CHAT ROOM PREDATORS AND YOUR CHILDREN

Unlike America where local calls are usually free, high phone charges in the UK explained why British users spent less than half the time that their US counterparts did, surfing the net. But in the six years since the US survey, charges in the UK have come down and, as a result, the dangers to children have increased.

I am happy to note, however, that more and more parents whose children use the Internet at home now feel it necessary to supervise them most or all of the time. Many have heeded the dangers of access in bedrooms where supervision is difficult. But children can never be completely safe, so continuing vigilance is necessary, without stifling creativity.

With the long summer school holidays here now, the papers have been full of dark news for children. Forty British schoolchildren, for example, have become victims of a Canadian Internet paedophile. Some of the children were as young as nine.

And that’s only one recent story. It seems as though it is impossible to pick up a paper these days without reading of some horror perpetrated against a child. And I do not mean the current obscene killing of innocent children in Israel and Lebanon either.

Ann Widdecombe, a former senior Government Minister who is now almost a star in both the print and broadcast media, said in a newspaper article on Wednesday that the new technologies have reversed one of the most fundamental securities of childhood: the belief that grown-ups know everything and are in control.

She said: “Even a five-year-old now knows that he or she is light years ahead of any 40-year-old when it comes to technology. Primary school kids sort out problems with the family DVD, set up websites and work out computer short-cuts while the grown-up can only look on in admiration.

“One of the most enduring characteristics of childhood is trust. Wariness comes from experience and the child who enjoys a happy upbringing will not be alert for evil, will not associate the kind of friend in the chatroom with the warnings of elders. But there are mechanisms for parental control, for blocking certain sites.”

And how some of these sites need to be blocked! Within minutes of logging on to the Candy Bar Internet chatroom, reporter Barney Calman received a message from a man in Belfast: “Wanna talk dirty?” The reporter felt disgusted since, as far as the man knew, he was a 13-year-old girl named Katie. Yet, as he discovered during a week of posing as a teenager on the Internet, this kind of sick proposition was not unusual.

Instead of seeing chatrooms as safe places where teenagers could interact freely, the reporter was bombarded with sexually explicit messages, pressured to appear in pornographic photographs and perform sexual acts on webcams, asked to talk dirty on the telephone and shown pornographic images by male chatters.

On three separate occasions, adult men, who initially claimed they were teenagers, tried to pressure him to meet them, believing he was a young girl. The tactics used by these men were similar to those used by paedophile Mark Bedford who is alleged to have orchestrated a relentless campaign of Internet “grooming” from his home in Ontario, Canada.

Closer to home, Lee Costi of Surrey was sentenced to nine years in prison in June for Internet grooming and having sex with minors, some as young as 13. Costi, 21, was the first predator to be successfully prosecuted by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, set up to make the Internet safer for children.

The Centre’s chief, Jim Gamble, explains: “Paedophiles are drawn to teen websites in the same way they would be drawn to a playground or any place that children gather. For these men, chatrooms offer a fast track to grooming.

“They target the sites because it’s so easy to create a false identity and then befriend a vulnerable teenager. They can quickly build up a relationship with a young person and then persuade them to do things or meet them. Children need to be aware that people they meet online might not always be what they appear.”

Since the Centre was launched in April, it has received about six reports of inappropriate behaviour every day, although, as Mr Gamble put it, no one is sure how many predators are out there. But what is known, he said, is that the Internet is a massively popular way for young people to make new friends.

It may sound an astounding figure but as much as 70 percent of British families have Internet connections at home. It does not take rocket science, therefore, to work out that children are accessing chatrooms all the time. Yet, many parents have little idea about what goes on when teenagers interact away from their prying eyes. The very thing that makes these sites attractive is also what makes them dangerous.

It is frightening to hear the Centre’s statistics that one in 12 children who have Internet access has gone to meet someone they first made contact with online. I suppose that this is marginally better than the one in eight figure in the United States.

In any case, there are now calls for access to the Internet to be highly restricted for some of the most vulnerable teenagers.

My view, however, is that it is probably better for parents to supervise their young children and point out the dangers to them, as they log on to chatrooms. But, of course, to do this, parents must themselves be competent in the technology.