Case Study
Friday, January 23, 2009
The dangers of online chat
"In order to investigate just how likely young children were to be approached online by adults, the BBC asked two detectives to pose as a 14-year-old girl and visit a range of unsupervised chat rooms.
Despite the fact that Sydney, the name they chose for their character, only went to chat rooms with innocent titles, did not approach any other people on
line and was non-committal and passive in conversation, she was contacted by 30 men over a two-week period.
One man went so far as to persuade her to meet up, having asked her questions about her sexual experience."
Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/
I was talking to a 40-year-old man on the net
'Sandra' has already had a scary chatroom experience and in her report she tells us that you should never arrange to meet anyone you've been chatting to online.
"About a year ago, when I was 15, my friend and I went into a chatroom on the internet.
We'd never done it before and thought it would be fun.
Sounded nice
We soon started chatting to a boy, he said he was 19.
We would chat to him for an hour each day.
He sounded a nice person and gradually he started to ask personal questions about us, even what we thought about going out with older lads.
Said yes
After a week he asked us if we wanted to meet him.
We immediately said yes, we thought it would be Ok and we hadn't heard anything about chatroom dangers.
And because there were two of us, we thought we would look out for each other.
Nobody knew
Three days later we agreed to meet him outside the local McDonalds because it was a crowded area and we didn't want to meet him anywhere that was too quiet.
We didn't tell anyone about what we were going to do, we just thought it would be a laugh.
He gave us his mobile number so we could call him when we arrived there.
Two men
At 8.00pm we were approaching McDonalds where we saw two men standing around looking like they were waiting for someone.
We stayed back and rang the mobile number we were given.
When we did this we saw one of the men answer his phone.
Ran home
We knew straight away that these men were waiting for us.
First of all there were two of them and they were not 19, they looked more like in their 40s.
We both got really scared and ran home.
One of the guys kept ringing me to see where we were so I turned my phone off.
He kept phoning for a couple of days, then he stopped. I didn't feel too worried because he didn't know where we lived.
Very lucky
The reason I'm telling my story is that I want other young people to know about the dangers of chatrooms.
My friend and I put ourselves in a very dangerous situation but luckily we were Ok.
From our experience we urge everyone not to give out any personal information about yourself in chatrooms.
And definitely do not arrange to meet anyone, because you just don't know who you've been talking to."
'Sandra', 16, Middlesbrough
Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/
