Is your child being groomed online?

(N.B. Nothing replaces the relationship with the family and rely he parents. Nothing. And certainly not a stranger online.)

I set fire to my school when I was thirteen years old.

They sent me to an institution. I was there for about a month. A man in that facility did something to me that I have never spoken about publicly until today. I was a child. He was not.

I carried that for thirty-one years. Through a marriage. Through five kids. Through driving a garbage truck at 5 AM and writing between stops in parking lots with the engine running. Through 1,800 posts and 26,000 subscribers, and a ministry I built with my bare hands.

Thirty-one years of silence.

I'm breaking it now.

Not because I want your sympathy. Not because I want to "process" or "heal" or whatever word the therapists use. I'm breaking it because I watched a 22-year-old kid on the Shawn Ryan Show this week describe being groomed on Roblox at twelve years old, by a developer that Roblox put in their own commercials, and I sat in my chair, and I could not move.

Not because of what happened to him.

Because I looked at a picture of my own children on the wall across the room.

And I thought about every screen in my house. Every app I never opened. Every conversation I never asked about. Every night, my kids were in their rooms on devices I paid for, connected to platforms I never checked, talking to people I never met.

And I realized something that made me sick.

I've been so busy carrying my own silence that I almost missed what was happening right in front of me.

Let me tell you what's happening.

Right now — tonight — there are grown men on Roblox, Discord, VR Chat, and a dozen other platforms your children use every single day. They have playbooks. Not metaphorical playbooks. Literal, documented grooming strategies. They build trust with your kid over weeks. They gift virtual currency. They isolate. They normalize. And then they destroy.

The kid on the Shawn Ryan Show tried to kill himself at fifteen. His mother reported it to Roblox. The company did nothing. The predator — a man named Kevin Nolan, featured in Roblox's own TV commercials on Cartoon Network — is still free. Still online.

Seven hundred thousand people watched that interview in two days.

Twenty million reports of child exploitation hit the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's CyberTipline last year. Twenty million. Reports of online enticement surged 192% in a single year. And those are just the cases someone actually reported.

Your child's bedroom is not safe. Not because you failed as a parent. Because the battlefield moved into your house through a screen, and nobody told you.

I know what it feels like when a man reaches for a child in a room no one is watching. I know what it does to a boy. I know what it costs him for the next three decades. I know the silence. I know the shame. I know the way your body flinches at things you can't explain, and your wife asks what's wrong, and you say "nothing" because you don't have the words.

I have the words now.

And I'm using them.

I'm not starting a movement. I'm not launching a nonprofit. I'm not pivoting my platform. I'm doing what a father does. A father protects his own. And he warns other fathers.

So here's your warning.

Check your kids' phones tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight. Open Roblox. Open Discord. Look at the friend lists. Read the messages. Ask your child who they're talking to. And when they say "just my friends" — verify it. Because the man who hurt me was supposed to be helping me. And the man who groomed that kid on Roblox was supposed to be making games for children.

The people who destroy children don't look like monsters. They look like helpers. They look like developers. They look like youth pastors, coaches, and family friends. And they are counting on you being too busy, too trusting, or too distracted to notice.

Don't be.

Be not ye afraid of them: remember the Lord, which is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives, and your houses. — Nehemiah 4:14

That was written for men standing on a wall with a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other. Building something and defending it at the same time.

That's us.

I wrote the full story on Substack today. Everything I've never said. What happened to me. What I found. What I'm going to do about it. And what I need from you.

If you're a father, read it. If you're a mother, read it. If you have a child with a screen in their hand, read it.

And if you know someone who needs to see this — share it. Not for me. For the kid in the room, no one is watching.

I'm done being silent.

We're not hiding anymore.

@Biblicalman on Twitter/X.