‘It could have been my child’

"IT’S a shame it takes a death to make kids think.” Those were the words of a woman to whom the tragic story of Ashleigh Hall evoked angry and painful memories.

The Darlington woman cannot be named as it would identify her daughter, who became the victim of internet sex predator John Allan, in 2007.

The girl was 13 years old when she struck up a friendship with Allan on an internet dating site. Photographs were exchanged and the pair arranged to meet in a Darlington hotel. Once there, Allan undressed the girl, who had claimed to be 18, but his sexual advances were unsuccessful.

He was sentenced to a nine-month suspended sentence in June last year, after admitting sexual activity with a child. The court heard that, although the girl had lied about her age, there was no doubting that, in terms of physical development, she was a minor.

Angry at seeing Allan walk from court, but wanting to move on with their lives, the girl and her mother attempted to return to normality.

But following the discovery of Ashleigh’s body on Monday, the mother has broken her silence in an effort to warn others about the pitfalls facing children over the internet.

“She sits next to me when she’s on the internet now,” she says. “Before she would be up in her room. You like to think they would be sensible, but sometimes you don’t have control over it.

“I never thought for a million years that my daughter would arrange to meet an older man, and I’m sure that the lady who has just lost her daughter would think the same. You do think ‘I should have done this, or that’, but you never know what goes through a teenager’s mind.”

The internet is now interwoven into the fabric of young peoples’ lives. To try to restrict a child’s access, to constantly monitor the sites they are using and the friends they are making, would be an impossible, and for the child, a socially crippling task.

The problem lies in the offline world, says the mother of Allan’s victim, in the naivity of those young people using the internet to make friends.

“My opinion is that these days, a lot of girls are quite sexually active at an early age,” she said.

“I think, in my daughter’s case, it was about keeping up the Joneses, and if that meant getting it from the internet, then so be it.

“She’s seen a lot of professional people since it happened, and they say she has got low selfesteem, which may be the answer to why she went there that day.

“She was very quiet when she heard about Ashleigh, you could tell it had had an effect on her, that she was thinking ‘that could have been me’.”

Dr Jo Bryce, director of research at the cyberspace research unit at the University of Central Lancashire, says “groomers” use a methodical approach to luring young people, and may have multiple targets at any one time.

“Grooming is the process by which adults with sexual interests in young people befriend them and take them through a process of relationship development,” she says.

“The process typically begins with the predator establishing a friendship with the young person through a chatroom or forum.

“This progresses to become a very close romantic relationship, where the offender builds a level of trust in their victim, often by saying ‘I love you’.

“It then moves on to a more sexual stage, which can start online, with the offender asking for photographs and exchanges through a webcam.”

It would be at this stage, says Dr Bryce, with the victim disarmed and trusting, that the predator may look to arrange a meeting.

But in defence of social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo, Jennifer Perry, managing director of e-victims.org, said a predator could not get far with a child who is aware of the risks and unwilling to interact.

She says it is the young person’s natural sexual inquisitiveness that plays into the hands of the predators, and that the unregulated chatrooms pose the greater threat. These are sites where anonymous users can instantly interact; places where a user can easily withhold or even alter their age, location and even gender at the touch of a key of the click of a mouse.

“The young people going onto these websites are looking for sexual experimentation,” she adds.

“Our generation would look at a Playboy or their dads’ porn movies. For this generation it all comes from the internet.

“But quite often the predators don’t even disguise their intentions. They’ll say things like ‘older man wanting young teen’. It is as blunt as that.”

Dr Bryce says young people must speak out when inappropriate advances are made.

“Young people need to be made aware that if they realise there is a problem, if they feel scared, they should tell an adult, and that they are not going to get into trouble for doing so.”

Children and the internet

According to Home Office figures, there were 315 offences of sexual grooming in 2008-9, up 16 per cent on 2007-8.

49 per cent of children aged eight to 13 have an online profile, compared to 22 per cent of over 16s.

Just over half of children say they use websites to make new friends.

43 per cent of children say their parents set no rules for using networking sites.

Facebook has 300 million worldwide users, with 150 million logging on once a day.

The average Facebook user has 130 online friends.

Facebook’s fastest-growing demographic is the 35+ age range.

■ All statistics taken from Garlik’s UK Cybercrime Report 2009