‘Looking back, it’s scary to think I sent semi-naked pictures to older guys. It could have gone a lot further’
The NSPCC calls for regulators to do more to keep children safe on social media sites as part of its #WildWestWeb campaign. Here, a grooming victim tells her story to Kelly Williams
CHILDREN in Wales as young as nine have been targeted by online groomers using Facebook and Snapchat.
Predators have been using social media to target youngsters, with dozens of cases in Wales among hundreds recorded since a new law was introduced.
In the first nine months of a new offence of sexual communication with a child there were 1,628 crimes recorded in England and Wales and police revealed what platform was used in 956 cases.
However, the true number of crimes is likely to be much higher as some forces only provided six months of data.
Facebook and two other platforms it owns, Instagram and WhatsApp, were used in 52% of online grooming cases where police disclosed which method predators used, according to the figures gathered by the NSPCC via freedom of information requests.
Figures from North Wales Police showed children as young as nine in the force area were being groomed on Facebook and Snapchat.
A total of 35 offences of sexual communication with a child were recorded by police between April 3, 2017, and January 3, 2018.
An investigation by the NSPCC revealed the youngest victim recorded was just nine years old.
Of these offences six recorded communication on Facebook, six on Snapchat, and three on Kik.
The NSPCC is calling for the introduction of a mandatory code to regulate social networks so that grooming can be prevented, rather than relying on police to intervene after harm has already been done, as part of its #WildWestWeb campaign.
As part of its campaign the charity released the following case study from a Welsh woman who was targeted by groomers as a teenager.
This is her story.
My experience of grooming started on Facebook when I was 14 years old.
At the time I was getting messages from these relatively hot guys in their early or mid-twenties.
You don’t think that’s weird, because these older guys have friends that you know of, or live in the same kind of area, so it doesn’t seem creepy.
I was 14 and hadn’t had any attention from boys before as lads my age were bullying me and taking the mick out of me.
So I played in, thinking ‘these older guys fancy me, they think I’m pretty’.
At the beginning it was messages like ‘Hey, how are you? You know some of my mates. Are you in school?’ It was generally how anyone would start a conversation. I rolled with it.
But as the weeks went on they started sending messages that were more and more sexual. It went from ‘You’re very pretty’ and ‘That picture you posted is very nice’ to ‘You’ve got a nice figure’, then sexual stuff.
It was so subtle; that’s why it is so easy for an online chat to slip into being so wrong.
Because other girls were doing it made it quite normal.
In the area where I live, in north Wales, everyone does it.
Friends in my year were also speaking online to guys, so in my mind there was no point speaking out about it because I didn’t think it was wrong at the time.
That’s the scary thing.
I thought that because other girls were doing it, if I stopped or said something about it I wouldn’t get the guys’ attention anymore.
That’s the kind of vibe the boys would give me, if I didn’t reply or speak the way they wanted me to, then they would say: ‘You’re just too immature for me’.
I was young, and when I received these sexual messages I almost felt it was exciting, like I was doing something naughty and that I shouldn’t tell my parents.
I didn’t feel like I could speak to other people (adults) about it because I thought I’d get into trouble for talking about sex with a guy. I was embarrassed about my parents finding out.
Looking back at it now, it’s scary to think that I sent semi-naked pictures to older guys. It could have gone a lot further.
Some of my friends lived in towns so they could just walk to the guys’ houses, and ended up sleeping with the guys they were speaking to online when they were only 14 or 15. The boys were in their twenties.
Those girls did go that far, because they thought they were in a relationship.
I was lucky I didn’t. I live in the middle of nowhere where you need to get a 15-minute car drive to a bus or train station to go and see someone.
I could not have just walked off and met a guy if he asked me.
One guy in particular was insistent, would say he could come and pick me up. I told him it couldn’t happen because my parents were very strict, and were on it about who I was seeing and when.
My mum made sure I had extracurricular activities every single day after school – singing, swimming, horse-riding, and I wasn’t allowed to go out and play in the streets with my mates.
I didn’t have any friends of driving age, so if he had driven up to my house my parents would have seen him and made it impossible for me to see him.
I was annoyed at my parents. I know I would have gone with him if I could. But I was so lucky that my parents were that way – if they had been like some of my friends’ parents, who weren’t really in the
It’s difficult to get the message through to girls – and boys too. I know I would not have listened when I was 14
loop when they were out, those guys would have popped over all the time.
This particular guy gave up on me in the end, he got fed up that I couldn’t meet up. He stopped replying.
The online grooming went on for about a year and a half, until I had my first boyfriend, whom I was with for three years.
It was after I broke up with him and had matured that I realised how wrong it had been to talk about sex with older guys when I was still a virgin; that it was weird and that it wasn’t just like a normal relationship sort of thing.
When I saw a video about the paedophile hunters on Facebook, it hit a nerve. That’s when I came to the realisation that I should not have been talking to those people when I was that young.
The type of messages the hunters were getting from these paedophiles were the same kind of messages I used to get. I realised how predatory it was.
I know these guys are still back home, now in their thirties, probably still doing the same thing to young girls at this very moment, and this makes me ill.
I know it’s still happening now because my little sister, who is 15, just told me that one of her friends in her year is currently ‘dating’ a 21-year-old.
Because of my experience, my little sister has tried telling her friend it isn’t right.
She encouraged her to either talk about it to someone or stop seeing him. But her friend replied my sister was jealous about her having ‘a boyfriend’. That’s the kind of attitude: ‘I have an older boyfriend and it’s cool’.
Those girls don’t see it as creepy – and they won’t for another couple of years.
Yet girls nowadays are not stupid: a 14- or 15-year-old would not go and speak to an old man. Girls are savvy. They will be able to tell if that person is real, young or not, by looking at their stories on Snapchat, or Instagram.
But if it actually is a good-looking guy in his twenties, girls won’t identify it as grooming.
To them it doesn’t sound like such a big age gap, but these are children. These are adults grooming and having sex with a child. It really angers me.
It’s a weird area of online grooming – people assimilate online grooming with a 60-yearold man behind a computer talking to a young girl.
That’s what you see on campaign ads – videos of an old actor typing a message to a young girl and warnings. I was never convinced.
I have seen posters saying: ‘Do you think you are being groomed? Here’s what you should do’. But that’s not the problem: young girls don’t think or know they are being groomed.
It’s difficult to get the message through to girls – and boys too. I know I would not have listened when I was 14.
It’s not about stopping girls speaking to strangers online – that is not how people need to tackle it.
We need to drill into their heads that not every predator is old, fat and above the age of 40.
If someone had told me that what was happening to me was not right, I probably would have questioned it and put an end to it.