Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Diary – 25 January 2003

The shocking truth about chat rooms

I spent Tuesday evening watching Ashley, a 15-year-old blonde girl from Oklahoma, flirt with a British boy called PJ. ‘Wanna see some photos of me?’ asked Ashley. PJ grinned. ‘I think you’ll like them, they’re hot,’ said Ashley, and winked. A boy called Ghetto, whom neither of them had met before, interrupted the conversation. ‘Hello, sir,’ he began. ‘Does anybody want to buy a dildo?’ Kitty69 responded immediately: ‘Check out the action on my live teen webcam!’ The Yahoo chat room for teenagers is one of the oddest places I’ve ever been. Boys pick up girls within seconds of meeting, and retire to ‘private rooms’ to talk dirty. PJ and Ashley soon disappeared to check out her webcam, a small video camera that transmits live footage of its owner, usually naked, over the Internet. A short profile of Ashley was available. The photo that she had submitted had been barred by the chat-room hosts for being too obscene, and she lists as her hobby ‘fuckin’. This seems par for the course in teen chat rooms. A nice 14-year-old called Fiona from Birmingham, whose hobby is shopping, gave Yahoo chatters the address of her web page. One click later, my screen was full of pictures of a pretty teenager, kneeling on her bed, wearing just pants and too much make-up. Does this make me a paedophile? Are Fiona and Ashley culpable for posting pictures such as these? If it is within the law for Ashley and PJ, both under age, to be naked together in a real room, why should it make a legal difference to put between them two panes of glass, several thousand miles of fibre-optic cable and the Atlantic Ocean? All this makes my head hurt. But I can at least now say with some confidence that if your teenager is locked in his room, luminous in front of a computer screen, tapping away at a keyboard, it’s a fair bet he’s doing unspeakable things with a 13-year-old Puerto Rican girl from New Jersey.

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