Sex predators on the prowl
YOUNG GIRLS GET TAKEN ON SOCIAL MEDIA
IT IS a mother’s worst nightmare – that her daughter would fall victim to sexual predators who prowl social media sites for vulnerable girls.
For Grace*, mother of two, her worst fear came true when her 17year-old daughter befriended a 28year-old man on Mxit. She also had sex with the man, who visited her at the private school in Belgravia in Gauteng, where she is a weekly boarder.
Grace accidentally found out the shocking news two weeks ago.
“I heard my daughter fiddling and when I asked her what she was doing, she said she was on her cellphone,” Grace says.
When she asked to see the phone, her daughter, Zandi*, hesitated.
“I told her I would smash it if she didn’t give it to me. I’ve smashed her iPod before.
“You don’t hit children these days because it doesn’t help. It’s better to take away what’s important to them,” she says.
Grace says when Zandi eventu- ally showed her the phone, she was shocked to see that it was a smartphone and not the basic phone that she had bought for her daughter.
“I took an expensive phone away from her. Previously, she had this top-of-the-range phone and I took it away from her,” Grace says.
She says she did this because she found out that Zandi had been chatting to an older man.
Zandi later admitted that she is still in contact with the man and he has bought her a smartphone to keep in touch with her on Mxit. This is where she met the man who would later have sex with her in the school premises, she says.
“I was in a student chat room chatting to one of my friends from school. Instead of chatting to me on the chat room, he invited me to chat to him on the side,” she says.
“I accepted his request. He said his name was Harry and when we started chatting, I thought he was my age,” she says.
After a month of chatting to “Harry”, Zandi says he came to visit her at school and he would bring alcohol and condoms with him.
“We ended up having sex,” Zandi says.
*Not their real names
While security guards at the school always ask questions, Zandi says that Harry somehow managed to get in to see her.
“I had feelings for him. He said his girlfriend broke up with him. He said he was in emotional turmoil, ” she says.
Since her mother took the smartphone away, Zandi says she has not been in touch with Harry.
Her livid mother says she tried to report the man to the police, but they told her they cannot help her because her daughter is over the age of 16 and from the sound of things, it is consensual sex rather than rape.
Zandi’s school principal, who we will not name to protect Zandi, told Sowetan that they could not understand how Harry was able to enter the school.
“We have a signing-in system,” he says.
The principal says parents have stickers on their cars that notify security guards who can and who cannot enter the school premises.
He says they are investigating how he managed to get in.
“We are concerned about the security of the children and our security company is looking into how he entered the school premises,” the principal says. –