The Americans told us it would happen and two weeks ago we discovered it finally had. A teenage girl called Georgie from Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire went to see a boy she'd "met" in an online chatroom, only to discover he was a middle-aged man.
| Young people have told Children’s Express their parents still can’t program the video recorder, let alone follow the internet. |
The easy reaction would be to blame the internet. After all, it's not an isolated case: children go missing in America every year after making contact with chatroom friends. And only a few weeks earlier, two teenage girls from Whitehaven in Cumbria disappeared, turning up four days later in the home of an online friend.
But examine these stories properly and a different pattern becomes clear: one in which the parents' role is key.
Leanne Reichert was going through a difficult time with her mother, Linda. One night the 15-year-old decided she needed to get away from Whitehaven and said she was going to go to London. Linda thought she was bluffing, but the next day Leanne vanished.
She and her friend Natasha ended up in Manchester, where they contacted Terence, a teenage boy they knew through an online chatroom. Nobody had warned Leanne that people in chatrooms aren't always who they claim to be. She said: "I didn't really think about that; we just exchanged mobile numbers."
In fact, Terence really was a teenage boy, and Leanne and Natasha spent four harmless days with his family before deciding to go home.
Georgie's story was very different. When her online boyfriend "Johnny" asked to meet her, she confided in her parents. They agreed, provided her mother, Catherine, went with her. When Johnny turned out to be a middle-aged man, Georgie was shocked. So was her mother. The point is, she was there to intervene.
Young people need parents not to over-react. The internet is now key to their education and entertainment, and all of them will have access at school by next year.
Kids love surfing the web, getting the latest news on their favourite bands or TV programmes, and looking up material for homework. Even more, they love chatting with young people worldwide and keeping in touch with real-life friends.
Many adults are being left behind and young people have told Children's Express their parents still can't program the video recorder, let alone follow the internet. Teachers seem just as confused. At least one school has given every pupil its own e-mail address with the school name. So the first time they use it they could tell a complete stranger roughly how old they are and where they can be found on a typical week day.
Children are also frustrated by the reliance on filtering software - Which? magazine recently gave these programs a poor press. They often block materials kids want to see, while letting through others they probably shouldn't.
Parents need to teach their children how to look after themselves and trust them to use those lessons online. In turn, young people need to talk openly to their parents. Software can't teach young people how to be safe or sensible. That's their parents' job.
About the team
This article was produced by editors Tinu Adeniji-Adele, 17; Abeyna Jones and Rupal Patel, 16; Michael Kalam, 15; and reporters Jonathan Hudson, 13, and Onome Edgeworth, 10. It was published in the Times, Interface section.
