My gaming addict son may at last get help
A 15-YEAR-OLD boy is set to be diagnosed with internet gaming addiction in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the NHS.
The north London teenager has been off school for a year after becoming so addicted that he has lost confidence to leave his home. It represents a potential breakthrough for Kendal Parmar, his mother, who has battled for three years to have his condition recognised and treated.
It comes just months after the World Health Organisation classified internet gaming as a mental health disorder.
“I call it a silent addiction. Every moment he’s awake, he wants to be on a game. There is no outside world. It has become all-consuming,” said Miss Parmar, who co-founded Untapped AI, which supports people online in work and at home. The mother-of-five added: “No one has taken it seriously at all. There isn’t any treatment as it’s so new and no one understands it.
“He was admitted to hospital for eight weeks because he was not functioning. When he came out, they said they had some medication for him. All it was was vitamin D tablets [to compensate for lack of sunlight] because he doesn’t go outside.”
LUCIE JAMES* was just 10 when she received a friend request on her favourite music website from someone she believed to be a teenager. Despite a comfortable upbringing, she had struggled to make friends, so turned to a social networking site to connect with children of a similar age interested in the same bands as her.
Innocently accepting the request, she had no way of knowing it had come from a man in his 30s; a man lurking anonymously in the shadows of the web. He was patient. Over a year, he cultivated Lucie’s friendship, posing as a peer. “He would say he was interested in the same music as me, the same clothing brands. I genuinely did think he was a friend,” she says.
When she got her first mobile phone, aged 11, he quickly requested her number. “It progressed from talking about interests to wanting to speak about sexual things,” she recalled last week. “He had a phone with a camera and he wanted sexual photographs of me”.
He played on her insecurity. “When someone has your trust and is telling you you’re beautiful, you don’t ... see a problem,” Lucie says. “When you are so young, you don’t understand you are being groomed. They are so clever. The police told me I was not the only child he was grooming.”
They met in a local park. Lucie took a friend, whom he bullied into leaving. “He was telling me ‘if you tell your parents about this, you are going to be in so much trouble’”, she said. “He twisted it so that it was my fault.”
It was then he sexually assaulted her for the first time, in a secluded part of the park, beginning a controlling and abusive relationship that lasted several years. “Sometimes he made me feel like someone special, like he loved me. He’d tell me we’d get engaged and married – every little girl’s dream. But other times he was threatening and abusive. I was sexually assaulted and hurt many times.” Lucie’s parents eventually found out about her abuser. And although he was placed on the sex offenders’ register, it was judged there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution. Lucie, by contrast, has been left with post-traumatic stress syndrome and fears she will need medication for the rest of her life.
Cases like Lucie’s are statistically rare but far from uncommon, with police arresting six people a day for grooming children via social media. But grooming is only one threat posed to children by what the NSPCC refers to as the “wild west web”. Some 60 per cent of parents are worried about the welfare of their children online – and 17 per cent say they have had to deal with a specific threat to their children’s wellbeing, according to research by Internet Matters, a parental advice charity.
Carolina Fernandez Fawaz from London is among the many parents to have watched as their child got hooked on social media. She first spotted the signs of addiction when her 13-year-old daughter, Sofia, “a great reader”, lost interest in books, ditched her violin lessons and reduced her sport.
It came to a head when she returned home one day to find Sofia had done nothing for four hours but stay in her room, online. “We decided to take drastic measures,” says Carolina, who submitted her story to the Commons science and technology committee investigating the impact of social media on children’s mental health.
“She told me that if she went to school without knowing or replying to what was going on in her group with her friends on Whatsapp, she would feel she was missing out and it was very embarrassing for her. I was shocked.”
The compromise was not without “a lot of fights”. Her daughter now hands over her devices at 9.45pm, then gets them back at 7.45am, when she has 15 minutes to catch up with her Whatsapp group before school.
In her evidence to the committee, Carolina speaks for a generation of beleaguered parents when she declares that digital devices should come with an addiction warning. “Parental controls are a joke ... and also social media [firms] don’t really block people once they have been reported,” she says.
With children now communicating across 142 digital platforms, parents frequently feel helpless. Turning off the internet at home is not an option for most as so much homework often needs to be done online. Likewise, confiscating a child’s phone can present a risk as they will not be able to call for help if they get into trouble when out.
This is why The Daily Telegraph is today calling for a new statutory duty of care to be placed on social media and gaming companies – something that would force them to take responsibility for protecting child users against known or foreseeable harms.
In the most extreme cases, children are being led to their deaths. Breck Bednar, from Caterham in Surrey, was 14 when Lewis Daynes, an 18-year-old stranger, groomed him via an online gaming forum before luring him to his flat and slitting his throat in a fatal attack believed to be sexually motivated.
Kayleigh Haywood, from Measham in Leicestershire, was 15 when she was raped and murdered by Stephen Beadman, 29, after his friend Luke Harlow, 28, had groomed her via Facebook and SMS and lured her to his home.
As was once the case with tobacco and lung cancer, there is not yet enough accumulated evidence to prove a causal link between internet use and rising mental ill health rates among the young. However, parents and children’s charities are right to demand that ministers act on the precautionary principle as hard academic evidence is beginning to mount.
One in five young people wake up during the night to check social media, making them three times more likely than their classmates to feel constantly tired at school, according to a Cardiff University study. Some 27 per cent of those online for more than three hours on a school day report high or very high scores for mental ill health, more than double those spending fewer than three hours on social media, says the Office for National Statistics. And a University College London (UCL) study which tracked nearly 10,000 girls and boys aged 10-15 found girls who spent more than an hour a day on social media from the age of 10 were more likely to have social and emotional problems.
The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health is about to bring out a long-awaited report that will say there is “moderately-strong” evidence for an association between screen-time and depressive symptoms as well as obesity and poor diet at all ages.
Tanya Goodin, a tech pioneer who founded the campaign group Time to Log Off, mentions one teenage girl who told her she was so desperate to keep up her Snapchat “streaks” – online interactions with friends that must be repeated daily – that even when seriously
ill in hospital she asked her mother to update them for her. Another girl said she had maintained her streaks for a record-breaking 380 consecutive days.
“Children come to me who think they have spent 24 hours a day online,” she says. “As someone who set up my digital marketing business three years before Google, I am part of a movement that thinks we have gone too far. We need to look again at this world we have created and decide if it’s fit for children and fit for purpose.” *Name has been changed
‘When you are so young, you don’t understand you are being groomed. They are so clever’