Gaia Online, recently awarded an award from CNET's Webware for Best Social site, is also the online teen destination site where a Wisconsin teen met an adult woman looking for a real world tryst. We parents will need to add this site to our watchlist for our kids, just as we monitor the use of other social networking sites. It's a very cool site, with gaming areas, great graphics for creating a personalized avatar (or online representation of yourself) and a very busy community. In fact, the site claims they have the "world's most active online community with more than 1 billion forum posts to date."
The adult woman began chatting with the teen, initially representing herself as a 30 year old woman. Apparently she shaved 14 years off her real age. No matter, the only reason the two were caught in time and this woman will face charges, is that the teen was at least bright enough (or lucky enough) to have bragged to his sister about his romantic weekend plans. The girl told her mother, and the mother contacted the authorities. This boy is incredibly lucky he has these two watching over him, because this scenario could have easily had a sad and tragic ending for him.
I hope you won't read this posting and think I'm saying Gaia is bad, or gaming or even social sites are bad. This boy was happy to have found this adult woman and was interested in having a sexual relationship with her. This is typical of the reported cyber predators and their victims. Usually the child (and almost always it's a teen, not someone under age 12) is actively looking for this form of attention, both online and in the real world.
Original posting date: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 | 1:00 PM |