Several times in the past week a friend has shared this video on Facebook.

The video plays three different scenarios involving teenage and pre-teen girls who were lured into meeting, in person and alone, a stranger they first encountered online. It is a truly horrifying thing to watch, but what I find most horrifying is not the behavior of the children, but that of the parents.

You see, each of the girls in the video was lured into a trap of her parents’ making. Having fallen into that trap, she is then verbally dressed down and shamed while the camera rolls. The final step, of course, is the publicizing of that shame on YouTube for the whole world to see. Yes, the girls’ faces are blurred in the video. But that doesn’t change the fact that what you see in this video is the painful betrayal of children by their own parents.

Each setup took several days to play out. First the girl in question had to be baited into chatting with a stranger online. She was then enticed to meet the stranger, whom she believed to be a boy close to her own age, at a designated location. Each of the girls included in the film ultimately carried out the meeting, in spite of the parents’ vehement assurances to the videographer that she would never go through with it. Perhaps the most disturbing scenario is the third one, in which the young girl provides her address to the online stranger so that she can be picked up at her house after dark. When she goes out to meet the van that has pulled up at her curb, she is grabbed by masked individuals who turn out to be her parents. How kind of them to disclose that fact after she has screamed in terror for several long and awful seconds.

Read the article “This is What Bad Parenting Looks Like” on thefederalist.com.