Boys as young as 7 being targeted by predators while gaming

Viking can reveal boys as young as seven years old are being exploited by strangers via their games consoles – when their parents think they’re in bed.

Predators offer them tips to help them progress in the game in return for things like explicit pictures which are then used to blackmail them.

“We talk to our colleagues in the police around the country and they’re giving us anecdotal evidence of youngsters going online at seven, eight years old in the middle of the night when parents don’t realise it, playing all sorts of games,” says Kevin Murphy from the National Working Group (NWG), a charity funded by the government to help tackle child sexual exploitation.

"That little cable coming through the wall can let all sorts of monsters into your house without you even knowing about it" - NWG

“The desire to get to the next level is intense. People can see this and can offer them tricks, cheats… and they might just say ‘can you send me a photo?’ Youngsters do it because they’re desperate to get to the next level. That’s when the blackmail can start happening.

“Anybody can be a victim. We hear of children who are living in deprivation and poverty but still have access to the internet being groomed. We see children whose parents are relatively well off, big houses, upstairs in the bedroom there’s the latest technology… they are being groomed at the same time.”

Kevin told us about one shocking case reported by Derbyshire Police recently where a seven-year-old boy was contacted by a stranger on the game Minecraft at 3am when his mum thought he was asleep. He was persuaded into performing sex acts because he wanted to progress in the game.

Experts from the NWG think cases like these are growing increasingly common, but are still hugely under-reported across the country.

“The difficulty youngsters have is how do they report it?” says Kevin.

“How do they go to a parent, particularly boys, and say ‘mum and dad, I’ve just shared a naked picture of myself and I don’t know what to do’?

“Where we get services where boys can go and talk, we get boys saying ‘this has happened to me’. Where we get local authorities where there isn’t a specific service for boys, we get an under-reporting. And what we see across the country is a gross under-reporting of boys who potentially have issues with being groomed online."

At the moment the only place in the UK with a support service aimed specifically at boys is in West Yorkshire, but there are calls for similar services to open across the country.