Beware the chatroom predators

By JAN CORBETT

When nzgirl, the online magazine for teenage girls, asked its readers to come forward with tales of bad experiences of meeting boys on the internet, they received this reply from 15-year-old Sarah*.

"My dad had just bought our family a new computer - complete with the internet. I quickly became hooked into the world of cyberspace, in particular, chatrooms. Being quite a newbie to chatrooms and stuff, I wasn't quite clued-up on internet safety. So when 16-year-old 'Joshua', a smart, fun-to-talk-to guy questioned me about my personal details, I gave no thought about giving them to him."

Joshua suggested they meet and Sarah was thrilled. "I knew that meeting someone off the internet was dangerous. But Joshua was different. He was nice."

Telling her parents she was going to the movies with friends, she instead waited outside the theatre for Joshua, standing away from the crowd as he had suggested.

Suddenly three men jumped her from behind, pulled her behind the theatre and yanked her skirt over her head. "A voice that sounded old enough to be my father said, 'Hi, I'm Joshua."'

Her mother wanted her to report the rape to the police immediately but "I didn't want to and I begged her not to." And her mother felt guilty for not monitoring what her daughter was doing on the internet.

A true story? Or a carefully crafted tale from an imaginative and literate teenager?

This writer cannot be sure, because it arrived by e-mail. And therein lies the problem with communicating via cyberspace. We cannot make the judgments about character and truth that we instinctively make when we see someone in person, hear their voice on the telephone and engage them in conversation.

Which is why teenage girls like Sarah can get into so much trouble on the internet.

And so can boys. Consider this story, told to us by the police:

He was 13, and he thought the new friend he had found in an internet chatroom was about that age, too. Typical of teenage boys, PlayStation was their favourite topic. So they arranged to meet in a park and exchange games.

But the messages coming from this new friend leading up to the meeting started to get a little creepy. He was now asking personal questions. Less typical of teenagers, this 13-year-old told his parents about it, and the parents went to the police. So when his new friend turned up in an Auckland park to make the rendezvous, rather than meeting the 13-year-old, he met an undercover policeman. And that policeman did not find himself talking to a teenage PlayStation fanatic, but to a 35-year-old paedophile.

Pretending to be someone you are not on the internet is not a crime. Turning up at the park with the intention to molest someone is.

Although a couple of years old, this case is remembered well by Detective Sergeant Phil Kirkham, head of the police's sex abuse squad, who agrees that reported internet-initiated sexual crimes are still rare. But he suspects it represents "the tip of the iceberg" of the danger children and teenagers are getting into on the internet.

She cannot reveal the details, but Rape Crisis coordinator and Internet Safety Group convener Liz Butterfield says she knows of two Auckland teenagers raped by men they met on the internet. One was lulled into a false sense of security because she met the man in a Christian-oriented chatroom.

Like many areas of social change in New Zealand, the degree to which its youngest users are at risk from this new technology is poorly measured and scarcely researched. In Auckland, police superintendent Howard Broad has taken a special interest in internet safety. But he complains that the police's antiquated methods of recording crime gives no indication of whether the internet was involved. Without that information his force remains statistically illiterate on the subject. He too fears "the problem is larger than generally appreciated."

To help to fill the information gap, the Internet Safety Group commissioned Auckland University's psychology department to survey 347 teenage girls who visited the nzgirl site, to find out whether they are routinely risking their safety on the internet.

The results, which were released on Thursday, "are of serious concern" to the Internet Safety Group because they show a surprisingly high number of teenage girls ignoring standard internet safety advice. An alarming 60 per cent "had done at least one potentially unsafe behaviour."

For example, 35.5 per cent had given their address, telephone number or surname to someone they met on the internet, 26.5 per cent had sent their photograph to someone they met on the net, and 14.5 per cent had sent pictures of themselves.

Asked if they had ever had a face-to-face meeting with someone they first met on the net, 33.5 per cent said yes (compared to 24 per cent who said yes to that question in a similar American survey) and 32 per cent went to that meeting alone. Of those who went to the meeting alone, 38.5 per cent did not tell a parent or caregiver about it.

Indeed, the survey showed a surprisingly low level of adult supervision of teenagers using the internet, even though the majority, 95.5 per cent, are using it at home. The largest proportions said there is either never any adult supervision (37.5 per cent) or only occasional supervision (37.5 per cent). Schools providing their students with internet access did not fare much better, with consistent adult supervision being reported by only 10.5 per cent and "often" by 12.5 per cent. Libraries offer the least amount of supervision to teenagers using their internet services, with 68.5 per cent of the respondents saying no adult looks over their shoulder at the screen.

At the same time 22.5 per cent said there had been times when they felt unsafe or threatened on the net.

Some reported they had been subjected to sexual threats. Said one: "When people ask if you want to cyber [chatroom shorthand for sex] and then you say no, they call you names and stuff." Another respondent described how "some guy just started chatting to me and talking about sexual matters. I didn't like it." And another said, "This person was like 45 and was asking to have sex with me, I felt like he was watching me."

Still others reported receiving phone calls at home from men in other countries, and even one said she ended up with a stalker who found out where she worked and turned up there.

In June last year, America's National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children released a report on online victimisation, based on interviews with 1501 teenagers who regularly use the internet.

It found one in five had received a sexual approach over the internet in the past year. One in 33 said the approaches had been aggressive and persistent. One in four had been exposed to pornography they had not sought and one in 17 had been threatened or harassed. One quarter of teenagers who had suffered these experiences were distressed by them and only one quarter told a parent about it. Less than 10 per cent were reported to the police.

As the authors point out, "Any workplace or commercial establishment where a fifth of all employees or clients were sexually solicited annually would be in serious trouble. What if a quarter of all young visitors to the local supermarket were exposed to unwanted pornography? Would this be tolerated? We consider these levels of offensiveness unacceptable in most contexts. But on the internet will we simply accept it as the price for this new technology because it is anonymous?

Rather than accepting it, the Internet Safety Group wants internet safety education to become part of the school curriculum, and for counsellors, social workers, psychologists and researchers to address the issues. It calls its survey results "a clear wake-up call to all who are entrusted with the care of our young people that we must take the issue of internet safety seriously."

We know, from experience, about the risks of letting teenagers out in cars, unsupervised with alcohol, or home alone for the weekend. But we don't necessarily know enough about leaving them alone on the internet to give them the right advice, rules and boundaries.

So three years ago, after hearing former sex abuse unit head Detective Sergeant Mark Churches give a seminar about paedophiles using the internet to cultivate victims, Liz Butterfield, an ex-patriate American and Rape Crisis coordinator, pulled together a group of representatives from the police, internet providers, sex abuse lobbyists and teachers to form the Internet Safety Group - the first of its type in the world.

Rather than scaring parents about the internet, its focus has been on providing the right guidelines and information so that younger users can approach it as safely as possible, much like the approach to road or water safety.

In another world-first , it launched a website dedicated to internet safety - www.netsafe.org - and produced an internet safety kit for schools, sponsored chiefly by the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services.

Like all good safety rules, those for the internet can squeeze on to a postcard. They include not giving out personal details like your address, telephone number or the school you go to on the internet, not arranging to meet someone you first met on the internet without telling your parents, or ensuring if you do meet in person that it is in a public place and that you take an adult chaperone. The most crucial advice to parents is to keep the computer in the family room. Leaving a teenager alone in a bedroom with easy access to the internet is asking for trouble.

Concerned about the potential for internet victimisation, Auckland father of three Warwick Jones not only keeps the computer in the family room, but runs a password system so the children cannot log on unless there is a parent there to enter the log-in code. "Some people would say I'm hysterical," he says. "But the kids don't mind."

Of course, either by accident, ignorance or unavoidable circumstance, most teenage girls have at some time put their safety at risk by, for instance, answering a classified advertisement for models, going on a blind date, walking alone down a dark alley, or revealing their name when they answer the telephone. Why single out the internet as being of particular safety concern?

One reason is that although the internet is arguably one of the most important educational and entertaining resources since the invention of television, most of us don't really understand how it works. Who realises that entering a chatroom is like walking into a party where you cannot see what the guests look like or how they behave? More dangerously, the kids often know more about the internet than do their parents, making it the one arena where the children have more power than adults.

Not only does the internet therefore become a place where vulnerable teenagers are known to gather, but also an arena where they feel free to be offensive or become offenders. After all, the majority of pornography traders caught on the net are teenage boys.

Butterfield says children, like many adults, are less inhibited on the internet than in their daily lives and are engaging in online bullying or sexually aggressive messages in a way they never would in person. "My feeling is they let their guard down on the net."

Not only that, but everyone from Hollywood directors who made You've Got Mail to newspaper reporters who become captivated by stories of finding true love in a chatroom, build the notion that the internet is a type of 21st-century Love Boat.

And for some people it has been.

Take 18-year-old Rachel* who has been "talking" in chatrooms since she was 13. She says she has made countless new friends at a site called Auckland 20 plus, and meets them at parties nearly every Saturday night. She considered chatrooms a great way to meet people when she moved to Auckland from a provincial city last year. Although she admits to encountering some strange types, she says on the whole "chatroomies" are not as socially inept as people may think.

Once she went to the home of one man she met in a chatroom which, looking back, she agrees was risky, but they became good friends. These days when she meets chatroom men in person she ensures a friend is never far away. She is careful about never giving out too many personal details, but will give out a cellphone number. Generally, says Rachel, it is about common sense.

Rachel perhaps personifies the anecdotal observations from American research shows that boys are more likely to view the internet as a tool while girls see it as their new best friend.

That was certainly true of American teenager Katie Tarbox, whose brush with a paedophile she met on the internet led to her journal being turned into a bestseller, Katie.com, and her online correspondent becoming the first person to be prosecuted for sexual harassment of a minor on the internet.

A 13-year-old from a wealthy but dysfunctional Connecticut family, Tarbox was obsessed with clothes, hair and makeup more than most her age, but still lamented, "No one my age seemed to be interested in music or books or any of the things that mattered to me. I was beginning to feel completely alone." All that seemed to change when she met what she thought was a 23-year-old college kid called Mark in a chatroom. After six months of cyber-flirting, they arranged to meet in a hotel room in Texas, where she was staying with her parents.

The door opened but instead of the tall, dark, handsome Mark she was expecting, she found a short, scrawny 41-year-old paedophile called Francis Kufrovich, whose attempt to grope and fondle her was mercifully interrupted by Tarbox's concerned mother pounding on the door.

Despite the attention paid to this case and this book, America is lagging behind New Zealand in providing internet safety advice. Clare Balfour, associate principal at Mt Roskill Grammar School and co-author of the Internet Safety Kit, is travelling to the United States later this year, when she will describe the internet safety work to the FBI and various senators.

Like a lot of adults, Balfour remembers being ignorant of and naive about the internet, until she visited the internet watchdogs at the Department of Internal Affairs. What she calls her "moment of growing up" was seeing the graphic images of a baby being raped and learning it took only 90 seconds to find the site.

She describes the internet as a major highway children are running out onto.

Although the kit was sent to schools three years ago, it alarms her how many do not know what their responsibilities are, or how to ensure their students are not wandering into hazardous areas.

As for her advice to parents, it comes down to setting the rules from the start - if your 16-year-old has had his or her computer in the bedroom for the past five years, it will be difficult to wrench it into the family room now - and educating themselves about the internet.

"At the end of the day it's about having a relationship with your kids.

"If just one parent reads this and thinks I'd better check on what the children are doing on the internet - it could save a life."

* Not her real name.