alike. This is not a future problem. It is a present one.
What Sally Needed
Sally did not need stricter parents. She did not need her phone taken away. She needed, and deserved, a few things that are harder to give than rules:
•Explicit, practiced skills for identifying what stress felt like in her body before it became overwhelming, not just after.
•Early, repeated experiences of bringing hard feelings to a trusted adult and surviving the vulnerability of it.
•A nervous system that had been co-regulated enough times that her body had a template for calming, one it could access even when her prefrontal cortex was offline.
"A regulated parent is more likely to be the person a child knocks on the door for, instead of climbing out the window to escape." Does that mean we blame Sally's parent? Absolutely not, blame goes nowhere (except possibly dysregulating nervous systems more and setting up future reactions to emotions). Let's work together to raise the bar on awareness about how to work with the nervous system.
A Question Worth Sitting With
What might have been different if Sally had been coached, alongside her mother, to simply notice what big feelings felt like in her body? Not to analyze them or talk through them, just to recognize stress as a physical experience that could be named, and survived, in connection with someone safe.
We will never know. And the responsibility for what happened belongs entirely to the person who harmed her... full stop. But the question is worth holding: what becomes possible when a child learns early to locate stress in her body, and a parent learns to be a safe landing place for it?
It is one of the most important questions I know how to ask.
This Is Exactly What Beyond Behavior Is For
Beyond Behavior: The Regulation Roadmap is a course built for parents of neurodivergent kids, specifically for moments like the one Sally's mother faced that night. Not to prepare you for every disaster, but to help you become a more regulated presence in your child's daily life, so that over time, they develop the internal resources to navigate a world that is not always safe.
When your child's nervous system is flooded, they cannot think clearly, communicate clearly, or make safe decisions. But a parent who has done the work of their own regulation can sometimes be the difference between a child who spirals and a child who finds their way back.
If you are curious about what that work looks like, and what it might make possible for your family, I would be glad to talk.
With compassion, Janine
