- Parents should where possible limit the kinds of chatrooms visited.
Last year the University of Central Lancashire published research containing the following shocking statistics:
- One in five nine to 16 year olds use chatrooms.
- One in 9/10 chatroom users have met in person somebody they communicated with online.
- Three-quarters of these children were not accompanied by an adult to face-to-face meetings.
- A third didn’t tell their parents that they had arranged the meetings.
On reading these facts I was hit by the scale of the problem. My parents have always made me aware of the dangers of the internet - although I do not frequent chatrooms I have made a few friends online, but I would never dream of meeting one of them without a parent present. I never give out my address, school or phone number to any of these people. I have spoken to some of these friends about the possibility of meeting up someday and the necessity of my parents’ presence and all of them understand and agree that it is a sensible attitude. I didn’t understand how so many people could be so stupid and careless as to give out personal information to strangers, and I didn’t think it was possible that they could be totally unaware that they were doing it, until I found this story on an awareness website. This is an excerpt from the story, which is based on two real cases and written by two Christian Internet users to alert parents to the dangers of the internet. It is set in America and is about a girl named Shannon (ByAngel213), and it begins with her online conversation with a boy - GoTo123 - who she has never met. Shannon is confident that she is being safe online as she has not given him her full name, phone number or address.
ByAngel213: Hi I'm glad you are on! I thought someone was following me home today. It was really weird!
GoTo123: LOL You watch too much TV. Why would someone be following you? Don't you live in a safe neighbourhood?
ByAngel213: Of course I do... LOL... I guess it was my imagination...
GoTo123: Unless you gave your name out on line... You haven't done that have you?
ByAngel213: Of course not. I'm not stupid you know.
GoTo123: Did you have a softball game after school today?
ByAngel213: Yes and we won!!
GoTo123: That's great! Who did you play?
ByAngel213: We played the Hornets... LOL.. their uniforms are so gross! They look like bees...
GoThere123: What is your team called?
ByAngel213: We are the Canton Cats. We have tiger paws on our uniforms. I play second base. I got to go.. My homework has to be done before my parents get home. I don't want them mad at me...Bye
GoTo123: Catch you later.. Bye
GoTo123 decided it was time to teach Angel a lesson that she would never forget. He went to the member menu and began to search for her profile. When it came up he highlighted it and printed it out. He took out a pen and began to write down what he knew about Angel so far.
Her name: Shannon. Birthday: Jan. 3, 1985. Age: 13. State where she lived: North Carolina. Hobbies: softball, chorus, skating and going to the mall. Besides this information he knew she lived in Canton. She had just told him. He knew she stayed by herself until 6:30 every afternoon until her parents came home from work. He knew she played softball on Thursday afternoons on the school team and the team was named the Canton Cats. Her favourite number seven was printed on her jersey. He knew she was in the seventh grade at the Canton Junior High School. She had told him all this in the conversations they had on line. He had enough information to find her now.
"She'll be so surprised," he thought, "she doesn't even know what she has done." …
…Shannon was in her room after her softball game next Thursday evening when she heard voices in the living room. Shannon, come here," her father called. He sounded upset and she couldn't imagine why. She went into the room to see a strange man sitting on the sofa. “This man is a policeman. He has just told us a most interesting story about you." her father began.
Shannon moved cautiously to a chair across from the man. How could he tell her parents anything? She had never seen him before today!
"Do you know who I am?" The man asked.
"No..." Shannon answered
"I am your on line friend, GoTo123."
Shannon was stunned. "That's impossible! GoTo is a kid my age! He's 14 and he lives in Michigan!"
The man smiled. "I know I told you all that... but it wasn't true. You see, Shannon, there are people on line who pretend to be kids; I was one of them. But while others do it to find kids and hurt them, I belong to a group of parents who do it to protect kids from predators. I came here to find you to teach you how dangerous it is to give out too much information to people online. You told me enough about yourself to make it easy for me to find you. Your name, the school you went to, the name of your ball team and the position you played. The number and name on your jersey just made finding you a breeze."
The man goes on to tell Shannon how a friend of his had a daughter who was abused and murdered by a man she had met across the Internet, and that he had done this to make children more aware of the dangers of the Internet and how vigilant they had to be in giving out information. Although the events themselves are not real this is a perfect example of how paedophiles and murderers work on the Internet, squeezing ‘unimportant’ information out of unsuspecting children who believe that they are safe because they haven’t given out their addresses.
Another potential danger of the Internet is the inability to regulate the content of the websites themselves. Until it was infiltrated, a website known as ‘Landslide’ offered subscribers easy access to violent and obscene scenes and soundtracks of child abuse which shocked even police investigators. In 2001 the seven people who set up the world’s largest paedophile ring ‘ w0nderland’ [sic], which contained pictures of 1,263 children, were taken to court. It was widely publicised and assumed that this would act as a warning to other potential groups. However, the trial lasted only one and a half days, and all seven men received sentences of far less than the maximum of three years.
So what has been done to combat these problems? When the lists emerged, of the total of 80,000, 7,000 actual subscribers to ‘Landslide’ appeared to live in the UK, and 2,500 had visited the site at least 10 times in the few months it had been on the Internet. Obtaining child pornography via the Internet is a crime, punishable by months or even years in jail. Yet fewer than 200 people have been charged. One might wonder why, when the police appear to spend most of their time trying to identify criminals, now that they are presented with the names and details of 7,000 paedophiles and potential child abusers (In America it has been found that a third of all Internet paedophiles are active abusers) they have done little or nothing about it.
The truth is, these police don't seem to have the time, money, expertise or the motive to look for paedophiles. It takes at least four officers to arrest a suspect and countless other experts to search the house and computer. Few police are trained in cracking the protection that may have been put up on the computer to prevent such evidence being found. And most importantly, child protection is not listed as one of the government’s police priorities. These include burglary, drug dealing, car crime and street robbery, but evidently not protecting hundreds of terrified children from violence, abuse and general violation by identifying and locking up those people who effectively provide an audience for their abuse. No, most forces (not including the Met and three or four others) have no incentive to spend any money on this area because they won’t be judged on it - success in this field won’t be included in reports on the area.
And even if all 7,000 suspects were arrested, would the government provide treatment for their perversions or simply punishment? Would just throwing them in jail cure them, or on being released, would they simply do it again? Prisons are already overcrowded as it is, and these people would raise the population of these prisons by a massive 10%.
Possibilities being considered by the government include implanting electronic tags into those convicted. It is being proposed that the ‘grooming’ of young children on the Internet become a criminal offence so that paedophiles, like Robert Colehill, who approach many children until one is naïve enough to agree to meet them, can be convicted without actually physically having to harm children. This also removes the common concept that young teenagers can consent to engaging in sexual acts with adults.
The unfortunate reality, however, as the statistics prove, is that as long as children continue to keep their parents in the dark about what is going on, little can be done.
Why I chose to write on this subject
I spend lots of time on the Internet, and ever since we got a computer my parents have been worried about the type of people I am talking to. I heard the university statistics given weeks ago and was shocked by the scale of this problem, especially when compared with the number of my friends who call me paranoid, give out their mobile numbers freely and seem completely unaware of the dangers facing them. I decided that this would make an good topic for further research, and it has proved to be very interesting. And although some of the information I found about the content of websites and various cases have been quite distressing, it really drove the point home to me.
