Com Networks: Young Men Are Being Hunted

There is a particular kind of predator who doesn't need to break into your life. He waits for you to invite him in — through a gaming lobby, a Discord server, a comment section where you posted something vulnerable and he noticed. He is patient. He knows you are lonely. He has been watching for exactly that.

The phenomenon being called "com networks" — exploitation communities operating in the digital spaces young people already inhabit — is not new to me. I have sat across from clients, male clients especially, young men who arrived at my clinic not quite able to name what had happened to them. They knew something had gone wrong. They couldn't always locate the moment it began. That is, I have come to understand, entirely by design.

What these networks do is elegant in the way that only truly predatory systems are elegant. They find the boy who is already on the edge — isolated, angry, looking for belonging — and they offer him exactly that. Brotherhood. Purpose. A place where his frustration is not pathologised but celebrated. They take the rawness of adolescence, that specific ache of feeling invisible, and they weaponise it. First they give him the feeling of being seen. Then they give him instructions.

The psychology here is not complicated, but it is devastating. Humans are wired for group belonging — we call it affiliation need, though the plain English is simpler: we will do almost anything to not be alone. For a teenage boy who has spent years feeling like a ghost in his own school, being welcomed into a group — even a vicious one — can feel like salvation. By the time he understands what he has joined, leaving feels like losing the only family he has.

What makes these networks particularly insidious is where they live. Not in dark corners the parents never visit. Right there, in the gaming platforms, in the social media feeds, in the apps already open on the phone charging beside his bed. Parents often think the danger is something you navigate toward. These networks understand that the danger is already inside the house, already familiar, already wearing the face of entertainment.

I think about what it takes to reach these boys before the networks do, and it is not complicated — but it requires a discomfort most adults prefer to avoid. It requires asking a teenage boy how he actually is, and then waiting, without rushing to fix it, long enough for the real answer to surface. It requires tolerating his anger without making his anger about you. It requires being present in the exact online spaces where he spends his time, not to surveil, but to understand.

The young men I see in clinic who have been drawn into exploitative communities share one thing: at the moment they were recruited, there was no adult paying close enough attention. Not because those adults didn't love them. But because love without attention is not enough.

The most dangerous thing you can tell a lonely young man is that he should be fine. He will go somewhere else to find the one who tells him he is exactly right.