It’s been several days since I watched Unknown Number: The High School Catfish documentary on Netflix, and I can’t stop thinking about it. This is a documentary about teens in Beal City, Michigan, who were victims of vicious and cruel cyberbullying for over a year from an unknown number, and it left me shocked and completely unsettled. As a mom of three kids, this documentary left me reeling — and with a deeper fear for my kids’ teenage years than ever before. (Warning: this article contains major spoilers for Unknown Number: The High School Catfish.)

It all started when 13-year-old Lauryn Licari and her boyfriend at the time Owen McKenny started getting mean, anonymous text messages from a number they didn’t recognize in Oct. 2020. The messages paused, then resumed in Sept. 2021, getting

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